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Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

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Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#101

Post by tehjoker »

reading-at-work wrote: post #17

Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons. “Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.” https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...

Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them.

Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#102

Post by umvi »

csb6 wrote: post #94
wnevets wrote: post #78

Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

Yeah, it’s discouraging. But Hacker News is a place for capitalists (self-identified) or wannabe capitalists to hold discussions, and the site is run by a venture capital firm, so makes sense. Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

> Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

In theory unions are great. In practice America's implementation of unions end up as a crappy caricature of the theoretical one and are nothing like their European counterparts.

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#103

Post by ForHackernews »

jacobr1 wrote: post #66
ouid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a growing part of america that is coming around to the idea that the path to more negotiating power for laborers is not unions. It is through basic income and social safety nets.

The presumption that the ideas we came up with in during the industrial revolutions are the best is preposterous. They might be the best (old idea aren't necessarily bad), but there are also probably modern options. I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial sy…

I'd take these kind of complaints a lot more seriously if they were coming from people with substantial experience in unionized workplaces.

The adversarial situation you want to avoid already exists: Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible; you want to get paid as much as possible. All you're doing by disdaining collective bargaining is sacrificing leverage.

Our owners are not as naive as we are: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/24/when-rules-dont-apply...

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#104

Post by dcolkitt »

chrisseaton wrote: post #81
smnrchrds wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?

Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way. At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.) I would…

Also at the time that the leader of the NUM, the striking union, was a self-avowed Stalinist.[1]

It's hard to overstate the extreme militancy of trade union leadership in the UK during the late 1970s. While Thatcher gets the blame for the disintegration of the labor movement, just as big an issue was that the union leadership no longer represented the opinions of its rank-and-file members.

The 1984 miners strike largely failed, because most of the local unions decided not to join. Scargill never put the strike to a membership wide ballot, because he knew it probably wouldn't have passed. Union leadership became more focused on pushing communist ideology than it was on representing its members.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Scargill#Socialist_Labo...

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#105

Post by pydry »

chrisseaton wrote: post #98
pydry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists Were subjected to police brutality while largely peacefully picketing. Meanwhile the army was called in to do their jobs... Apparently there was evidence of "excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men,…

I don't know of anyone who disputes the killing of Wilkie happened or claims that it was somehow exaggerated. As a taxi driver he was also not a police officer or an agent of the state. He was not armed or causing violence to anyone. He was just driving someone who didn't agree with the union to work. So they killed him.

They dropped a concrete block on his car. It wasn't attempted murder it was attempted property damage.

So, yes, they killed him and were rightly imprisoned for manslaughter.

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#106

Post by caoilte »

chrisseaton wrote: post #81
smnrchrds wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?

Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way. At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.) I would…

Love the way you've got to reach back literally 36 years to find one example of union violence. The reputation that British unions actually have is for getting shat on by bullying employers.

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#107

Post by dencodev »

alecb wrote: post #85
dylan604 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is awesome in a very very sad way. Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being h…

I'm impressed by how low-quality this anti-union astroturf bot is. If you have sentience, how much did someone pay for you on Fiverr?

HN is not the best platform to from anti-capitalism sentiments. There's a lot of privilege here and it makes people pretty blind to how awful capitalism is (and the things it creates, like anti-union sentiment).

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#108

Post by umvi »

wnevets wrote: post #78

Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners, and unions take power away from business owners and can and will force you to do things to the detriment of your business if they deem it in the best interests of the union members.

Re: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

#110

Post by scarmig »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #83
AlexandrB wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does that make corporations with more than 1 location?

Each location should have its own union, grouping them all up allows the needs of the few to get drowned out by the wants of the many, and elevates union leadership to a position of power over the workers as union reps have easier access to spread their messaging to employees across locations while normal employees can only organize within their location.

It also significantly decreases negotiating power. The point of unions is that someone small (an individual) has a hard time fairly negotiating with an organization (a company). Multiple small single-site unions would be just as ineffective negotiating with one large multi-site company.
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