from Hacker News

Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

by kevlar1818 on 5/4/20, 2:55 PM with 154 comments

  • by minimaxir on 5/4/20, 3:38 PM

    Note: this was posted last week, and therefore not caused by a Amazon VP leaving (but perhaps could be partially a cause to the VP leaving)

  • by nimbius on 5/4/20, 5:28 PM

    As a former member of the local 701 and a current member of a union, keep fighting. You start seeing this stuff when the company knows theres a good chance you'll get a union if you want one.

    I once had all of my lunches turned into safety briefings with some slimeball in a suit lecturing us on the evils of unions for an hour. This prevented us from discussing unions favorably during our only time off during the day, so we decided to start an after-work club at the local pool hall. Less propaganda, more beer and real talk.

    Try taking your messages out of the office. Find some place the boss doesnt control and believe me, this will help a lot. You're still going to get flyers, phone calls, letters, and even doorstep visitors if you push for a union but just remember: its all bullshit at this point. Remember why you wanted to do this, and keep a running list of issues the company has not addressed. Remember: a union gives you fair bargaining for anything else you want or need for the company to succeed and you to do your job in the future as well. Some of the handouts now might seem generous but believe me, if you back down, the company will fire absolutely everyone they can identify as an organizer that hasnt been let go up till now.

  • by retrac on 5/4/20, 5:00 PM

    Some comments here really had me scratching my head. Remember, it's not just engineers, code monkeys and managers at Amazon.

    The majority of their employees are unskilled labour. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers. An Amazon warehouse worker in Canada makes just a little more than minimum wage. Even if it might be a nice company to work for if you're in an office, it may be a very different reality for the majority of workers.

  • by foob4r on 5/4/20, 2:56 PM

    Seems like Amazon's getting desperate now. Too bad the US government is the weakest in decades it's been to do something for the workers.

  • by redmattred on 5/4/20, 4:51 PM

    Here is the page to cancel your Amazon Prime membership: https://www.amazon.com/mc/pipelines/cancellation

  • by greendave on 5/4/20, 4:27 PM

    Would be interesting to see a comparison of Amazon's tactics and Walmart's. Traditionally Walmart has gotten a lot of bad press for its working conditions and its destruction of small businesses across the US. Amazon has thusfar had far less scrutiny.

  • by crazygringo on 5/4/20, 5:40 PM

    > Internal listservs with more than 500 participants are now required to move to a moderated model where a manager must approve any content before its distribution, according to emails obtained by Recode.

    Google did a similar thing in November [1]. This is starting to feel like a trend for tech companies reaching a certain level of size/maturity.

    Now this may be a contrarian opinion, but I actually think this has the potential to be a good thing if you're on the side of workers. Here's why.

    If you're organizing a union, trying to reveal "evil" projects, or otherwise trying to be a force for good in the company, as long as you're doing it on internal message boards everyone's still halfway-careful of what they say, and big movements/protests are less likely to happen.

    But by shutting them down or forcibly moderating them, that will hopefully be enough of an impetus for employees to start using third-party forums, where they can "approve" each other through invites, and everyone can speak and organize freely (and with more anonymity if desired) and accomplish perhaps far more than they have so far.

    As political scientists know, repression of citizens brings short-term stability at the cost of an increased long-term threat.

    Obviously you can't know for sure... but this feels like the kind of thing that's going to backfire for Amazon (and Google), leading to more and stronger union organization, not less.

    [1] https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/googles...

  • by unethical_ban on 5/4/20, 3:50 PM

    >The company told Recode that the moderation policy is not new but that Amazon has begun enforcement against lists that either weren't following the rules or had previously been granted exceptions after a "routine audit." An internal message to employees, obtained by Recode, said the change was to "minimize disruption to any business-critical email lists."

    "We have always had the rule ready, in case we needed to start enforcing it."

  • by robrenaud on 5/4/20, 4:06 PM

    A third party service that validates all members are part of a company/organization, and then allows anonymous postings viewable to just those validated members would be very useful, IMO.

    There is good reason to have these discussions in a place where Amazon's management is not in control.

  • by toohotatopic on 5/4/20, 5:06 PM

    Doesn't this show that the executive layer of Amazon isn't as clever as they appear? Employees can organize easily on Whatsapp or any other platform. In that case, Facebook has all the data and Amazon doesn't have any insight. Facebook then can hire any disgruntled but competent employee easily.

    The lock down also signals weakness and insecurity. Amazon pays at least market rates and people want to work there. In case of a strike, they can hire new people with no training because workers essentially shop all day, a skill that is ubiquitously available

    What do they fear?

  • by coronaboi on 5/5/20, 9:03 AM

    Don’t understand what the fuss is about. To continue their discussions, Can’t these employees get on a service like Blind? Yes, amazon throttling such behaviour is questionable, but why bitch and moan about not being able to use a company resource when there’s something like Blind available?

  • by seemslegit on 5/4/20, 5:38 PM

    That's why every workplace should have an off-company mailing list / forum / group.

    Yes even your very employee-friendly workplace with image boards that would never stoop to those kind of tactics.

  • by kevlar1818 on 5/4/20, 7:23 PM

    @dang + HN moderators: Why did you change my link? I originally linked to the ArsTechnica article. And why was it removed from the front page?

  • by justanotherhn on 5/4/20, 3:58 PM

    Does the top management at Amazon know this us ultimately a futile cause? What are they trying to do? Delay efforts until more on their delivery business is automated? If anyone has an idea please let me know.

  • by floatingatoll on 5/4/20, 5:44 PM

    The original article by Recode contains more information than the Ars reblog of it:

    https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/amazon-interna...

  • by dang on 5/4/20, 5:47 PM

  • by outside1234 on 5/4/20, 3:56 PM

    Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.

  • by Pfhreak on 5/4/20, 3:38 PM

    tl;dr: Email lists with 500+ people must be moderated and have a manager moderate them. (It's unclear if manager means 'manages employees' or 'manages email list'.)

    This seems pretty draconian to me, if it's true.

  • by danbolt on 5/4/20, 4:55 PM

    Is It true that Amazon’s internal chat tool doesn’t have as much support for “fun chat” stuff like stickers and emoji? I’ve been hearing along the grapevine.

  • by mlcrypto on 5/4/20, 4:53 PM

    To avoid PIP at Amazon you just gotta be more productive than the people on those internal discussion forums. And they wonder why they're getting pushed out. Leave the trolling for after work

  • by WilliamEdward on 5/4/20, 3:59 PM

    Amazon is interesting because there is a rift in the company; on one side you have upper middle class engineers, and on the other working class warehouse labourers.

    It's easy to dismiss union organisation coming from the former side, but the real tragedy is the thousands of workers working in dangerous conditions. They won't get their union.