> "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications"
Sounds like the training was teaching you how to avoid leaving an audit trail rather than how to prevent illegal activity.
Sounds like the training was teaching you how to avoid leaving an audit trail rather than how to prevent illegal activity.
it is because humans use terms colloquially rather than with the utmost precision, and then it gets held up as if the person meant the exact precise legal concept. This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason.
The audit trail is always there no matter what, and this wouldn't change that
Alternative take: it is indeed for the same reason - to avoid incriminating yourself. You carry assumption that the behavior is not incriminating.
Doctors do commit in malpractice. Companies do engage in monopolistic behavior.
If such training were strictly to avoid illegal behavior, wouldn't it be better to train people in what the precise legal concept is, so that they can comply with the law? Or is behaving within the law a secondary concern.
In this case Amazon quite literally got caught by the AG of Washington state for breaking the exact laws their training tells them they shouldn't talk about. Why are you defending this?
I worked for a fortune 100 company. We are humans, and our customers are humans. We absolutely have morals - at an individual level, and those morals influence how we work
That often includes stuff that you would classify under 'morals'.
They also train people to not commit insider trading. It still happens. Does that mean the training exists simply to help them figure out how to not get caught insider trading, or to avoid an evidence trail?
You aren’t going to successfully train people en masse in something like antitrust law in the course of a few hours. That’s why law school isn’t a single day.
I’m not defending any illegal behavior here, I’m defending the training that says "please be careful with what you say" does not exist mainly to try to hide some useful evidence trail, which was the claim.
The level of cynicism in all this is impressively high, and the level of knowledge about antitrust is very low
Say that you are part of the executive team of Amazon, and want to take some illegal behavior like price fixing. Things that actually happened. You know it is illegal and want to avoid getting caught, so your communications only happen in person, and there's not really a paper trail.
Okay, great, you've set that up now. Now it's the day to day business at your company, and all different departments need to do their basic jobs to support that. You're still doing something illegal, and now it's spread across hundreds of people to support your illegal activity. The last thing you want to do is to have them writing e-mails about price fixing and kickbacks etc. How do you avoid this? Train your people not to mention certain words.
And guess what, that's exactly what they do.
Amazon literally committed a crime requiring many people to conspire. How is it cynicism to say that Amazon can conspire to commit crimes?
Your optimism is impressively high.
> Amazon: commits crimes
> OP: lol when I was at Amazon they told us not to talk about crimes
> You: These are completley unrelated! Let's stop this trope!