Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

> Amazon is straight up firing these people for expressing their personal opinions.

A lot of companies will do that. For instance, I never identify on social media (including here) which company I work for. I am not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Even giving it praise on social media is a form of communication, and I am not PR. Therefore, not authorized (of course, retweeting official communications or linking to them is fine). We may not like these policies (and it is kinda dystopian if you think about it), but once we identify as employees, we are representing the company.

Should I then decide to criticize the company publicly, I would expect the hammer to fall down, hard Not sure about termination, but it is always a possibility. Especially in the US, with at will employment.

You can blow the whistle. But that doesn't make one immune to consequences. Should it be like that? I don't know, but the matter of the fact is that it is like that today, across most corporations. Google is (Was?) somewhat of an exception, but even then most of it was on internal forums.

You're speaking broadly about how a lot of stuff should be while ignoring how stuff actually is.

>Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies

I've worked in tech for a long time, at a lot of different companies, and consulted for many more. Tech employers fire people all the time for complaining about company policies. You just don't hear about it because...

>and it's almost always news when they do

No, it's really not. When some 20 person startup lets someone go because of a disagreement, it doesn't appear in WaPo. It does happen whenever Amazon or FB or Google are involved because those are big names. But just because you don't see it in the news when every other tech company does it, does not mean it isn't happening.

>A general sense of shared cause and cameraderie is part of the way the industry is "supposed" to work, and part of that is a culture of reasonably open discussion of this stuff.

This sounds wonderful and ideal, but I've never experienced this at any of the tech companies I've worked at, even the big name Silicon Valley ones.

>But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union.

The world isn't this black and white. I assure you from talking with my friends at Amazon that there is plenty of open discussion about the working environment, while also plenty of satisfaction and happiness with their job. And a couple of particularly outspoken people being fired hasn't changed that in the past, and I strongly doubt will change it now.

In the parent comment I'm referring to the commenter states that if you talk negatively about your employers employment practices (perform action X) you should expect to be fired (receive outcome Y).

I get irritated by this kind of comment because by being a description of a chain of events with no verdict as to whether outcome Y is fair or proportional to action X, it is an absolution of responsibility for the observer and to some extent implies that those affected by outcome Y are responsible for their fate simply because they weren't canny enough to realize the chain of events they had set in motion, regardless of whether the chain of events is immoral.

An alternate example: "The subversives held a protest and were reported to the secret police who sentenced them to death by firing squad. Perhaps if the subversives didn't want to be shot they shouldn't have staged the protest in the first place, since protesting carries the death sentence."

I know that example is taken to the extreme, but I think it makes some points more salient: (i) by reciting a series of outcomes without value judgments about the outcomes, the observer is not engaging with whether the subversives should be shot and thereby implicitly supports the status quo, regardless of whether the status quo is fair or just (ii) the observer misses the point by implying that the protesters are responsible for their fate and blames them for the unjust outcome. The protesters likely knew that they would be executed for protesting. Surely we should be asking why the sentence for protesting is death, not whether the protesters were too stupid to see what they were getting themselves into.

RE the criminal justice system...I know it's a cop out to say "I read a lot", but I am interested in its shortcomings and consume a lot on the subject matter. I recently read "Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System" which I think is a good primer on the bureaucracy of the justice system. It's a complex thing to dissect in a post, but from a very high up/more abstract POV the American justice system considers "justice" the rendering of sentences based on breaking of laws, not necessarily whether an outcome is compatible with what we consider "justice".

Example: a man is sentenced to 10 years for possession of marijuana. The justice system considers this to be justice because the man was aware that action X (possessing marijuana) leads to outcome Y (prison time) without really considering whether jail time is a reasonable or fair outcome for possessing a plant that is quite harmless by most scientific standards.

This turned into an essay...hope I clarified my point of view though!

The person filing the paperwork still isn’t necessarily the one who made the call. In fact, it usually isn’t; they are just the ones whose responsibility it is to carry it out, or else their head is on the block.

This is why unions are so important.

Anonymous comments aren't worth near as much those with a name behind them, so I don't buy that as a solution.

How can we expect to improve as a society, if we fire everyone who has the courage to say something?

Most folks are going to just continue to keep their mouths shut. It's bad for everyone. I want others to stick up for me, and I hope you want others to stick up for you. I don't want them to have to weigh healthcare and feeding their family against sticking up for what's right.