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

npr.org

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

#431

Post by [deleted] »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #81
dalbasal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Yes, Bezos does not want an amazon union and won't just let it happen without a fight. Same as always. Which is, if I recalled correctly, illegal.

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by satisfaction »

rvense wrote: post #262
TremendousJudge wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point the cloud provider that is the least shitty as a company is probably... Microsoft? Damn what has the world come to

My company is on DigitalOcean, but we're not exactly web scale yet, so I can't vouch for them on that level. Their support is nice and responsive, though, and their management interface is very nice. They don't do everything AWS do, e.g., they only just added an S3-compatible object store and I've yet to come across anything like secrets management or IAM for their virtual machines.

Our prototype was on DigitalOcean but we started collecting issues and feature requests that were solved more easily by AWS. Including IAM, we were an early adopter of S3, it's a great product. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to open an issue to evaluate the other cloud providers. But honestly, the team is going to hate me, they have all spent a lot of time learning AWS.

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

#433

Post by nerdponx »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #238
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon was recently polled to be the most trusted institution among US Democrats [0], which comprises the majority of NPR's listenership and donors. They know what they're doing. [0] http://aicpoll.com/

Two points here at least worth footnoting: (1) That poll is from July 2018, and while that's technically recent, in terms of news about big tech that can affect perceptions, a lot's happened in the last two years. (2) According to the poll, Amazon was the third most-trusted institution among US Republicans, just behind "military" and "local police", and was the second-most trusted institution behind the military acro…

That, or, Amazon knows from history (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, even going as far back as Standard Oil) that the public trust is not to be taken for granted. They have strong incentives to stay ahead of any negative sentiment that might arise.

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

#434

Post by cpeterso »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #429
ardy42 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Your employer can mistreat you under the threat of losing your employer-provided health insurance. If everyone had government-provided health insurance, then employers would have less leverage. Government-provided health insurance can also ease the burden and risk for people starting new companies.

It also maximizes the number of people paying into the insurance pool.

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

#435

Post by edoceo »

throwaway201103 wrote: post #429
ardy42 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

So you can switch employer and keep the care.

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

#436

Post by hinkley »

ImaCake wrote: post #334
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.

This reminds me of a similar, and quite popular, 90's rock song in Australia called "Blue Sky Mine" [0]. It refers to the horrible exploitive activities of CSL on an asbestos mine in the Pilbara region of Australia where they controlled their workers in a similar manner to what you describe here. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_Mine

And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground.

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

#437

Post by hinkley »

timoth3y wrote: post #389
_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…

This culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain were mine owners employed private security and the US military to put down 10,000+ striking miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain It's an incredible story of capitalism gone mad. Areal bombardment and poison gas were used against the miners and it did not end well for them.

What the fuck was going on in 1921? That’s three months after they firebombed Tulsa.

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

#438

Post by worker767424 »

mrtksn wrote: post #267
_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…

Is there anything stopping workers from crowdsource their own protection anonymously? Does it have to be some kind of formal union? If you think about it, work is just a business deal and wouldn't be possible for employees create some kind of company that deals with the companies they are employed? Pretty much like an agency, I guess.

Pimps basically play the same role as unions.

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

#439

Post by erostrate »

glaugh wrote: post #256
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.

“What did you expect?” is my least favorite conversational trope (it’s more disappointing on HN because in general I have higher expectations here, but it’s common everywhere). On the surface it sounds smart and world-weary. As an actual part of a conversation, whether something is expected is pretty orthogonal to whether, say, something would ideally be done about it. I suppose it is relevant to whether something ma…

This brand of cynicism where you claim that everything is expected can also be a way to protect yourself from negative information. If you care about say privacy and you constantly receive news about surveillance, it can be disheartening, so it's easier to dismiss the news with "well, what did you expect?". I know I used to do that, in my head at least. I'm not advocating for cynicism of course, just saying that people might be doing it for deeper reasons than sounding smart and world-weary.

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

#440

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

claudeganon wrote: post #430
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a distinction with a difference. And no, I could not make the same argument about Planet Money, since that show is produced by NPR.

If you say "American public radio", do you also include Democracy Now? Do you include shows produced by other local stations, including the ones that do not get distributed? NPR is not the totality of "American public radio".

Understanding the structure of public broadcasting in the USA is critical to understand why it works the way that it does. NPR is a distinct organization, even from CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), even if its sensibilities are echoed in other public radio organizations (like MPR/APM).

As for your points about Adam Davidson, I don't find that shameproject.com page particularly persuasive. It's clear that Davidson's worldview does not align with that of the people/person who wrote the page/manages the site. I don't find this particularly remarkable or even particularly interesting. Davidson's worldview doesn't really line up with my own either. But there's a bunch of stuff on that page (the quotes in particular) which lack context, and a lot of other stuff that consists mostly of deeply subjective assessments and assignment of motive to Davidson without much evidence.

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