Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

> Fast-forward to the Covid-19 era. Stories surfaced of unrest in Amazon warehouses, workers raising alarms about being uninformed, unprotected, and frightened. Official statements claimed every possible safety precaution was being taken. Then a worker organizing for better safety conditions was fired, and brutally insensitive remarks appeared in leaked executive meeting notes where the focus was on defending Amazon “talking points”.

Sorry, but none of this is new in "the Covid-19 era". There is a long Wikipedia page dedicated to criticism of Amazon detailing decades of criticism of how Amazon treats its workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon

Better of Tim to exit late than never, but let's not pretend that until recent firings and this blog post we all thought that Amazon was a nice and cuddly company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray says he started there in December 2014. He must have known at that point what he was getting into. For reference, here's the state of the criticism page at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Criticism_of_Amaz...

The fear of death due to infection by a pandemic is new. The need for PPE and lack thereof is new. Firing whitleblowers in the face of a pandemic and meeting to smear them (with public proof thanks to a leak) is new.

We didn't think Amazon was nice and cuddly - but this is a good point for Tim to exit.

Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical. I think we can criticize Amazon's long history of being repressive without shaming someone who publicly did the right thing.

Sure, but at the same time, it is our civic responsibility as skilled programmers to deliberately starve Amazon of the labor needed to build their oppressive systems. It is not wrong to remind ourselves of that greater responsibility, especially in the context of Amazon being vulnerable to organized labor action today.

> The fear of death due to infection by a pandemic is new. The need for PPE and lack thereof is new.

Very specifically, yes. A bit more generally, it's not different from a pattern of conditions like "heat so extreme it required the regular posting of ambulances to take away workers who passed out, strenuous workloads in that heat, and first-person reports of summary terminations for health conditions such as breast cancer".

> Jumping on someone doing a principled thing at personal cost for "not doing it sooner" is so cynical.

I don't agree that doing one good thing undoes bad things that went before, and that it absolves one from criticism.

> Sorry, but none of this is new in "the Covid-19 era"

This seems a straw man argument. I don't think the author was saying that before Covid-19 Amazon listened to their workers.

On the contrary, one sentence before what you quoted ("Fast-forward to the Covid-19 era"), the article describes how activists were threatened with dismissal.

I thought that the introduction about the climate change issue was supposed to have addressed your concern. I interpreted it as him saying he was equally upset about the equal inaction on the climate change issue but had his priorities set such that it wasn't enough for him to quit until they started directly messing with human lives.

To be fair, he did say that AWS was quite different. When he started he wasn't a VP, and it looks like firing activists and Covid-19 triggered it, rather than regular working conditions in normal times.

I think the difference is that, while before personal health was only on the line on an individual basis, now it's on the line on a collective basis and AMZ apparently seems to not care for human life in general...

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