Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 468 posts

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#421

Post by edgyquant »

dugmartin wrote: post #313
rtkwe wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Probably) The first aerial bombardment on US soil was when private planes dropped homemade bombs on striking coal workers at Blair Mountain in 1921. The US has a looong and brutal history of breaking up labor movements.

Growing up I always heard it was in Southern Illinois (where I grew up), as documented here: http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0118.shtml > A far better documented incident occurred in southern Illinois in Williamson County in November 1926. "Bloody Williamson" had already garnered national notoriety during the 1920s as the site of labor unrest among coal mine unions, one of the bloodiest Ku Klux Klan war…

Hey a fellow Little Egyptian. My great grampa was one of the striking miners who was drug out at gun point in the Bloody Williamson Massacre.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#422

Post by CryptoPunk »

ixacto wrote: post #394
_wldu wrote: post #145

In 1920 Appalachia, coal companies owned all the land, the homes and stores. They also paid workers with their own special money (that was useless everywhere else). The security companies they hired where armed and violent towards miners and their families. https://explorepartsunknown.com/west-virginia/coal-minings-d... Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and…

We also had the ludlow massacre where the local militia and mine company guards attacked the miners with machine guns (pre nfa...) and dynamite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre .

It's important to remember that the strikers started the violence:

>>When leasing the sites, the union had selected locations near the mouths of canyons that led to the coal camps in order to block any strikebreakers' traffic.

Blocking strikebreaker traffic amounts to using violence to obstruct others' freedom of movement.

Strikebreakers were often assaulted and sometimes murdered.

The fundamentally coercive nature of historical striking activity is heavily glossed over, and modern day anti-free-market ideologues go to extreme lengths to try to justify it.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#423

Post by mrtksn »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #393
mrtksn wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, it's not a union. Unions are apparently uncool in the USA. Think of it as Musk inventing the Tube by removing the engineeringly silly parts of the Hyperloop and adding a sharing economy feature to the result :) Why would you share your "not-union" membership with your employer? Instead, use it as a coordinator between your peers to prevent being underpaid and overworked do to information disparity you normally h…

So it's like a union... but without any democratic control by the members, just a company trying to maximize profit from it's "customers" instead? What problem with unions are you trying to solve here?

It’s with democratic control and not for profit, unless of course you vote for it to try to maximize profit.

It’s owned by a trust or something similar.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#424

Post by mrtksn »

na85 wrote: post #384
mrtksn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t simply going to accept any offer, you are going to negotiate a fair one thanks to the intelligence you obtain from not-union.

Without leverage that comes from collective bargaining, how does the intelligence change your negotiating position?

It’s not about extortion, it’s about fair deal. The knowledge is useful as market research, in a similar way knowing rent prices in the neighborhood when renting.

In the current situation, companies have access to this and employees don’t.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#425

Post by nickff »

javajosh wrote: post #270
djsumdog wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the Tennessee Ernie Ford song comes from, "Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store." There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.

That is de facto slavery!

Well, it's actually de facto indentured servitude.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#426

Post by ryanbrunner »

mrtksn wrote: post #325
sudosysgen wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you leveling the playing field is a net loss for them. Companies like to use their information and coordination advantage, and exploit it to their benefit. It's why some companies will try to find ways to fire you if you share your salary.

I guess they’re free to try fight it. It doesn’t mean it’s helpless case. Measures and countermeasures, businesses as usual.

Except one party is a billion dollar business, and the other party is a single worker relying on an hourly wage job.

Without the threat of collective action, the idea is toothless.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#427

Post by na85 »

mrtksn wrote: post #424
na85 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without leverage that comes from collective bargaining, how does the intelligence change your negotiating position?

It’s not about extortion, it’s about fair deal. The knowledge is useful as market research, in a similar way knowing rent prices in the neighborhood when renting. In the current situation, companies have access to this and employees don’t.

Characterizing collective bargaining as extortion is part of the problem.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#428

Post by elihu »

dalbasal wrote: post #55
patwolfe wrote: post #18

Really disappointing to see the "Well, what did you expect?" comments already. Just because companies have been trying to prevent organization of their labor for over a century doesn't mean it isn't still messed up now. It's easy to say that it's just the way the world works from your desk, the people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions don't have that luxury.

For those who identify strongly with unions, union-busting stuff like this is triggering... like "bringing up the war" in a war traumatised nation. I get that. But... 2020 isn't 1920 or even 1980. Fresh eyes might see more clearly. To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today. Surveillance is easier too. IDK. Yes, Bezos does not want an amazon union and won't just le…

> To the advantage of union organisers, mass communication and organisation is a lot easier today. Surveillance is easier too.

For those of us who are working from home due to the pandemic (or other reasons), we don't have any way to communicate with our co-workers except via electronic channels that can be logged.

Pre-covid, one could reasonably expect that if one were to mention unionization in conversation over lunch, there wouldn't be a permanent electronic record of it. Now, it's just not something you can discreetly discuss with someone unless you have their outside-of-work contact information.

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#429

Post by throwaway201103 »

ardy42 wrote: post #324
EarthIsHome wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "special money" had a name called "the scrip" [0]. Here's a really short video of what used to be a "company town" in Appalachia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCxG_SCnQE One of the host's grand dad was paid in scrip until the 1970s. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

> Here's a really short video of what used to be a "company town" in Appalachia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCxG_SCnQE That's a great video.

If getting your health insurance through your employer creates dependency and gives your employer more control over you (and it does) then why is it a good idea to give this power to the government?

Re: Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions

#430

Post by claudeganon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #417
claudeganon wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this with all due respect, but highlighting NPR's own defense of their editorial practices is hardly convincing. NPR routinely runs editorial pieces that were pitched to them by corporate sponsors or their fronts like think tanks. They likewise have have discussion panels featuring these groups' talking heads. Listen to a few episodes of Marketplace if you want the most obvious corporate propaganda imaginable.…

Just to be precise, Marketplace is not produced by NPR. It is produced by American Public Media, which is a branch of Minnesota Public Radio (and Southern California Public Radio). Perhaps you meant "US public radio" in general, but said "NPR". They are not equivalent, however.

It's a distinction without any real difference. You could make the same argument about Planet Money, an NPR show, that went out of the way to provide cover for the banks during the financial crisis, had their host attack Elizabeth Warren in an interview, all while taking money from the same industry. Adam Davidson (the host who attacked Warren) of course then also went on to collect all kinds of "speaking fees" from financial institutions.

https://shameproject.com/profile/adam-davidson/

NPR, despite what the parent linked, does almost nothing to police these conflicts.

Post reply on HN