Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers who try to form unions • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by burkaman » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #178

burkaman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about it this way: both sides have the right to freely negotiate a contract, and then decide whether or not to enter into it. The CEO can't prevent the workers from talking to each other and figuring out what they think a fair contract would be, and the workers can't prevent the CEO from talking to other CEOs for the same reason. The specific human right is usually referred to as "freedom of association". You c…

As you observe, workers talking to each other to agree on prices for labor is the flip side of the coin from CEOs talking to each other to agree on prices for labor. But the latter is in fact illegal. CEOs can't talk to each other and agree to pay $10/hour for warehouse workers. Coordinating with others to set prices for labor or goods isn't viewed as within the scope of freedom of association. Union activities are i…

The way I'm thinking about it, you don't need anything extra to justify unions, but you do need something extra to prohibit wage fixing. I agree that freedom of association, when considered alone, would allow wage fixing and price fixing and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.

We're moving away from areas where I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, but I think as a society we've decided that while anti-competitive laws do infringe on the rights of business leaders, we're trying to balance their rights with those of everyone else, and the laws are necessary to prevent a permanent class divide between business leaders who cannot be challenged, and workers under them. In the long run, allowing complete free association among CEOs would limit the freedoms of the rest of society.

Society is a constant project of balancing various conflicting rights, and this is one of many cases where we limit the rights of a few to defend the rights of many.

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

#212

Post by morelisp » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #162

morelisp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is basically correct that the US police descend from a mixture of slave patrol remnants and strikebusters near the late 19th / beginning of the 20th century (though sometimes in opposition to them, the initial state police ranks were still largely drawn from private police, racist "town watches", and militia forces). England and the rest of the Anglosphere adopted what are often called "Peelian principles," focuse…

Do you have sources on any of these? In the 'defunding' era, I often see this claim about the origins of police but a) it seems unlikely to be generalized (police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants" and b) it seems irrelevant since whatever the police was in the past doesn't mean that's what it is today and it doesn't mean the goals or the culture are the same.

heavyset_go has provided a good source for my more general statements but I want to specifically address

> police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants"

This is a common misconception that the north was "free" even as the south kept enslaving people. It's true that the north also had other economic forces influencing its policing, but the Fugitive Slave Acts gave plenty of legal cover for anyone wanting to make a buck by finding "escaped slaves" (often just whatever black people they found) in the north.

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

#213

Post by chungus_khan » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

sempron64 wrote: post #29

nicoburns wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world-dominating is largely a negative from my perspective: it pushes it's smaller competitors out of business which decreases the competitiveness of the market and extracts profits/wealth out of local communities where it would likely be spent productively into the pockets of Jeff Bezos and Amazon investors where it is not nearly so useful.

The services they provide have been of incomparable quality to any other offering in the US. They made free 2-day shipping and free returns the baseline. Amazon lockers provide online shopping opportunities to those not privileged to own a house with a secure front yard (I do wish shipping to amazon lockers was possible from other online-only retailers). And in truth the vast majority of amazon’s income is still inve…

In Canada it is possible to order online directly to any post office via a special address and pick up there for free.

This is IMO a much better solution because post offices are already necessary and present everywhere, and individual retailers don't have to support the option to ship to them.

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

#214

Post by dontbeevil1992 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #209

dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a specific definition that you can find by googling: "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." Don't assume that others are naive, imprecise, or uninformed about what capitalism is and how it affects the world, just because your own understanding of it is limited.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning…

Googling. Got it. Wow, what a time saver I wish I had known about that earlier.

My point is not that googling it will reveal everything about it, but nice bad faith. My point is it has a dictionary definition and there are plenty of people who understand what it is. It is not a nebulous concept just because you aren't informed about it.

If you want to get started learning about it, I recommend looking up Richard Wolff

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

#215

Post by ska » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #150

wozer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most Western countries, workers have a right to form unions. So yes, companies have to accept it.

At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law. I don't know what's the situation in the US but in Europe that means that conditions cannot be horrible to start with if the company acts within the law (which would be expected of a company like Amazon, but maybe I'm optimistic). Unions are a way to negotiate a better deal than the legal minimum for unskilled…

> At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law

Are they though? There are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.

Obviously working condition protections are much better than they were before 1950s-ish, and the existence of a minimum wage is greater than zero (where applicable). But neither of those inherently meet a bar as fuzzy as "decent".

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

#216

Post by claudeganon » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

jamiequint wrote: post #95

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > We need to note that Amazon is an NPR funder. The original Motherboard article [0] is extensive. The NPR version is deliberately incoherent. [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...

You actually believe that Amazon has editorial control over NPR and specifically exerted that leverage to make this article incoherent?

You actually believe that NPR doesn’t edit articles to protect the people who fund them?

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

#217

Post by iso1631 » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

moocowtruck wrote: post #37

kome wrote: post #17

We are letting amazon going way too far. This is unacceptable. A global coalition of trade-unions is mobilizing against amazon, https://makeamazonpay.com/ Also legislators should get more aware of companies undermining workers right. But I feel legislators to be part of the problem.

unionizing amazon would be horrible, I've been working at usps for 15+ years and unions are the reason for most of our troubles. Please lets not turn a company who makes a good product and pays people well for it into the enemy

So why don't you go and work for amazon?

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

#218

Post by markus_zhang » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #171

markus_zhang wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law is meaningless when there are a lot of money/power involved. After all it's the ruling class who made them.

Not in democracies. It does make it somewhat harder though.

Democracies or not, regardless, I think the key for citizens is to have both a scientific mind as well as a fighting spirit. Lack of either would be a disaster.

So that it's pretty costly for the ruling class to push ordinary people around. Not that they can't, I mean they still control the army and police so technically they can still do whatever they want, but in reality it's going to be very expensive, financially and politically to push people around if ordinary people possess both qualities.

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

#219

Post by jonjacky » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

mattalbie wrote: post #12

It’s a very minor point but this article makes it sound like the generic term for a union buster is Pinkerton agent. Pinkerton is a private company who does security work these days, but has a long history of doing exactly this. Fascinating Wikipedia read if you’re curious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

Another echo from those old days: this news about Amazon was broken by a writer named Lauren Gurley.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a famous union organizer who fought the Pinkertons more than a hundred years ago.

Coincidentally, the new novel The Cold Millions by Jess Walter portrays Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Pinkertons in Spokane in 1909.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn

(A quick search shows Lauren Gurley is a prolific writer on labor issues but doesn't mention any connection to the earlier Gurley - the names might be just a coincidence)

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

#220

Post by SauciestGNU » Thu, Dec 03, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #159

nkrisc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could do whatever they're doing with their tech workers. Around these parts any talk of unionizing developers is usually meet with skepticism or derision. So whatever big tech is doing is keeping most of their tech workers happy and unwilling to unionize. They could do the same for their warehouse employees, but that would mean paying them very well and giving good benefits.

It's not really feasible to pay their box packers $120k / year.

But it could be feasible to pay them more than a poverty wage. Something where working full-time would reasonably cover housing and food costs (and ideally healthcare as well) without needing government assistance.