Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’ | Hacker News Reader

Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

vice.com

518 pointssamdb440 comments

Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, those Pinkertons.

“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...

For those who aren't aware of Pinkerton's history, from wikipedia:

>One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892. When the Pinkerton agents were withdrawn, state militia forces were deployed. The militia repulsed attacks on the steel plant, and prevented violence against strikebreakers crossing picket lines, causing a decisive defeat of the strike, and ended the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers at the Homestead plant.

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

"My team and I routinely pried into workers' police records, personnel files, credit histories, medical records, and family lives in search of a weakness that we could use to discredit union activists... Once in a while, a worker is impeccable. So some consultants resort to lies. To fell the sturdiest union supporters in the 1970s, I frequently launched rumors that the targeted worker was gay or was cheating on his wife. It was a very effective technique." [1, 2]

Read the Ebay stalking indictment. They were the B team with extremely limited operational capability. Now imagine they had any of the following, which are all for sale:

* Real-time location from your cell provider

* Real-time AirBnB booking

* Real-time purchases from credit card companies

* Real-time browsing records from your mobile ISP, home ISP, and behavioral advertising networks

* Your complete prescription history from your pharmacy

[1] https://aflcionc.org/confessions-of-a-union-buster/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies

Decades ago in University, I remember an Accounting professor talked about how Wal-Mart used their parking lot cameras to monitor where employees would congregate after work and would have special "employees" who would befriend these groups and make sure they weren't trying to organize unions, or discourage organization if they were.

"Who are those guys?"

"Pinkerton men"

-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Everyone that likes the New Deal should thank the union organizers and socialists that literally had to fight police in the streets to force the hand of the state. A large enough faction of the capitalists back then agreed to reforms because they feared things were going the way of revolution. In the 1930s, the 1917 revolution in Russia was a recent memory that scared the piss out of them.

Bezos would like to continue accumulating wealth from the labor of his workers without having to face real negotiations. A really great idea for anyone out of work that has any free time not applying for jobs right now would be to join labor discussion groups about the state of the economy and read some Marx. A great deal of those writings feels like hearing from Hari Seldon from Asimov's Foundation series given that we can look back 150 years and see that so many predictions and ways of thinking about the world were broadly true. Socialism or Barbarism as they say.

While I don't think getting bogged down in a political discussion here is a good idea (and I don't necessarily disagree,) I do think it is interesting how ignorant Americans often are of the many literal battles in the war for humane working conditions.

It might be worth reading about how workers were bombed and gunned down during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Here is a good history of the different full battles waged in the late 19th and early 20th century by bosses and the police [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

+1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.

That's one of the origins of the term "red neck."

"read some Marx"... do you have some book in mind? Perhaps some good summary? I hear Capital is hard to parse.

So far my experience in trying to distill Marx is that he did reasonable assessment of the state of affairs at the time (i.e. identifying main classes in society of 1800s), but then his prescriptions of what to do (socialize means of production) did not work out anywhere. Maybe I'm reading wrong books.

Whatever you do, do not only read the Manifesto. It was designed as an agitation pamphlet rather than an as a complete exposition of his thinking, and it is almost entirely devoid of his economic thought. As other commenters here have said, Wage Labour and Capital is a good read. You may also benefit from a companion guide if you want the full picture. Capitalism: A Companion to Marx's Economy Critique by Johan Fornas is a very high quality book, and relatively new; published by Routledge.

You will not come away with a good overview (whether you are sympathetic or not) just from the Manifesto. This is not enough to learn about Marx's thought. WLaC is better, but it too does not do a deep enough dive into the peak of his thought, nor his method of exposition. Capital, with a companion guide, is your best bet.

As another commenter here said, the first chapters (even as admitted by Marx himself) are difficult to get through, mainly due to the fact that Marx uses a dialectical presentation in his work, in which the most 'core' and highly abstract concept is dealt with first, before progressing to more concrete concepts. As such, the book gets easier as it goes on.

Like others have said, "The Communist Manifesto" is the easiest entry point. My copy also has "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" which some say is the work most descriptive of the US today. "The State and Revolution" by Lenin is a relatively easy and enlightening read as he talks about the nature of the capitalist state, the police, and other topics. "Reform or Revolution" by Rosa Luxemburg is also clarifying as it talks about why reformists have lost the thread. However, there are also many many many leftist podcasts you can listen to that can be easier to digest and will get you the basics, so that way when you read the original works later you have a baseline of understanding.

Capital is a doorstop, but I have heard that past chapter one which talks about the labor theory of value, the reading is much more breezy.

However, while some of these books are dense, even rural peasants have been able to read and metabolize these books, so don't despair!

Not, OP, and not well read in Marxist literature either (life is too short), but I can recommend The Communist Manifesto, it's short, quite lucid and of enormous historical influence (and would be worth reading for that reason alone). As you say, the interesting part is the analysis, the proposed remedies do not just look bad in hindsight, after tens of millions of dead bodies.

Wage Labour and Captital

I haven't read through it yet, but it's relatively short, and it was recommended to me as a good starter.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/wag...

Capital is not a hard read. Marx prescriptions were not perfect but the problem description from back then is surprisingly accurate for todays workers

I think anything before the communist manifest is worth it. But it should always be read in context of the time of the industrial revolution and before.

Marxism rewards the vicious and punishes the virtuous.

It's not in the interest of virtuous people to have Marxism. It's in their interest to have freedom, which implies capitalism.

I don't think Marx always intended revolution and the term changed context later in his life, when reformation and revolution were distilled as two separate approaches. In my opinion this is still a fault line in modern leftist movements.

Capitalism rewards the vicious rentseeker and punishes the virtuous worker.

Any transfer of wealth towards weaker member of society is forbidden? Should we let babies starve, after all they don't literally pull their own weigth? What about disabled people?

This is completely wrong. Marxism is presented as "scientific socialism" compared with former idealist versions that proliferated in the 1800s. While you can disagree with his conclusions, Marx presents a theory of class society, of the development of productive forces, and how these interact to advance the political forms of society which ends in revolution when the old structures and the new engines of society clash. He doesn't really go deeply into what "socialism" would look like, only that the clash between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, where the proletariat both massively outnumber the bourgeoisie and do all the work for survival wages presents a contradiction that will be resolved.

In general, it's not a good idea to talk poorly about your employer in public if you want to keep your job; I've heard of at least a couple cases where someone was fired for "mouthing-off" to their spouse in a public place like a grocery store.

Pre-COVID it was very interesting sitting in a bar in downtown SF and listening to all the drunk tech workers mouthing off. You could hear a lot of illegal activites, particularly racist or poor hiring practices, boasted of or complained about very regularly.

Which bar was your favorite?

I liked Mikkeller for this, but it got too loud. Irish Bank was also good, slower but quieter. I used to nag my friends about opsec... back when you could go places with friends :*(

It's not the smartest idea to talk poorly about your employer in private, either. Especially in "confidential" employee surveys.

I keep trying to get the message out. When your employer sends out these surveys, rate everything at the highest level possible. Nothing good can possibly come from giving bad ratings. If your boss/employer can't figure out how to improve things outside of those surveys, they won't figure it out from the survey. All you are doing is creating a bureaucratic headache for your boss which is going to trickle down to you.

This is awesome in a very very sad way.

Several years ago, I started working for a company that was in the build up to a Yea/Nay vote for joining the union. During that time, 2 "goons" showed up at my apartment to discuss the benefits of joining the union and why not joining would be bad. However, these very "intelligent" goons showed up during the day, you know, working hours where I had a very low chance of being home. I don't know if they were just that dumb, or if they were trying to influence what they thought were family members. Instead, it was my flatmate from England. She told me just laughed at the thought of me joining a union, and not so politely told them to bugger off and closed the door on them. Ultimately, the vote failed miserably.

All of that to say, that I'm not surprised that anti-union shenanigans are at the same level as the pro-union shenanigans.

What makes you call them goons? Politicians, activists, all sorts of people go door knocking around the time of elections and referendums. What made this interaction so different that you call them goons sent there to intimidate you, not activists trying to attract your vote?

Union activists in the UK have a reputation of being bullies, and in some cases in the past they've used physical violence to try to get people to do things their way.

At the height of union fever back in the 80s it got so bad at one point that union activists dropped a concrete block on someone's head from a bridge because he was trying to get into work and they thought he should be striking (David Wilkie.)

I would not appreciate union goons showing up at my door and I'd have a similar reaction.

I used quotes because I was quoting my flatmate. She said their demeanor was not welcoming at all, and it felt very aggressive. I kind of wish I was there just so I could have told them what I thought, but spilled milk and what not.

corpitized unions (anything union organisation bigger then 1 location of 1 employer) are goons.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that they were _actually_ union. They may very well have been. But companies have a long, proud history of playing VERY dirty tricks in response to unionization.

A former boss of mine once bragged about how he killed a union effort at a previous job. He worked a corporate job for a chain of restaurants that was threatening to unionize. He was given the task of showing up pretending to be a union-affiliated, bafflingly incompetent asshole. He went to individual employees to discuss the "benefits" of joining the union, because in a group he was more likely to be called out by somebody actually union-affiliated.

Pretty sure his actions were actually illegal.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...

> Supervisors and managers cannot spy on you (or make it appear that they are doing so), coercively question you, threaten you or bribe you regarding your union activity or the union activities of your co-workers. You can't be fired, disciplined, demoted, or penalized in any way for engaging in these activities.

What union did this?

In my mind they are all the same. I honestly paid so little attention, I didn't even do the research. Everyone just kept referring to the local, but I don't remember what number. This was 2010 time frame. I've slept (a lot) since then.

Edit: Turns out it was IATSE

This does not surprise me. I've been waiting to see corporate intelligence agencies pop up. When you think about it, Amazon had an operating budget last year of around $309 billion [1], already 75% of Germany's at $399 billion [2]. Facebook has an operating budget of around $35 billion, but that is still enough to field a small intelligence arm. Also, that is Facebook..not all Facebook properties combined.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/operat...

[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-passes-record-budget....

Most of Amazon's revenue is retail sales. Buying a product for $10 and selling it for $10.10 is not comparable to $10 of government spending. After deducting cost of sales and cost of fulfilment you're left with ~$60 billion.

Are you sure about that? My understanding is that the bulk of their profits are from Amazon Web Services. That is potentially a factor that contributes to this skewed and awkward framing of labor.

You are both right.

The bulk of PROFITS is in AWS.

The bulk of ECONOMIC ACTIVITY is in amazon.com sales.

These corporations are their own intelligence agencies. Facebook knows who your friends are, Amazon knows where you live, thanks to their line of doorbell camera, and then there's the Google-Microsoft email duopoly.

The vast majority of Amazon's operating expenses is paying manufacturers for the products that people buy, so there's really no comparison to a country's budget. Plus their margins for that are close to 0, and overall they constantly take large losses from their physical retail business in order to expand everything else.

Corporate intelligence agencies have long existed, but they don't call themselves that. They are usually called corporate law firms or PR agencies. Note that the Amazon job description was specific about working with attorneys.

Wasn't there previous news stories of FB doing exactly this? A 3rd party was hired to investigate something. It's all fuzzy, so if I'm totally wrong, someone please correct me.

Beyond the creepiness of the tasks required, what sticks out to me is the persistent use of Amazon-specific jargon:

> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders)

Does anyone who doesn’t work at Amazon know what “L7 + ER Principals” means?

Perhaps these are universally understood terms in some fields, but my guess is that the “error” was posting this publicly, and it was meant to be an Amazon-internal job posting.

Sometimes, for legal reasons, these sorts of jobs are required to be posted publicly, but not in a way that makes the underlying content clear to anyone [0]. So another possibility is that the mistake was posting the job with too many specifics.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21851281

L7 is a Level 7 employee, going from lowest to highest, Bezos is level 12. ER is Employee Relations (HR).

I also figured that out by searching, but what does it mean in context? I.e. what is the significance of talking to people at that level vs one above or below, and why, given limited ad space, would you include this detail?

You could try to figure this out by trying to map out all of amazon and see how far away from Bezos your “stakeholders” are, but so what?

It’s a signal that tells some people much more information than it tells others. It’s either an oversight or a deliberate message that the job is for insiders. Either way, it’s baffling to me, an outsider.

it's not an unusual callout for an Amazon job. Some roles are very technical, you can be heads down working on code or doing data analysis almost all the time and what talking you do is to your teammates. If you need to communicate up in your own org you just tell your direct boss, across orgs you tell a program manager, either of who will be reasonably technical. Other jobs you are expected to present directly to the higher level, non-technical folks. L7 is "upper middle management", so likely have been in the management world for long enough to need some abstraction laid onto the detail.

I see this a lot in job postings; they often use internal language that you need to somehow learn to translate. This is particularly true with positions, which makes no sense because you then need to figure out what exactly “L7” is relative to the scale you have in your head.

A quick search shows that L7 also exists at Facebook and Google at least. It's a senior (staff) software engineer. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi... Not sure about the ER part though.

Levels don't scale the same among FAANGs

In particular L7 at Amazon is roughly equivalent to L6 at Google, E6 at Facebook, 66-67-ish at Microsoft, and 5-ish at apple.

Better then have a HR...because a Human is NOT a resource, funny that everyone thinks this is normal.

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

The relevant excerpts from the job listings:

>Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company, establish and track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics

>Analysts must be capable of creating and deploying sophisticated search strings tailored to various business interests and used to monitor for future risk; Engaging business leaders (L6+) directly is core to this support, and may cover topics including organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders.

>Analysts are expected to close knowledge gaps by initiating and maintaining engagement with topical subject matter experts on topics of importance to Amazon, including hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor

> labor organizing threats against the company

If anyone needed confirmation that unions are beneficial to employees, Amazon just handed it to them on a silver platter.

I don't think people doubted that... but that doesn't necessarily imply that they are a net good. For instance, the Chicago Plumbers Union was fantastic for the plumbers but ensured the city's water supply was poisoned for decades at an increased cost to citizens.

> ...hostile political leaders.

Nice! It's always good to see corporates fight against elected politicians that are hostile to projects like HQ 2. This is not dystopian at all.

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman paid Twitter employees to spy on dissidents. He was also the guy that ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. One of the spied-on dissidents was a friend of Khashoggi.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit...

1. MBS was not elected - a qualifier I included intentionally.

2. What Twitter would have needed was a counter-intelligence analyst (reactive), as opposed to Amazon's proactive intelligence post. Now that I've written it out, what twitter needed was better security - not COINTEL.

3. If companies start dabbling with intelligence and counter-intelligence against political actors directly (instead of offloading to state apparatus like the FBI), then we are reaching Deus Ex levels of Dystopia

dystopian?

democracy is a flawed system so politicians should expect pushbacks.

Yes - Dystopian. You're likely familiar with the dystopian trope where unchecked corporate entities supersede nation-states. I got reminded of that here.

In my ideal democracy, I do expect pushback, but I'd like for it to come from actual voters. If you believe that not only are "corporations are people (my friend)", but should be able to go mano a mano with individual politicians (not lobbying), here's a quick thought experiment: how would you feel if that sentence were from a document by TikTok Inc?

first off, the "corporate entities" are not entirely unchecked. they have shareholders who vote and boards who oversee the company.

second, the "nation states" are on their last legs. the globalization of this tiny planet, the birth of the international citizen, and the truly global nature of the internet will make sure this happens.

the pushback against local democracy by global players is entirely justified considering it's inherently local nature.

on your last point, tiktok, as any other corporation is entitled to act as they see fit.

what we're actually missing is a global government, with global elections that can keep in check both the local governments and the global corporate players, creating a level playing field. this should be the ultimate wealth unlocker.

Previous employment with the Pinkerton Detective Agency is preferred.

Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.

I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.

As long as we’re offering anecdotes, I’m part of a union and I think they have a positive effect on workers and enjoy a generally positive opinion among the employees. This union is probably less powerful than the one you are talking about as no one is mandated to join, and no one is impossible to fire.

The type of union business owners are terrified of aren't small local unions, but massive NEA-esque mega-unions.

Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.

> Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union.

Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations)

> Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.

Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?

Were I to base career choices on every one-off negative anecdote about a particular work scenario, I would have gone to live in a monastery years ago.

Of course, I'm probably replying to a Pinkerton employee right now. But, yeah, unions bad.

Except that it's not a single anecdote, and this issue is widespread.

Ignoring the realities and complexities of established organized labour is not going to help the cause.

It is, very literally, a single anecdote that they guy is responding to.

As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread.

"Racism doesn't exist just because one person used n-word! It's just one anecdote!"

... is not an argument.

Anyone with any exposure unions knows they are far from perfect, many of them are quite terrible.

This kind of ideological, wilful ignorance kills any goodwill people might otherwise have among the adult population who will invariably have come up against theses issue probably multiple times in their lives through either personal experiences or acquaintances.

The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective.

They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system).

We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance.

Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.

> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel

You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world.

First of all, it's widely known that Amazon already has a rigid employee structure that pays according to the internal pay scale. This alone shuts dispels the "omg unions keep top performers down", because internally your only shot at a pay increase is to run through their promotion obstacle course.

Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power. They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason. Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress.

And, coincidentally, should you ask a person making such statements I am confident that they will place themselves firmly in the "excel" category. Ignoring, of course, that self-categorization does little good when Jobs is calling up Schmidt (wait, calling would be the smart move; they documented it in email instead) to say, "hey, you don't hire our workers, and we won't hire yours. Win, win!" Where's your meritocracy now? I'm not going to say a union would have prevented that particular incident, but a union would carry more weight saying, "remember that shit you and $OTHER_COMPANY pulled last year? Yeah, well, to prevent such things in the future..." than some IC in her manager's office where the manager holds all of the cards.

Great point—every company I've worked at, people have complained about lack of transparency about who gets promoted. HR and company leaders always respond "oh we're trying, it's hard, trust us", etc. But with a union workers would have a seat at the table to change the process.

"You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world."

You mean the 3 decades I dealt with unions?

"Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power."

In theory, they were there to help employees. In practice, they are just as corrupt as any large organization and only hurt companies that have to deal with them.

"They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason."

The only way? Please. We have federal and state employment laws that protect all works. No unions required.

"Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress."

If you are a good employee, you have plenty of power. If you are bad and under performing, you need the protection by the unions.

In countries that have really string unions, it's getting to the point where you won't get hired at all without experience because firing an employee involves a court case and lots of red tape. This resulted in protests/riots in Sweden about 5 or 6 years ago.

It also makes a company less competitive in the international marketplace. Now that the Internet has opened up commerce internationally, companies that pay unskilled workers 4x what they are actually worth don't do so well.

It's difficult for me to change my views on this when I've seen the rampant corruption first-hand and the cancerous like effect unions have on a company over time.

> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel

SAG-AFTRA represents both movie stars and B-list actors you've only ever seen in infomercials.

> Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.

SAG-AFTRA represents every American movie star, the same movie stars that can command multi-million dollar contracts with their own terms with the help of the union.

Ironically enough, Mr. Union Buster himself [0] was SAG's president for seven terms.

[0] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reagan-fires-113...

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.

I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker.

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

Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy?

Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted).

Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr

Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr.

Average "union" pay is: $25/hr

So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").

I'm not sure what companies you've worked for, but salary is almost never based on a 'meritocracy,' it's based on the minimum amount an employer thinks they can get away with. That value has nothing to do with an employee's output, and everything to do with minimizing costs.

This is a pointless thought experiment that has practically no basis in reality.

Some people like unions, I think because they're lucky enough to have had a good experience, or to be part of a union that was not decayed by age or special interests.

Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed.

Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.

Who determines what workers "should" have by default? Once that moral determination is made, who makes sure it actually happens?

Nothing in the world happens without power. A union is a way to get some. "Should" doesn't mean anything without it.

The government will never be as in tune with the needs of the workers as the workers themselves.

I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago.

But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense.

I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay.

I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good!

https://youtu.be/8iHeh0iRykw

I think worker-owned cooperatives do make a ton of sense and bridge the interest gap between employers and employees. When the interests of the unions align with the interest of society at large in that we want to promote productivity, it fixes a lot of things.

Agreed. Germany has kept so many factories (it would seem) because labor doesn’t want to offshore their own jobs, even if management is indifferent.

Who supports these pro-worker politicians and holds them accountable? In the US, both parties are very cozy with corporate interests, because that's where the money (and thus ability to mobilize voters) is. Historically, unions played a major role in holding politicians accountable, and supporting those who were more pro-worker. The parties have become more corporatized as union membership has declined. Without the base of support from organized labor, this is a likely outcome.

The average person doesn't have any power over their government. You know who does? Their employers. Given this power imbalance, who exactly do you expect the government to "represent"?

Some workers are happy about some of the things unions championed. Like 5 day work weeks.

Nice anecdata. Unions are necessary to ensure fair negotiations between employees and their employer, though. Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair, as the latter holds far more power. Unions are a tried and true concept almost everywhere in the world, the Nordic Countries being a particulary good example. It'd seem that being unable to provide basic rights for workers is part of the fabled American exceptionalism -- together with the inability to provide universal healthcare, the monthly school shooting, and war in perpetuity.

> Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair

wow! what a statement.

you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.

i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.

>>Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair

>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.

Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.

If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.

It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.

Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.

Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.

In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.

There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.

By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.

I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.

1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power. 2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.

> You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.

I am not wrong:

"According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

> I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s.

They are as relevant as they were in 1776:

"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith

Isn’t this kind of separate from Amazon’s actions though? Unless you’re positing that Amazon is actually acting in the interest of their employees, or thinks they are?

False dichotomy. Two things can both be true: Amazon is not acting in the interest of their employees, and unions are also not acting in the interest of the employees.

It's possible for unions to be bad for both the employees and the employer, and only good for professional middlemen bureaucrats and national parent union leadership.

> I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.

Same, and my workplace doesn't even have a union.

They treat part timers the worst. You get to pay dues but get little of the benefits.

As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.

Would you agree that there are some corrupt market-based economies in our world? Would you say that the fact that there are corrupt and inefficient market-based economies means that all market-based economies result in negative outcomes?

Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.

I could ask you the same question, about unions.

What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year.

As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves.

Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?

> Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?

That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ...

Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.

>Unions are not the exception in this regard

They must be.

or all unions will just trend toward allowing corrupt incentives to take over over time.

> As long as unions can forced on empolyees

Nobody is forcing you to work a union job. You're free to take a non-union job or quit at any point.

Is this argument in any way distinguishable from someone saying 'Nobody is forcing you to work a non-union job. You're free to quit and take a union job any time you want'?

Their benefits outweigh these anecdotal downsides.

It's always interesting to see the anti-union arguments on threads like these. Half the people say that unions are anarchist thugs who beat people up and bash their heads in with bricks, and half say they're gray bureaucratic paper pushing middlemen.

Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.

I think unions are only helpful when employers are particularly bad and have no intention of improving.

In most other cases, unions are generally harmful, including most public-sector unions.

The problem is that the needle for "particularly bad" gets moved every year if there's no countervailing force. Short (<3hr) shifts and JiT scheduling were "particularly bad" a few years ago. Now they're probably the norm in the service/retail industry. The new innovation(s) thanks to Amazon seem to be unpaid security screenings and hidden performance metrics. How long until these are just SOP for all large retail companies?

I live in France, being a union member here is incredibly dull, all day long people come with their employment contract, and you pore over the labor code and the various unions contracts to check the legality of various allegations.

at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.

a lot of useless bureaucracy that culminates in yearly standstills via strikes. no wonder unions in France are slowly losing members:

> A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions.

A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers.

The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European

The fact is that there are effective unions. There are also corrupt unions. The problem is that each side will only acknowledge one of those sentences as being correct.

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.

But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition).

> They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.

You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead!

The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.

I am no fan of unions, but I think they were necessary to force business owners to treat workers decently - to make them pay better than starvation wages, and have decent working conditions. Then came the Cold War, and business owners had an extra incentive to treat workers decently: it undercut communist propaganda, and business owners did not want communism in the country where they owned a business. And so workers didn't think unions were necessary, because they were getting a decent enough deal.

Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.

I've heard nothing but bad things about American unions from both management and many (but not all) workers. I strongly believe that we need labor organization, but I also wonder if someone needs to (cliche alert!) disrupt the space with a new model or just new unions that are not run by bureaucratic chair warmers or the mob.

The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.

One of the biggest problems is honestly that. The existing unions are trying to expand into other industries. It only brings the existing mess, ducktapes on some new layers and fucks up more things. They aren't even expanding for the workers at that point, but to increase revenue for their administrative salaries.

Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job.

And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con. The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.

This is just proof that not everyone is following the same narrative that you’re personally following or understands reality the same way you do.

It’s beyond me how that job post would make sense to anyone besides someone who is disconnected from the usual contending rhetorics Amazon is involved in.

Nobody raised a flag on how that would look like for them? You gotta be pretty oblivious to read that and say “yeah that looks good to me”.

I’m not even discrediting the value or purpose of that particular position since I have zero context besides the ad but I don’t understand how can you sprinkle those terms and reference those specific groups without reflecting deeply how it could be perceived.

Are you commenting on the optics or the ethics?

In a broader context, I don’t understand how others see this as a victory. As if taking the job post down means it’s not still part of their strategy.

Mainly on the optics. I know that’s shallow but I’m commenting on how it looks because perhaps that’s a symptom of something deeper.

Maybe people involved on these projects are so oblivious that it never occurred to them that they may be contributing to something that could be borderline unethical.

What’s kind of ridiculous about this is that you can tell these job requirements were written by a lawyer or similar. People that are trained and presumed to have a somewhat acute skill to evaluate the ethical complexities of a situation.

"This just proof that not everyone is following the same narrative that you’re personally following." Your post is a perfect recursive function.

hahaha

It's so nice to know they group "organized labor" in with "terrorism" and "geopolitical issues."

I will never purchase anything from an Amazon-related company.

>"organized labor" in with "terrorism" and "geopolitical issues."

For sure, all three are bad for the online shopping business...long live the unlimited capitalism!!

BTW: When did you heard "Freedom Fighter" the last time in the "Free Press"?

Why would Amazon want to prevent workers from unionizing? Look what it did for teaching, policing, mail delivery, port security, taxi driving, waste management, public service, and construction.

Ageee. Amazon, walmart and co union bust because they are really really concerned with promoting healthy labor markets. Nothing at all to do with the fact that union workers make significantly more money than non-union labor.

Depends? The union supermarket chain by me makes basically pays pennies above minimum wage and they get the part-time status only scheduling shtick.

Some unions are in fact quite useful. For example, non-union electricians are often asked to do dangerous work and often have little to no recourse. Truck drivers also have unions and its one of the reasons that driving a truck is still a profession that can provide a good quality of life for its workers. Nobody complains about UPS, and every driver is a Teamster.

Public unions are somewhat problematic, I'll give you that. Police are the best example of overpowered unions. Police forces often have tremendous leverage against local governments which makes it hard to keep them in line. What's happened in NYC anytime minor reforms are tried is a disgrace.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't have a problem with workers trying to unionize while recognizing that unions do have issues. Amazon warehouse workers are on the ground doing potentially dangerous work on fast moving floors with robots flying around. I think those people have a right to get paid a living wage given Amazon's profits.

Basically, if you treat your employees happy, they won't have any reason to attempt to unionize.

I think there is a growing part of america that is coming around to the idea that the path to more negotiating power for laborers is not unions. It is through basic income and social safety nets.

How would basic income and social safety nets increase labors negotiating power?

I assume you're asking this question in good faith.

Negotiating power is derived exclusively from the ability to walk away. When walking away from your employment means being evicted, starving, and being unable to afford medical care, your ability to do so is crippled.

I was and all of the replies so far are assuming UBI would cover all basic necessities in the long term in every part of the country. Many people with above avg income TODAY struggle with medical bills and even housing. So I'm not sure I buy the argument that a UBI would be able to cover them unless many other things change first.

Simple, it would mean the employee doesn't need the job as badly as the employer needs the worker. If you don't need to worry about starving, it's a much more powerful position to begin from, naturally.

If healthcare is not tied to your job, you have much more leverage because you are not shackled to a particular employer with an attractive healthcare plan. The cost-benefit analysis of working for or leaving a company no longer includes basic human needs which are held effectively hostage via your employment status.

This can be extended to other social services such as childcare.

It's much easier to quit an abusive boss if you have some income to sustain yourself (UBI). You don't have to put up with the abuse for another month or two until you have a new job offer, etc.

If that were true then how come existing social safety netting in the form of unemployment benefits haven't helped people stuck in this type of situation?

Less precarity. If you aren't terrified of losing your job, because you know you won't be instantly devastated without it (losing health insurance, being evicted), you have less to lose in labor negotiations.

The presumption that the ideas we came up with in during the industrial revolutions are the best is preposterous. They might be the best (old idea aren't necessarily bad), but there are also probably modern options.

I find it frustrating to discuss the failure of unions without being labeled anti-labor. But it seems to me, the fundamental failure of unions, even when they seem to work, is setting up an adversarial system. I would posit for any social institution to be stable you need an alignment of incentives.

I disagree wholeheartedly with this idea that adversaries create instability. Stability is the result of all forces acting on an object summing to zero, to abuse metaphor. You can't have that if all of the forces are pointing in the same direction. There is a reason Nash equilibrium is called "equilibrium"; it is stable.

Unions fail primarily because they are a very shoddy bandaid. When you have commodity labor, in which each worker is the same, a union has the capacity to plausibly represent them as a group. That cooperation gives the workers negotiating power. There is A) no reason to suspect that that negotiating power cannot or will not be abused, and B) the premise is usually false. Police are the obvious target here on both counts, as a police union is nothing more than a private army, and policing is far from commodity labor. It matters a lot who my police are. I think that teacher's unions are probably a better example of the problems though because people tend to think of the police as an outlier.

I'd take these kind of complaints a lot more seriously if they were coming from people with substantial experience in unionized workplaces.

The adversarial situation you want to avoid already exists: Your boss wants to pay you as little as possible; you want to get paid as much as possible. All you're doing by disdaining collective bargaining is sacrificing leverage.

Our owners are not as naive as we are: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/05/24/when-rules-dont-apply...

I think you're being sarcastic, but most of those industries pay a living wage to their employees -- or they did until some SV scabs showed up -- unlike Amazon's warehouse workers.

Actually your example of police unions is a good one. What do they excel at? Protecting bad cops.

I can't speak to unions' effects on taxis -- I don't know if I've ever been somewhere which has unionized taxi drivers -- but I'm guessing Amazon isn't aiming to have a workforce which can shoot innocent people with impunity.

The entry level pay at an Amazon warehouse in the US is more than most of that list.

The primary complaints with Amazon though are about working conditions, not pay.

I don't even think it is about ruthless cost-savings, as it is about ruthless efficiency of the system. They are building an automated warehouse/supply-chain, they just happen to be using real-robots for some of it and humans for other parts. They humans are just cogs, with machine dictated instructions. Much of the misery probably isn't even intentionally, but they still are culpable for it. They need more constraints on how humans are used within their system. Just using a minimum rest period (even more gracious ones than state mandates) is not enough, if you presume humans are working at 100% efficiency, constantly moving and doing for the rest of the time. And not to mention that excludes human desires like autonomy. Accounting for that, while not hindering efficacy too much is an interesting systems problem that Amazon's industrial engineers should be spending more time addressing (though I'm sure they already are investing significant effort, just clearly isn't enough).

I very much doubt they no longer intend to hire somebody for such activities, this was just way too much in the open.

They'll go through an adequately discreet private headhunter. Those responsible for this leaking to the media, have been sacked.

https://pinkerton.com/

They still operate. Among the things they do: secret shoppers at sports stadiums to confirm that the vendors selling alcohol are carding.

This page is quite interesting in its omissions: https://pinkerton.com/our-story

Is that even legal? I thought the US or most states at least like most other countries have laws against undermining the ability of employees to organise.

If you've ever worked in retail, one of the first "training" videos they show you is an anti-union informational video.

One of the big points of the videos is to report union organizers to management ASAP.

This kind of training is extremely common for low wage jobs in the U.S. If almost all large retailers are doing it, it mustn't be illegal, or not enforced.

Saw these videos during my first job (cart attendant at Target). This behavior happens at every big company, both in and outside of tech.

I remember the video being incredibly weird - they basically posited unions as bad because nonmembers would feel socially isolated from member. Eg - in one clip two workers would be gossiping about info from a members-only meeting and the moment a nonmember walked up to them, they became quiet and it turned into this strange teen drama.

The House has passed a bill [1] that would make it illegal to make these meetings mandatory, btw. Obviously won't pass with a GOP senate, but could happen if the Dems manage to retake government.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2474

Found an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6bFEs4ZoXw

Hah. In the US, there are laws, but their effectiveness depends on enforcement. Additionally, there's an entire industry of employer-side law firms focused on union busting, who advise employers on how to do as much as possible without crossing the legal line or getting caught when doing so.

I would be curious to know what European labor laws are like. I'm also curious about what kinds of tactics these companies resort to which are sufficiently legal. Can anyone recommend good labor books?

To paint the American landscape a bit more, the majority of what are called "union avoidance" activities are legal: since employers are employing the workers, they have a captive audience, and use that to the full extent of their ability, usually with the help of outside legal consultants. A lot of what goes on is surveys, videos, forced informational sessions, etc. Much of it can be compared to targeted public relations. Even when an employer stays within the full bounds of the law, they're usually substantially advantaged over the labor organizer: full information about the workforce and a captive audience goes really far.

So where do the violations of law come in? A lot of it comes from very murky, subjective boundaries: employers can't threaten to shut down a plant or time wage increases in a way to interfere with a union organizing campaign. But a lot of what union avoidance specialists' work involves is consulting at exactly how to do the above in a legal way. It will end up in court, and if the consultants did their job right, the employer will win.

Beyond that, you get into activities like firing workers purely because they're involved in union activities: here the labor avoidance consultants will sometimes help with building a paper trail to target workers viewed as problematic. Another illegal activity is spying, either on union meetings or workers and organizers when they're off premises. Oftentimes, employers want to do this on their own volition, and union busting consultants actively work to curtail this (or at least make sure any firings happen in a legal, documented way).

Generally you need to have a minimal number of employees that form the committee of a new union. You register at the Court, inform your employer. Anyone who wants to be represented by the union can join you. The employer must inform you about organisational changes / salaries / etc. You can add your union to a confederacy of unions, biggest of which has a place at the tripartite table during Labor law updates - so it's the state, employer groups and labor unions deciding about yearly wage increases.

Yes, but you can "track" it. It's the actions you take against it which may be constrained by law.

It seems perfectly fine and honest from them. Did anyone expect any different? I'm not saying it's bad, just that's the reality of the job.

It seems perfectly fine and honest to post a job listing and then take it down hours later due to backlash, claim it was a mistake, and refuse to answer follow-up questions on it? What part of that sounds honest to you?

they honestly posted a job, they honestly got backlash, they honestly decided it was a mistake, they honestly refused to answer follow-up questions. What part of that is not honest?

Honestly, I think you simply don't like that they don't agree with you 100% and act as you would have them act, and you should honestly admit that, and honesty would require that you stop accusing them of being other than honest on the basis of what you outlined.

Yeah, (dis)honesty isn't what was noteworthy about this. It's just optically very strange. Like, the fact that they employ people to do this is totally unsurprising to me, but the fact that they're willing to say so in public job posting seems really tone-deaf. Like, what hiring manager thought this was a good idea, and how oblivious must they be of how Amazon is publicly perceived?

This is their business. This is how they want to run it. We can either boycott them or not. I have worked most of my life in mega big corporations, and I cannot say "oh I didn't know that bankA did this and bankB did that". I am either stupid, complicit or indifferent.

Amazon will look after Amazon's interests (aka the shareholders). The little people have rights defined by laws. As long as they are not breached, Amazon (and every Amazon out there) will match on.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I do not condone the majority of Amazon's practices and thus I don't buy from them (or at least they are low in my list of preferred options). But since we got capitalism, and since the US is the HQ of capitalism.. then why is anyone surprised? Facebook will spy. Amazon will squeeze every cent they can, and so on..

Some things businesses do have been made illegal. Perhaps this might be one of them.

They must have found the perfect candidate!

Or maybe they found their candidates based on the free publicity around the posting..

It's fascinating how emotional of a topic this is on HN. A lot of people seem to be taking a staunch binary, black-and-white, us-vs-them approach to this issue.

I've known friends that hate their unions (usually retail), and those that love their unions (electricians, UPS drivers etc.) These are of course just a small group of anecdotes and not representative of a comprehensive dataset so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another if the question is "are unions horrifically evil or a godsend that's universally necessary."

The framing of this type of debate doesn't seem to foster good faith discussion.

My only personal experience with being in a union was a call center job I had when I was 18. I don't recall dues being much, and everybody got full health coverage (including dental and vision) at 25 hrs/wk, and that ended up being a big draw for a lot of people in the area. So that was pretty cool.

I've also worked at a lot of places that weren't union where the employees were paid well, received benefits and treated fairly. That was also pretty cool.

I guess to me if I were to have an opinion it'd be something along the lines of "If people want to unionize, they have a legal right to do so, and I don't have any particular issue with that. If it works out with a positive outcome, great! If it doesn't, that sucks!"

I'm definitely not in favor of people being bullied or misled to go either way on this issue. It literally just seems like something people should talk about in good faith and make their decision accordingly. It's just a choice.

There are two separate issues here. They’re only tangentially related.

1) Unions, good or bad?

2) Is it appropriate for a company like Amazon to spy on their work force to stop them from unionizing, as compared to persuading their work force that unionizing would be bad?

The majority of my post was addressing the way that this is being discussed on here. There have been a lot of nasty comments on this issue ranging from accusing people of being Pinkertons and bots, to posts about declining meritocracy etc.

It seems as though this thread has had a whole lot of posts conflating the two issues you mentioned and it just muddies the waters imho.

As I mentioned, I think it should be a good-faith discussion across the board and I'm not a fan of bullying or misleading people.

I could be misunderstanding this but the discussion about your second point has been in some cases in this thread been supplanted by people arguing about who is on the "right side" rather than the more immediate discussion of "is this an acceptable practice?"

Like I said earlier, it's really fascinating how emotional this gets.

While being in Basic Income meetings frequent subject was "what will happen to people rights when AI takes over" sadly this is example of the answer of what is the most probable outcome...

Never ask the drivers about unionizing. I'm not saying that they will report it to their boss who will mess with your orders and deliveries.

But I am also not not saying that.

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind man. Got something that helps you lean towards that conclusion?

Jeff has a lot of money. Surely workers rights don't hit the bottom line that hard. Does Jeff not know that everyone will remember him for this behavior?

> Does Jeff not know that everyone will remember him for this behavior?

This presupposes that Jeff cares about his legacy. I genuinely don't know what drives him; my best guess is 'making Amazon ever more successful'.

Jeff likely knows that a mogul's legacy is crafted long after the boom years. See Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Gates, Nobel, etc.

Wasn't there an article about him saying that he fancy himself as real life capt. Picard?

Ok haircut checks out everything just fell in to place

do you think jeff poorly practices a penny whistle in private?

god does that man suck

It's not just about money. It's about power.

"Made in error!"

The excuse heard round the world.

The error was that they stated so bluntly in a public job listing that they wanted a union buster with an intelligence background. They still are looking for someone like that, of course (or many someones), the error was that the job posting wasn't written in a properly deniable way.

Maybe they can ask Sammy Gravano for recommendations

They already have a company stores. Just hire your own police force and we can be back to colonial America .

HN title: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

My thoughts after reading the title: "Oh good, I always thought Amazon was scummy and lacked integrity, but credit where credit is due, they did good here.

The actual article's title and body: Amazon deletes their own job listings for union-busters, as a PR response due to public outcry.

My thoughts: #$%@!

It's mind-boggling to me that we allow this sort of thing, and that brazenly putting on a job description that you want to hire someone to help thwart legally-protected labor organizing isn't something a company can get fined -- or worse -- over.

I am surprised from the reactions here. What is the best way to deal with worker union blackmails according to you? I know people like to portray worker and amazon as good guy and bad guy, but I think most of us has seen some demands that are pretty outrageous from them. I think it is best if both sides have contact person with whom they can negotiate.

Don't get me wrong, I think worker unions are essential for pushing the demands of underprivileged and should exist, but nobody should agree every demand from them.

Unions don't end up with outright control over business. Generally speaking, companies and unions do continue to negotiate throughout the term of a contract, which negotiations are formalized in Memoranda of Understanding. And during contract negotiations, if negotiations over a particular issue stall, the law empowers companies to make a "last and final" offer, which is then included in the contract presented to the workforce. (This is U.S.-specific.)

The idea that a company must "agree to every demand" from a union seems to me a strawman. Bargaining ideally maximizes net value, and true collapses in bargaining are rare.

"Outrageous" demands that are met, therefore, represent a company's unwillingness to reallocate the value of those demands towards other contract elements (that is, to say "we can't do that, but we'll offer this instead"). If they were truly too costly, the company would have either a) refused the terms, or b) failed to bear the cost and gone under.

Yes, that's why amazon is hiring people who are expert in negotiations.

I think the problem is mainly the methods. Delta, for example, actively runs campaigns to deter their employees for joining the union. I don't know how is that perceived in general but I assume that people in general consider that more acceptable than the idea of running internal counterintelligence to prevent the formation of unions.

The reality is that Amazon is under so much scrutiny that pretty much any program on this area would be criticized.

This is actually a really interesting recursive algorithm: That is, the job listing for analysts to track labor organizing threats turned out to be a labor organizing threat.

Man, it sure would suck if the lowest ranked and most precarious Amazon employees got a bigger piece of Bezo's pie. What an awful world that would be. /s

It's too late this year (I bought some cat food during the winter), but next year I'm shooting for zero orders from Amazon.

This is what counts most!

I don’t know why this is even controversial. American style unions are bad for business, plain and simple. And Amazon is legally required to put the interests of its investors first. Amazon is going to be doing whatever it can to discourage unionization, that’s just what’s going to happen, and I find it hard to blame them.

Maybe it's controversial because it's blatantly illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1300856270572916736

Gathering information on union organizing is illegal? I don’t think so.

Spying, yes, but I don’t see that in the description.

And your Twitter post is gone.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3azegw/amazon-is-spying-o...

> American style unions are bad for business, plain and simple

They're not bad for business, they reduce profits, and they limit the ability of a company to exploit it's workers.

> they reduce profits, and they limit the ability of a company to exploit it's workers.

Right, so bad for business. Great for most workers though.

I would define "bad for business" as something that reduces the core business - less sales.

Reducing profits is a different thing. Business can still be booming while profits are not through the roof.

An interesting thing from Amazon’s labor organizing risk rubric: increased diversity drastically decreases the risk of employees organizing. In case you were curious why all the big companies are so strongly pro-diversity, that’s a pretty compelling reason for them.

As far as my understanding goes, companies of any size have the right to exercise a sort of capital strike at their discretion. The perfectly legal shuttering of The Gothamist after their newsroom unionized a while back is a good example of that (the story is a fascinating read!) (0)

I would honestly love to hear from those that aren't favorable towards unions about why it's acceptable for business management and ownership to punitively destroy jobs and value over ideological issues, but it's unacceptable for the employees to have that option as part of collective bargaining?

(0) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561830256...

Why is this a surprise? If you work in infosec at any multinational you would know activists (hacktivism) and hostile nations/leaders are a serious threat you track. Has no one heard of Dataminr? What do people think it's used for. The "labor" part is a bit unusual but given their business it kinda makes sense.

This reminds me of how back in 2016 right before November US elections,I read threat intel reports and conference style presentations from threat intel vendors talking in detail about Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Steele dossier, this was before buzzfeed decided to publish it (all other media refused at the time). This is all public stuff now but big corps are very interested in learnig about the latest strategic intel so they can adopt. And that's perfectly fine so long as no laws are broken. This is similar to how big corps get a scoop on emargoed CVEs so they can patch before it's made public. A lot of times this is what intelligence community people do when they want to settle down and make money. I'll bet good money whoever they hire has background at FBI,NSA or DIA.

Who said it was a surprise?

We're seeing it here because people made a big deal out of it on social media.

US law does not protect employees' right to unionize? I'm from Brazil where we have some strict (too strict IMHO) labor laws and this type of hunt (and punishment) for union makers is wildly illegal here.

Technically this is probably illegal in the US as well, but enforcement is very weak.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...

Never forget The Ludlow Massacre: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

Should probably be merged with:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345259

Even if not quite a dupe.

How is workers' rights for white collar at Amazon? I guess the company culture is ever prevailing, or is it a apartheid system?

> The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is a foundational statute of United States labor law which guarantees basic rights of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and take collective action including strike if necessary.

It's truly late stage capitalism if companies can impede labor organizing so brazenly in public like this and have only encouragement at the federal level to go further. HN a few days ago (the 787 structural issue) was also talking about Boeing closing plants and sacrificing safety to avoid union labor.

do have the link(s) for that Boeing thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24305067

The whole thread is interesting.

What Amazon needs is competition.

agreed

Do unions really provide a better work experience for the worker? Genuine question.

According to the BLS, white collar union members in the US have higher salaries, better benefits, more paid time off, and better retirement benefits. They also report having higher life satisfaction[1].

The same trend exists for blue collar union members, too.

[1] https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.baylor.edu/dist/2/1297/f...

Yet another step towards NeoFeudalism, with The Corporations as the new Lords.

Bemused at the knee-jerk downvotes against anyone who has an opinion on unions in EITHER direction.

As in so many internet spaces, partisan zealots are degrading our ability to converse. I hope the mods figure out how to keep them from turning HN into yet another dunghole.

At what point would it be unethical to continue using Amazon?

They can just outsource the work to a union-busting company.

Isn't vertical integration and in-sourcing Amazon DNA?

This is not unexpected. Merely the product of capitalism.

We build an economic system that rewards selfishness and drive for profit at all costs. Successful companies generate profit. More profit is generated by charging the highest cost for the lowest quality product and paying the worker as little as possible.

Unions threaten that profitability. Its simple math. Its cheaper to hire analysts to track and snuff out labour movements than it would be to capitulate to the demands of any labour movements that formed, such as wage increases or benefits.

Why are we shocked and appalled when the system we created does what it does best?

Off-topic - US should hire lots of intelligence analysts and AI experts to track social network driven threats to our nation.

Pinkertons!!

It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that a website for wannabe capitalists views workers having greater negotiating power extremely suspiciously, yet is enthusiastic towards employers having near-absolute power over their employees.

Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

There is lots of support for unions in HN comments. It may even be the majority position by a slight margin. (Police unions are an inverted special case right now.)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.

This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

After post has been out for a while there probably is a majority in support. However every single time I read the comments of these kind of threads the first several highly upvoted comments are almost always anti-union. Its not until the post has been on the front page for a while before the comments begin to turn.

Do I have sciencily evidence? Nope. Could it be a confirmation bias or just a coincidence? Sure. However it seems to happen a lot.

You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... If an article is about unions, the first round of objections is probably going to come from the "boo unions" contingent. Once those comments appear, a second wave of objections saying "wait a minute, unions have done good things" (or "I can't believe how anti-union these comments are!") would be expected.

I don't know for sure if that's what's happening in the threads you're talking about but it kinda sounds like it might be.

I doubt it’s a conspiracy or organized comment ring.

The popular narrative around unions is one of the employees versus their employer, but ultimately even the business’ customers or adjacent businesses end up paying some of the price.

For an example that will probably hit home for many HN users, try asking your trade show team about dealing with unions. The restrictions imposed by unions on trade show attendees are unreal. We had to spend extra to use tool-free fasteners and pre-wire our booths to avoid trigger union regulations that only union employees could use certain tools and do certain wiring jobs on the trade show floor. The union even sent someone to watch us to ensure we weren’t using forbidden tools or wiring one year. If we did, they would send us a bill.

Unions have their place, but it’s dishonest to suggest that anyone skeptical of union efforts doesn’t have valid reasons to oppose them.

What's amazing to me about that anecdote is that it seems like such a tremendously small reason to dislike unions, for all they do to improve worker safety, pay, and provide a stop against exploitation by corporate owners.

I would consider not being able to plug in my own gear at a trade show a small price to pay to show my support for unions and union workplaces.

Yeah the example they use is literally the union providing worker safety.

Which is to say the company made you guys do all the work instead of paying people to do it for you.

I don't think money is the issue. For one thing, your company is paying you, so it's not like it's free labor. For another thing, it's often just easier to do stuff yourself.

For some tiny job it takes less effort to just do it than it does to ask someone else, especially when there are all kinds of union rules. One task leads to another, and then you need to find someone else to do that job.

I guess you can't let people attach whatever willy nilly and trip the circuits or start a fire. Furthermore, that requirement is set by the trade show not the union right? Surely they take a share from the bills.

It's clear you've never worked with a union if you think the rules make sense or if you think the tradeshow had any say in this activity.

A total coincidence that 15 FWD: FWD: UNIon RUInEd My Life stories immediately dominate the conversation whenever a story like this hits the front page.

Yes I too used to belong to a scary union. I was forced pay dues and there was this bad employee that didn't get fired! Now at my non-union job we only have the best employees and managers because we are allowed to fire the bad ones.

From HN guidelines:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners, and unions take power away from business owners and can and will force you to do things to the detriment of your business if they deem it in the best interests of the union members.

>Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners,

A lot of small business owners who also happened to work for a union and had a bad experience? That seems like a lot for a site largely filled with software developers. Is HN more mainstream than I'm giving credit?

HN is not mainstream but has a diverse audience. The subset commenting on any story is a self-selected group that likely has more experience in or devotion to the topic. Find a thread about math or physics and you’ll find an outsized representation of mathematicians and physicists commenting; does that indicate the site is full of mathematicians and physicists? No, they’re just self-selected to comment. Same here.

The vast majority of people on HN are people who need to work to eat and keep a roof over their heads, and the companies they work for take power away from them, and will force them to do things to the detriment of themselves if it's deemed in the best interests of the company.

A union is a company that represents the interests of workers in the same way that a company is an entity that represents the interests of capitalists.

Besides, many people on HN work for tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm or eBay, all of which were found guilty of colluding[1] to keep engineer salary below market value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

That lawsuit didn’t require unions, though. If anything, it’s a great example of how our industry can overcome these issues without unionization.

People tend to forget that unions represent the existing employees, not aspiring hires. This can actually work to the detriment of juniors and newcomers to the industry. It can also work to the detriment of teams where it becomes intensely difficult to fire people who are legitimately underperforming. The public school unions keeping bad teachers on the payroll but keeping them idle in empty rooms is a prime example. Police unions defending bad cops is another very relevant example. If you’re an aspiring teacher or police officer with motivation to do well, why should those union employees take a spot on the job that you could otherwise occupy and do better? Switching the rules of the game to favor seniority doesn’t benefit people who rank low on the seniority ladder.

Most of people on HN work at large tech companies. In my experience the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good, but of course that is infinitely debatable.

> the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good

Most people also think they are smarter than average. I have seen people that thought they were great at negotiating their own wages/benefits in a ritualized yearly pissing match with their boss only to be outdone by new hires. Lots of overinflated egos around that would rather rip their own arms of than pull on the same rope.

I don't think there's coordination happening on HN necessarily. There is a very high degree of anti-union propaganda in the broader culture, and many have taken that propaganda on without considering or hearing much from the other side. None of the stuff people say about unions on HN is anything I haven't heard a million times in casual conversation with others.

Maybe a lot of people just have had negative interactions with unions.

Entirely possible, but also maybe people who have positive experiences with unions can't be bothered talking about them when the popular narrative of 'unions are bad' means they're inevitably going to have to defend them and explain every bad thing that has ever happened at or adjacent to a union.

I'm a union member, but man do I think twice about ever commenting on anything to do with a union because of the huge negative wave that comes your way.

I for one would like to hear more about the positive experience. The narrative in the US tend to be polarized, and I do wish we can have a civil discussion on the merits and perspectives from both ends.

Maybe a lot of people have been told nebulous negative union stories repeated over and over by big business.

Can't speak for other people, but my views are from personal experience. Granted low sample size of 2, but that's what I have to judge by.

Because not all unions are angelic as they are portrayed in popular culture.

I am a 34 year old immigrant from a country where unions are synonymous with both corruption and workers rights.

US also has a similar history.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=518184...

Edit: downvoted for pointing out facts. Your downvotes won't change reality, as much as you think it does.

I don't understand this sentiment. Why is

1. an allegedly corrupt democratic institution that you personally have influence over which exists to fight for your rights

a bigger problem than

2. a definitely corrupt authoritarian institution run by self-interested plutocrats that exists to squeeze as much free work out of you as possible?

A couple possibilities:

1. There is a conspiracy to bad mouth unions to protect the capitalist class.

2. Unions have problems and people are expressing their opinions about those problems

with just how little power unions have in America, I'd wager it's more likely the former. especially in tech spaces

> Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

I doubt it's a coordinated effort, it's just resident libertarians getting agitated by a concept they've been conditioned to fight against.

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

Yeah, it’s discouraging. But Hacker News is a place for capitalists (self-identified) or wannabe capitalists to hold discussions, and the site is run by a venture capital firm, so makes sense. Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

Well-informed, good-faith disagreement is possible on a range of topics, including this one.

I agree wholeheartedly, though I'm not seeing much disagreement or discussion, I'm just seeing downvotes on any comment that even suggests the remote possibility unions might actually be a good thing.

> Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

In theory unions are great. In practice America's implementation of unions end up as a crappy caricature of the theoretical one and are nothing like their European counterparts.

Maybe recently, with many American unions struggling just to survive, but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective and pioneering.

I think it's maybe a bit more subtle. In our industry there's what I call the "California Ideology" (after the classic essay: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo... which is a bit dated but still stands the test of time)

At one point this perspective was fairly counter cultural -- computing technology fused with Alvin Toffleresque third wavism, a tinge of libertarianism but without a suit and tie, some LSD, some cyberpunk, wear jeans to work, "change the world", etc. But that sheen is increasingly wearing off.

The reality under the surface dressing is we are part of an industry with deep military ties, and it doesn't matter if you wear jeans to work and get vegan treats in the cafe, there's nothing particularly radical about computing technology and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way.

We're part of a semi-managerial class that is doing on the whole pretty damn well financially, but there's no reason to expect that to last forever.

A lot of us ran around saying "information wants to be free" in the 90s and so on, it looked a bit naive to me then, but now it just looks comical and sad.

> and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way

There is a good argument to be made that increasing the GDP is a moral imperative [0]. I know it's increasingly trendy to think all of capitalism is evil and we should tear the whole global economic system down (and to tweet about it from your iPhone while sitting in your air conditioned home, eating your meal delivered by Doordash). As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be, and there are lots of things in the world that should be improved, it's also true that for the vast majority of people in the US and around the world, their living conditions today are much better than they would have been at any other time in history. Which is the simple result of compounding economic growth.

Talking about "changing the world" by building an app sounds a bit quaint and too self-serious these days, but I really don't think it's true that the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society.

[0] https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/essays/economic-growth-moral...

The same happens whenever anything is discussed that would actually improve the lives of the very vast majority of Americans - healthcare improvements, UBI, tertiary education that isn't crippling debt, unions, better public transport, etc.

There are extremely rich and powerful people who will sink hundreds of billions of dollars into making sure those things don't change.

America is just so profitable the way it is.

At some point you have to question people that choose to work at Amazon who have other options. At the very least.

I worked at Amazon and I had other options. What about me do you have to question?

were you aware of amazons practices before you started to work there? if yes, how did that factor into your decision to take the job?

Do you mean specifically around their anti union stance?

It wasn’t widely in the news back then. But I also don’t want to be part of an union and most of the unions I’m aware of in North America are not shining examples. So I’d be ok with working there today given what I know.

Why doesn't Amazon do what all monopolies do, lobby the government and cause Regulatory capture to corner the market?

It's easy, spend 100M dollars on a law that makes warehouse labor a mandatory union.

Mom and pop companies can't afford to fill out government/union paperwork for their 3 employees and customers can't go to cheaper alternatives.

But this means Amazon and Amazon employees win.

Unions are probably the biggest threat to Amazon in the long term, as their interests are directly against Amazon, they'd rather there be 100 competitors they can buy out/drive out of business one at a time; then a single union who could easily shut them down (by striking)

Disgraceful. But will anything be done, judicially, legally? Not a chance. Tells you all you need to know.

I'm pretty sure it isn't illegal to seek out an employee with strike-busting knowledge.

It is, however, illegal to engage in, or create the impression of engaging in, surveillance of union activities.

Sure, but you're already treading in murky legal waters.

Just this posting could be viewed as Amazon trying to create the impression that it is actively surveilling labor organizing activities, which it's illegal to suggest, even if you're not actually engaging in that practice.

Yes, and that's wrong.

I've not seen good come out of unions in decades.

Example of unions that are net negative for society: police unions, teacher unions.

There hasn't been significant union power in the US in decades.

Disregarding unions all over the EU...

Teachers unions are definitely not a net negative...

Teachers unions exist at the detriment of children's education.

police unions are basically the singular example of where they shouldn't exist

I have lots of friends in the "movie making" business. Lots of crew members like camera department, set construction, etc. Before Obama care, the only way these folks could afford health insurance was to join the union. Even my actor friends have used the medical coverage as their sole reason. They are not looking to be SAG members for SAG work (we're in Texas so not necessary), but use it for the other benefits.

It's the only time it has made sense to me, within my lifetime. Otherwise, I think unions have way more power than what they need at this time. Now, they have to do things to justify their existence. Would things go back to the way they were before unions if they didn't exist?

> Otherwise, I think unions have way more power than what they need at this time. Now, they have to do things to justify their existence.

Unions have long offered things like group health insurance, and other benefits. I'm not sure what you mean since those are not new offerings.

Aside: Union membership has been on the decline for decades, not increasing in power.

This article is ridiculous. It makes a bunch of unfounded assumptions and provides very little in the way of facts to support its claims. Did anyone actually read the job postings before jumping to conclusions?

>Monitor various collection platforms for incidents that pose direct and indirect risk to Amazon operations, personnel, or brand;

There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize. This author is naive to think that Amazon isn't dealing with state level threats. They likely need state level intelligence.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazo...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200901142713/https://www.amazo...

> There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize.

Literally from your own link:

> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company

(emphasis mine)

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