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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

#451

Post by mleonhard »

jmcgough wrote: post #414
rmrfrmrf wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the common threads in media critiques like Manufacturing Consent and Hate, Inc. is that direct editorial control is not necessary in order to promote your agenda. Control of money and access, along with ideological indoctrination of journalists at elite universities, is all that's needed. See also my comment below about NPR listenership and trust in Amazon as an institution.

Semi-off-topic but Manufacturing Consent really changed the way I see the world and think about media. As a kid I never questioned that Iraq War-era Time magazine article with diagrams of a mobile nuclear weapons facility. It should be required reading.

Same for me. Unfortunately, I found it hard to get along with some close relatives after my change in perspective.

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

#452

Post by [deleted] »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #445
shevek_ wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the story of our entire media. No, they didn't line by line come in and edit the article, but any media outlet is going to self-censor to not lose a big sponsor. I think that's pretty self-evident at this point. The classic Manufacturing Consent does a deep dive into this dynamic. Related, newspapers are historically unprofitable. Why would someone like Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Like any investment,…

Do you have any proof of that? Otherwise it's just conspiracy theory. Sometimes people do things that don't benefit them. It's called charity. I don't think that Bezos is a saint, but I also don't think he bought the New York Post to be his mouthpiece nor would the editors allow it.

[deleted]

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

#453

Post by Klinky »

mrtksn wrote: post #302
Klinky wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's like Glassdoor or Salary.com? That's not a union, that's not HR, that's not armed protection.

Are unions armed protection? Anyway, the idea is to have a coordinator that work on your benefit. Companies, even the large ones are simply people coordinated by the capital owners. The not-union is a coordinator for the people who are not the capital owners but those who deal with the capital owners. The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners.

Sounds like a talent agent. Sectors that utilize talent agents often still have strong collective bargaining agreements and unions in place. Part of the power of a union is the ability to deprive a business or industry of labor. A talent agent alone does not provide such leverage.

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

#454

Post by rvense »

satisfaction wrote: post #432
rvense wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But honestly, the team is going to hate me, they have all spent a lot of time learning AWS.

This was another motivation for going with DO: there's just less of it. Less to learn, less to get lost in. We've got a couple of juniors on the team who are brand new to actually having to get the software they write to run in production, and I don't think the AWS control panel is a very good place to send someone like that.

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

#455

Post by mrtksn »

rualca wrote: post #450
mrtksn wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are unions armed protection? Anyway, the idea is to have a coordinator that work on your benefit. Companies, even the large ones are simply people coordinated by the capital owners. The not-union is a coordinator for the people who are not the capital owners but those who deal with the capital owners. The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners.

> The aim is to assist for a fair deal through information, not to extort the capital owners. This sounds similar to "the aim is to be good, not bad". Your assertion does not lie on facts but on your personal moral interpretation and even prejudice against a label. Unions are organizations whose aim is to represent workers and defend their best interests with the company's representatives. Sometimes the company's goa…

Well, this is not a union therefore doesn't match all the features and objectives. The not-union aims to relieve inherit disadvantages of individuals v.s. corporations while preserving individual freedoms and free market dynamics. Just like companies coming together to fix a price and specs of their products thus leaving consumers with no options, workers coming together to force their own preferences by leaving companies with no options is also unacceptable.

If the unions actually do the things that you describe and people are happy with it, they should opt out for unions.

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

#457

Post by TaylorAlexander »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #445
shevek_ wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the story of our entire media. No, they didn't line by line come in and edit the article, but any media outlet is going to self-censor to not lose a big sponsor. I think that's pretty self-evident at this point. The classic Manufacturing Consent does a deep dive into this dynamic. Related, newspapers are historically unprofitable. Why would someone like Jeff Bezos buy the Washington Post? Like any investment,…

Do you have any proof of that? Otherwise it's just conspiracy theory. Sometimes people do things that don't benefit them. It's called charity. I don't think that Bezos is a saint, but I also don't think he bought the New York Post to be his mouthpiece nor would the editors allow it.

I think you would find that the book or two hour YouTube documentary “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky provides compelling answers to your questions. I do understand it can be irritating to hear “watch this two hour doc” as a response to an internet comment, but it really is a master work on the subject. I haven’t seen it in a few years so I can’t do its arguments justice, but it completely changed my views on how media works. I have been meaning to watch it again though.

For a different take there is a YouTube series from “Crash Course” on “media literacy” that I suspect goes over this, but I haven’t gotten that far in the series yet.

And then there’s also Michael Parenti, another author who has written and has YouTube talks on the subject.

Either way I just want to say it’s not wild conspiracy theory. It is an established body of work people are talking about here.

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

#458

Post by ConradKilroy »

dfxm12 wrote: post #276
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.

It looks like the Tulsa Race Massacre [0] has Blair Mountain beat by a few months (May vs August). 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre#Attack_by_...

Good catch, dfxm12!

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

#459

Post by dalbasal »

elihu wrote: post #428
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…

> 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 lu…

The situation is what it is.

That said "communicating via electronic channels" is not an insurmountable problem. It could be turned into and advantage. If union organizers post a letter, video or whatnot... amazon employees can see it. If people want to sign up to an unsurveiled "stream," they can.

The reality of secrecy and anonymity are what they are. Amazon are feisty, but they aren't the KGB. Secrecy is hard, probably unattainable. Anonymity is doable, but not default. Circulation is easy, assuming recipients are into it. etc.

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

#460

Post by dalbasal »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #273
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…

>I don't think the central factor here is Pinkertons. Union organising is the actual determinant. "If you didn't want to be spied-on, you wouldn't try to unionize"? Really?

I didn't say it isn't a factor. I said determining factor.
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