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Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#101

Post by bambataa »

paxys wrote: post #88

This is likely an unpopular opinion among the tech crowd here but I find it very hypocritical to publicly criticize your employer for their practices while expecting to continue enjoying cushy paychecks directly fueled by them. You cannot simultaneously be an activist and a cog in the wheel. Pick a side, and then accept the consequences.

Who does that approach ultimately favour? Isn't it a good thing that people can speak out about things they think their company is doing wrong and try to improve it?

I have some sympathy with your view but doesn't that end up marginalising people who stand up for things?

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#102

Post by ajross »

rochester46 wrote: post #59
ajross wrote: post #46

I think the real story here is not so much whether or not it's OK to fire troublemakers, but how Amazon got itself into an unrecoverably antagonistic relationship with its own workforce. The flip side to being a general union buster and hard-nosed employer advocate during "peacetime" is that you lose the moral high ground in crisis and have no where to turn to but more employee-alienating policies. I mean, let's be h…

Amazon has nearly a million employees. The gist of your comment is valid, but firing two people (or even two hundred people) out of a million doesn't even come close to meaning that they have an antagonistic relationship with its workforce in general.

Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies, and it's almost always news when they do. 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.

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. And in the process their alienating their engineering class too.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#103

Post by justizin »

paxys wrote: post #88

This is likely an unpopular opinion among the tech crowd here but I find it very hypocritical to publicly criticize your employer for their practices while expecting to continue enjoying cushy paychecks directly fueled by them. You cannot simultaneously be an activist and a cog in the wheel. Pick a side, and then accept the consequences.

> You cannot simultaneously be an activist and a cog in the wheel.

Bullshit. The entire history of the labor movement chooses to disagree. Employees have far more influence than customers in influencing company direction.

It is the moral and ethical responsibility of individuals enjoying cushy paychecks to ensure they don't come from creating harm to others.

What you're saying is that corporations should be able to bribe employees into accepting an unlimited amount of harm, when in many cases replacing employment and continuing one's own livelihood would be threatened by doing so.

That's horse shit and somewhere deep down, you fucking know it.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#104

Post by joshstrange »

> (This story corrects second paragraph to say Christian Smalls was fired for violating paid quarantine, not for raising health and safety concerns.)

I'm I misremembering or was that story "fired for violating paid quarantine" proven to be iffy at best? I'm looking for confirmation.

Edit: Found what I think I was looking for [0]

> Here is the key point Amazon claims he was exposed to the worker on March 11th. Over the weekened he said he is organizing a strike, so over the weekend they order him and only him into quarantine. A full 18 days after his 5 min exposure. From my reading of it, this almost certainly looks like retaliatory action due to the strike, and a company using the excuse of quarantine to cover it up. Key excerpts from a much clearer article. And yet again, why you never 100% believe a company's PR response when they're trying to cover themselves. They tell just enough truth, but use it to intentionally mislead.

> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/amazon-strik....

>> According to the company’s previous statements, the infected co-worker in question last reported for work on 11 March. Had Smalls been exposed that day, a 14-day mandatory quarantine would have made him eligible to return as soon as 25 March.

>> Smalls said Amazon did not send him home until 28 March, three weeks after the exposure.

>> “No one else was put on quarantine,” he said, even as the infected person worked alongside “associates for 10-plus hours a week”.

>> “You put me on quarantine for coming into contact with somebody, but I was around [that person] for less than five minutes,” he told Vice.

>> According to Amazon, no one else was fired. Smalls said he was considering legal action, calling it “a no-brainer”.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22739059

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#106

Post by burrows »

tehjoker wrote: post #96
paxys wrote: post #88

This is likely an unpopular opinion among the tech crowd here but I find it very hypocritical to publicly criticize your employer for their practices while expecting to continue enjoying cushy paychecks directly fueled by them. You cannot simultaneously be an activist and a cog in the wheel. Pick a side, and then accept the consequences.

That's why we need labor unions. When you are alone, speaking up gets you fired and maybe also persecuted by the company. When you are together, a company has a much tougher time dismissing your concerns.

And the state shouldn’t prevent companies from discriminating against laborers in labor unions. Unless the union has a private contract with the company.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#107

Post by paxys »

bambataa wrote: post #101
paxys wrote: post #88

This is likely an unpopular opinion among the tech crowd here but I find it very hypocritical to publicly criticize your employer for their practices while expecting to continue enjoying cushy paychecks directly fueled by them. You cannot simultaneously be an activist and a cog in the wheel. Pick a side, and then accept the consequences.

Who does that approach ultimately favour? Isn't it a good thing that people can speak out about things they think their company is doing wrong and try to improve it? I have some sympathy with your view but doesn't that end up marginalising people who stand up for things?

It's great to have opinions about how things are/should be done, but the right place to express them isn't a public press conference.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#108

Post by mcherm »

qppo wrote: post #70
Noughmad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, people should make it illegal. Like they did in most other countries. The US is full of outrage about companies doing unethical things but nobody wants to make unethical things illegal.

Without getting into all of the hazards about legislating morality it's impractical in our current climate. I don't think this should be illegal, personally. I do think that it would be helpful to make the decision making public though. Limited legal liability isn't limited moral liability. Rather than saying "amazon fired" someone they should tell us "Jane Doe a manager at Amazon made the decision to fire." People s…

I would immediately implement a special role for the head of HR: official decider of all firing decisions. No one will blame the head of HR because they'll know that they were only carrying out someone else's decision, while no one would blame the original decider because no one knows who it was.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#109

Post by jshevek »

mcherm wrote: post #91
alexandercrohde wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are outraged not because it's illegal, but because it's unconscionable. I think the general understanding is people shouldn't have outside-work activities be held against them, maybe it's time for the law to catch up. It's pretty easy to come up with a lot of absurd and "legal" at-will policies (e.g. we'll fire anybody who watches porn)

> It's pretty easy to come up with a lot of absurd and "legal" at-will policies (e.g. we'll fire anybody who watches porn) My favorite which would work in much of the US is "We'll fire anybody who registers with the Republican party." (Or Democratic, if you prefer.) Especially in a state where registration is required in order to participate in the primary. It is legal, but, I believe, completely unacceptable to just…

>It is legal, but, I believe, completely unacceptable to just about everyone.

This is not true in my experience. Many people on the left, particularly under 35, earnestly believe that their political opponents are by definition racist and evil. In a manner similar to how I would not want a literal neo-nazi on my company's payroll, they do not want a registered Republican on the company's payroll.

Edit: In other words, this kind of bigotry is actually acceptable to a disturbingly large number of people.

Re: Amazon fires two UX designers critical of warehouse working conditions

#110

Post by birdyrooster »

cosmotic wrote: post #105

Amazon employed UX designers?

Can you imagine tackling the task at hand better? They were given a shit sandwich. Every Amazon product has infinite feature creep with thousands of engineers and I can't imagine trying to jumble all of that into great interfaces.
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