Category: Amazon

Today in Amazon Rat-F%$#ery

2 Comments

A brief rundown of poor Amazon behavior, first despite triple digit temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, and the Kent, Washington warehouse continued operations in brutal heat with no air conditioning. 

Next, and more significantly, Amazon is demanding stock warrants to carry some merchants’ products in their store, which in addition to being something that Glass-Steagall USED to ban is a pretty big slam dunk example of anti-competitive behavior:

Suppliers that want to land Amazon.com Inc. as a client for their goods and services can find that its business comes with a catch: the right for Amazon to buy big stakes in their companies at potentially steep discounts to market value.

The technology-and-retail giant has struck at least a dozen deals with publicly traded companies in which it gets rights, called warrants, to buy the vendors’ stock in the future at what could be below-market prices, according to corporate filings and interviews with people involved with the deals.

Amazon over the past decade also has done more than 75 such deals with privately held companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. In all, the tech titan’s stakes and potential stakes amount to billions of dollars across companies that provide everything from call-center services to natural gas, and in some cases position Amazon among the top shareholders in those businesses.

The unusual arrangements offer another window into how Amazon uses its market heft to increase its wealth and clout. The company has been under growing scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers over its competitive practices, including with companies it partners with.

………

Amazon routinely leverages its size and power to force terms that benefit itself, including by getting partners in one business to sign on to its other services; learning about up-and-coming technology companies through its venture-capital fund; or creating top selling Amazon branded goods that compete with small sellers on its site. It has aggressively competed to wrest market share from rivals, which Amazon says results in better deals for shoppers.

In its supplier deals that include warrants, Amazon throws its weight around to exact lucrative terms, knowing many companies won’t refuse, according to former Amazon executives who worked on the deals.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the warrants it obtains in commercial agreements are typically tied to milestones that Amazon has to meet, such as large purchases from the supplier. The company declined to comment on specific deals, or say how many warrants it has exercised or the amount of money it has made from such agreements. The spokeswoman said it has warrant deals in fewer than 1% of the commercial agreements it enters into.

Grocery distributor SpartanNash Co. last year amended a contract with Amazon to deliver groceries to its Amazon Fresh arm. The Grand Rapids, Mich.-based company had been supplying Amazon with food since 2016, but this time Amazon added a condition: if it bought $8 billion worth of groceries over seven years, it could get warrants to purchase around 15% of SpartanNash’s stock at a price potentially lower than the market. Amazon also said it wanted to be notified of any takeover offers for SpartanNash and have a 10-day window to offer a counterbid.

………

Amazon has been doing such deals with vendors for about a decade but has aggressively increased the practice in the past few years, said former Amazon executives and lawyers who worked on structuring the deals. In its latest quarterly report, the company valued its warrants at $2.8 billion, more than five times the level three years ago. Amazon doesn’t disclose the value of stakes it owns as a result of exercising its warrants.

A broader measure of its warrants and the stakes it holds in companies through warrants, direct investment or other ways increased 10 times to $8.4 billion in that period, according to Amazon’s quarterly filings.

………

Like stock options, warrants let the holder buy a company’s shares at a set price during a set period. If the stock surpasses that strike price, the warrant holder can buy shares at a below-market price.

Corporate executives in a range of industries and lawyers said Amazon’s push to get warrants as part of vendor deals is highly unusual. Warrant deals have more commonly been used by investors who back companies in financial trouble, in deals deemed high risk.

Amazon is using its market dominance to steal from the share-holders, but that’s OK with the corrupt stooges that Robert Bork unleashed on antitrust law.

………

In talks with Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings Inc., Amazon broached a 10-year leasing deal, with similar terms. This time Amazon demanded warrants that would amount to up to 20% of Atlas’s equity over five years—with an option for 10% more later—depending on how much business it gave Atlas. Amazon also wanted the right to elect a director to Atlas’s board, after meeting certain milestones.

People involved on both sides said that warrants were a condition of Amazon partnering with Atlas. “There was definitely a sense that if it wasn’t agreed to there wouldn’t be a deal,” said one of the people. Atlas executives didn’t want to pass up the revenue opportunity from Amazon and viewed giving up the warrants as the price of doing business with Amazon, said the person.

………

Former Amazon executives said they avoided doing anything during supplier negotiations, such as putting its ultimatums in writing, that would give fodder to critics who have said Amazon abuses its power. One of the former executives said that most companies complied with its demands over warrants. Several former Amazon executives who worked on such deals said in interviews that they found them to be unfair and one-sided, saying the companies weren’t in a position to refuse and that most of the upside went to Amazon.

This is extortion and demanding kick-backs, and while it is likely legal, it really shouldn’t be.

This sort of behavior is baked into its DNA, as we can see by their dealing with the press as well, with intimidation and lies being the rule rather than the exception:

It was a slow news day at Gizmodo, the tech website where Dell Cameron worked. Without a story of his own to report he decided to aggregate—a journalism term for rewriting and crediting—a day-old Tampa ABC-affiliate’s TV piece on how Amazon’s Ring home surveillance security system was being marketed to dozens of Florida police departments.

A day later, an email from an Amazon spokesperson popped into Cameron’s inbox. The brief email claimed that the Tampa-based reporter, Adam Walser, was “correcting his story” and suggested that Cameron would need to do so as well. In her mail, the spokesperson challenged the accuracy of the station’s entire report. “It is inaccurate that AWS or Amazon is marketing Amazon Rekognition to law enforcement, either individually or in combination with Ring,” she wrote.

Cameron checked, and he didn’t see a correction on the Tampa story. Before making any change to his post, Cameron decided to reach out to Walser and double-check. “I read him the exact email that they sent me,” Cameron says. Walser was puzzled, according to Cameron. “He said ‘That’s just not true, we’re not issuing a correction. I don’t know what they’re talking about.’” Cameron wrote back to the Amazon spokesperson relaying what he’d been told, and mentioning that Gizmodo was planning their own potential follow-up story that was “likely to include that Amazon attempted to obtain a correction from Gizmodo by falsely claiming the ABC station was planning to issue one.”

The Amazon spokesperson doubled down, insisting that a correction had indeed happened. She accused Cameron of being “up in arms” and “threatening” by mentioning the possibility that Gizmodo would publish a piece about being misled by Amazon. “I do not appreciate being called… a liar,” she added in a follow-up email.

………

“I do not believe for a second that this person is naive or didn’t understand what a correction is,” Cameron told me recently, almost two years after the interaction. “They got a job in the PR department at one of the most powerful companies in the world. I think they were trying to trick me into correcting a story and didn’t expect me to go back and contact the reporter.”

It’s not unusual for communications teams for corporations, non-profits, and the government all alike to be withholding in their interactions with the press and to try to spin things in the best possible light. It’s rarer that companies try to mislead and intimidate the press into falling into the lines that they want. But of the dozen journalists I spoke with for this story, most of whom declined to be identified out of concern for professional repercussions, all recalled times Amazon’s press team had engaged in manipulative and sometimes deceitful behavior. According to these writers and editors, and my own experience reporting on the company, Amazon’s comms team readily employs these rarer, bare-knuckle PR tactics. The ultimate result isn’t just that reporters have a harder time writing stories. Some may be deterred from writing on the company at all. And if those that do are deceived and unduly influenced, then by extension the public is as well.

Aside from Cameron, at least two reporters recalled moments when they felt Amazon’s press team had outright lied to them. Almost all of the journalists told me they found that Amazon press relations was either the most or among the most clawing and deceptive corporate communications team that they had dealt with in their work.

“Amazon is the only company I’ve dealt with that has directly lied to me,” said one tech writer, recalling instances when Amazon boasted of warehouse safety guidelines in ways that journalists who had spoken with rank-and-file employees had found not to be true.

“They’d often lie about things we had proof of,” said another reporter, citing times they had visual evidence contradicting the communications teams’ claims. “There will be videos of these big walkouts and they’ll say only a few workers participated.”

………

“I do think that the broader effort is to disincentivize you from telling the truth. They want you to feel like it’s going to be a world of pain if you do your job,” one veteran tech reporter said. “Even if corrections aren’t needed, it’s still a headache and a waste of time for reporters and editors and lets them know that they’re probably scheduling another headache for themselves the next time that they decide to write about Amazon.”

Another reporter at a smaller outlet with less resources described a similar chilling effect after the company pressured him after a critical story. “It just eats up so much of time, going back and forth with our attorneys,” the reporter said, describing how the trouble had made him hesitant to cover Amazon again. “You think twice about it. Is it really worth it? Maybe you have a good story but it won’t change how they do business. It’s kind of a scary thing.”

Amazon tried a similar tactic this September on Reveal—a non-profit investigative news shop that often releases its stories in partnership with newspapers, broadcasters, and other outlets—after it published an award winning series from a team led by reporter Will Evans about the company’s efforts to mislead the public about warehouse injury rates. “Yesterday we published an investigation into Amazon’s massive misinformation campaign. Naturally, we’re now the *subject* of their misinformation campaign,” wrote Andy Donohue, Reveal’s deputy director of projects.

………

But others noted Amazon is willing to go to bold lengths compared to other companies they’ve reported on. Amazon has a broader reputation for fostering a cutthroat corporate culture, which seems to be reflected in the company’s external communications. Ahead of April’s high profile unionization vote at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama facility, Amazon fallaciously tweeted claims that its hard-pressed drivers and warehouse pickers didn’t actually have to pee in bottles, and chided lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who had spoken out about the company’s labor conditions. Recode reported that the tweets were directly driven by Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO and one of the world’s most wealthy men.

While that suggests the company’s aggressive PR efforts flow from the very top, there are other executives with a role in overseeing public relations and related portfolios. While the most high profile may be vice president of global corporate affairs Jay Carney, the former Time magazine reporter and Obama White House press secretary, two former Amazon communications staffers and another employee with knowledge of Amazon’s communications team told me that Drew Herdener, the vice president of communications, usually calls shots internally.

………

Amazon’s tactics seem to be well known among reporters. Beyond the dozen with personal experience I spoke with for this story, many others who had not themselves faced an Amazon harangue were aware of the company’s aggressive approach. Indeed, hints of Amazon’s press strategies have leaked out over the years. In 2019, a Twitter glitch notified users when they were put on other users’ private lists. Caroline Haskins, a reporter at BuzzFeed who had broken a series of stories on Amazon Ring, noticed that Morgan Culbertson, an Amazon PR person, had added her to a list called “Haters.”

The goal is to have these tactics, “Well known among reporters.”  The technical term for this is, “Chilling Effect.”

Even reporters who have never written a story about Amazon are leery of writing one.

………

It was not the first time I had been yelled at by a press flack—that’s not uncommon. Nor was it the first time I had been asked for a correction. But it was the first and only time a press flack tried to aggressively antagonize and intimidate me into stripping a quote out of a published story from an established expert.

That expert, Stacy Mitchell—the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research group that advocates for small businesses—has seen the impacts of Amazon’s PR wrath firsthand. When I spoke with her for this story, Mitchell said that she’s had editors “tone-down and remove stuff to reduce the blowback from Amazon” or “at least brace themselves,” when preparing to publish op-eds she’s written.

See Effect, Chilling.

………

“I’ve heard about Amazon’s bullying from many journalists,” Mitchell says. “I sometimes ask reporters about it, and sometimes they bring it up off-handedly.”

………

Even accepting that less than ideal reality, Amazon seems to be doing something that goes beyond mere spin. Facebook, Google, or other tech giants’ softer pressure and prodding certainly don’t come with the best of intentions. But employing aggressive, intimidation tactics and playing word games that severely contort the truth clearly goes beyond the line, wherever it is.

I am not surprised.  The company was founded by a contemptible sociopath, and the company (Corporations are people, my friend) is a contemptible sociopath as well.

The Dog Ate My Homework

No Comments

So now, Amazon is blaming social media for the plague of false reviews on its site.

If they have the resources to dedicate to tracking their shoppers’ habits, and the resources to surveil and harass their employees at the slightest whiff of a unionization effort, they have the resources to fix this:

Amazon today said it can’t stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.

In a blog post, Amazon said its own “continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts” has led to “an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit 

fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services.”

Amazon doesn’t handle the fake review problem because they don’t want to.  Anything near a full accounting would reveal just how badly they are screwing their customers, and they make a lot of money by screwing these same customers.

That’s also why they are so lackadaisical about pursuing counterfeit product in their market.

It’s All of the “Gig Economy” Companies

1 Comment

Amazon just settled a lawsuit where it stole tips from its drivers.

The short version is, they used tip data to lower rates to drivers in specific areas.

This is the very epitome of how companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. use opaque algorithms to cheat their employees:

The US Federal Trade Commission on Friday announced the approval a consent order against Amazon that requires the company to pay $61.7m to resolve charges that for two and a half years it took tips intended for Amazon Flex drivers and concealed the diversion of funds.

………

The tech giant launched its Flex service in 2015, promising drivers – which it classified as independent contractors and referred to as “delivery partners” – that it would pay $18-25 per hour for the delivery of goods from Amazon.com, Prime Now (household goods), Amazon Fresh (groceries), and Amazon Restaurant (takeout).

Amazon’s ads made promises like, “You will receive 100 per cent of the tips you earn while delivering with Amazon Flex.”

However, during the period from late 2016 through August 2019, drivers – who, as independent contractors, paid for their own car, fuel, maintenance, and insurance – saw only a portion of the promised gratuity when customers opted to tip.

That’s because Amazon allegedly, without telling its drivers, shifted to a “variable base pay” rate, which varied by location, wasn’t disclosed to drivers, and was frequently lower than the promised hourly range.

“Under the variable base pay approach, for over two and a half years, Amazon secretly reduced its own contribution to drivers’ pay to an algorithmically set, internal ‘base rate’ using data it collected about average tips in the area,” the FTC complaint [PDF] explains.

………

To make up any difference between the base rate and the advertised minimum, Amazon is said to have used some or all of any tip left by customers to meet its payment commitment. For example, if Amazon set a base rate for a region at $12 and the customer left a tip of $6 via Amazon’s electronic tip collection system, then the company paid the driver only $12 and augmented the payment with the $6 tip, instead of paying the $18.

This is not enough.  People should be going to jail for this, and not just white collar prison.

This should be hard time in a hard prison, not just because of the scope and callousness of the theft, but because the threat of a few years in Terre Haute will get people to turn on higher ups in the operation.

They stole from thousands of their employees, and they did so knowingly, there are numerous internal emails detailing the reputational risk to Amazon.

Bat Boy Billionaire to Ride Giant Space Dildo

No Comments

Compensating for Something?

As you may have heard, Amazon chief and Bat Boy look-alike Jeff Bezos plans to be on the first manned manned flight of his Blue Origin booster.

I guess he thinks that having more money than God qualifies him as a test pilot.

You give an egomaniac enough money, and they think that they are Buckaroo Banzai:

Jeff Bezos has already selected a hobby for his post-CEO life: space travel.

Just two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon, Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.

“If you see the earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one earth,” Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram on Monday morning.

“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space.”

I want to go into space, but this desire is NOT strong enough for me to share a space capsule with Jeff Bezos.

Amazon is Evil, Part 12⁹

No Comments

I am not at all surprised that, Amazon’s warehouses have an 80% higher injury rate than the industry norm.

This is completely not a surprise:

Employees at US Amazon warehouses are injured at a higher rate than those doing similar jobs at other companies’ warehouses, a new report has found.

A union-backed study of safety data found Amazon workers had 5.9 serious injuries per 100 people – almost 80% higher than the rest of the industry.

The study’s organisers blamed Amazon’s “obsession with speed” as a main cause of the problem.

It is the latest in a string of controversies around worker safety. 

………

This new study comes from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of labour unions. It analysed workplace safety data reported to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2017 to 2020.

It found that “workers at Amazon warehouses are not only injured more frequently than in non-Amazon warehouses, they are also injured more severely”. 

………

And compared to its largest retail competitor Walmart, Amazon’s overall injury rate was more than double, at 6.5 per 100 employees compared with three.

An independent analysis of the same data by The Washington Post reached similar conclusions.

The Post conducted its own analysis of the OSHA data, and came to the same conclusions.

The Washington Postis owned by Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, so this qualifies as a statement against its own interest..

The SOC characterised the report as an “epidemic of workplace injuries”.

………

But technology news site Motherboard has this week published an Amazon warehouse pamphlet issued under the “working well” branding, which tells workers they should think of themselves as “industrial athletes”.

“Just like an athlete who trains for an event, industrial athletes need to prepare their bodies to be able to perform their best at work,” it warns.

“Some positions will walk up to 13 miles a day… [others] will have a total of 20,000lb (9,072kg) lifted before they complete their shift,” it said.

The pamphlet, from a Tulsa warehouse, also offers tips on health and fitness. It encourages exercise on days off, a good diet to fuel the 400 calories an hour the company expects employees to burn, and tips on buying shoes to fit swollen feet from the active working environment.

Amazon told Motherboard that the pamphlet had been created in error and removed – though the employee who gave it to the publication said it was available on-site for months.

So, it appears that Amazon thinks that its employees should be Olympians, and sets metrics accordingly.

Your Amazon order is literally being paid for with the blood of its employees.

It’s time to find another online marketplace.

New Amazon Union Drive in Staten Island

No Comments

What the song says

Following the union election loss at the Amazon Bessemer, Alabama warehouse, a union drive has been started at their Staten Island facility.

Hopefully, the union should learn lessons from what happened in Bessemer.

Specifically, don’t run a “Hot shop” effort, contact people out of work, and get in management’s face from the start of the campaign:

In some ways, Amazon workers’ more than yearlong struggle for adequate COVID-19 protections and against corporate retaliation at the company’s Staten Island facility in New York City helped pave the way for this month’s unionization attempt at the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse.

Now, as the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) seeks a second election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filing official objections Friday charging Amazon with engaging in illegal interference to defeat the union, Staten Island “JFK8” warehouse workers with The Congress of Essential Workers (TCOEW) tell Truthout they aren’t deterred by the outcome. Rather, their on-the-ground experiences in Alabama, where the unionization effort gained national attention but ultimately failed, have taught them hard lessons that will inform their own approach to unionizing JFK8.

………

TCOEW organizers say one thing they’ve learned is to take a slower, more cautious approach in order to build enough internal support within the large warehouse for an independent union. “We’re just trying to get all the pieces in order so that we do it effectively rather than just rushing into it,” Palmer says.

JFK8 has several advantages over Bessemer, they say. For one thing, the warehouse has been around longer, and TCOEW organizers have more direct experience at the facility and a good reputation and influence among the workforce. Moreover, New York is a union-friendly state.

Please, make Jeff Bezos’ life a living hell. 

Also, pass the PRO act.  It is good policy and good politics.

Damn

2 Comments

The union drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama failed. It failed spectacularly: 

Earlier today the National Labor Relations Board announced the results of the vote on whether workers at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., would join a union. The vote was 738 in favor to 1,798 against. It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.

The stories of horrific working conditions at Amazon are well-known. Long before the campaign at Bessemer, anyone paying even scant attention would be aware that workers toil at such a grueling pace that they resort to urinating in bottles so as not to get disciplined for taking too much time to use the facilities, which the company calls “time off task.” Christian Smalls was fired a year ago for speaking publicly about people not getting personal protective equipment in his Amazon facility, in bright-blue state New York. Jennifer Bates, the Amazon employee from the Bessemer warehouse, delivered testimony to Congress that would make your stomach turn. Workers at Amazon desperately need to unionize, in Alabama, Germany—and any other place where the high-tech, futuristic employer with medieval attitudes about employees sets up a job site of any kind. With conditions so bad, what explains the defeat in Bessemer?

Three factors weigh heavily in any unionization election: the outrageously vicious behavior of employers—some of it illegal, most fully legal—including harassing and intimidating workers, and telling bold lies (which, outside of countries with openly repressive governments, is unique to the United States); the strategies and tactics used in the campaign by the organizers; and the broader social-political context in which the union election is being held.

First, it needs to be stated that the legal and regulatory environment regarding unionization in the US has been hostile the labor unions since the passing of Taft-Hartley, but the organizers knew that.

I will add that Mike Elk at Payday Report has a very good analysis of what the organizers did wrong:

Today, the union drive at Amazon in Alabama, which drew unprecedented political and media attention, was defeated by a 2-to-1 margin.

………

In our interviews with workers, we discovered most workers held similar views to Beringer. It wasn’t that they hated unions, who were heavily against them, but that they didn’t know much about unions and didn’t feel they could trust them.

In winning union elections, the election feels like more of a formality since the organizing committee has already been acting as a union, winning campaigns in the workplace to change things and standing up for co-workers facing unfair disciplining.

Then, when the union election comes, workers feel like they already know the union and are a part of it. In massive facilities with thousands of workers like Amazon, the process of building a strong organizing committee and building trust in the organizing committee through concerted action can sometimes take years.

RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] had only started its campaign last June when outrage over unsafe working conditions during COVID was raw. While they had an outpouring of initial momentum and interest, they never developed a strong organizing committee that took the time to build trust through shop-floor action and organizing against the boss.

Instead, they rushed a union election or did what is known in union organizing as “hot shopping,” where union organizers hope to take advantage of an outburst of anger in a facility over things such as poor COVID working conditions to force and win and a quick union election.

A “hot shopping” campaign is were the unionization effort is driven by an immediate issue, think shootings of clerks at a store and management refusing to add security cameras, rather than a long term organizing effort.

This was a case of long standing issues and the philosophy of management, and the effort needed to deeper and broader

However, their initial union enthusiasm support collapsed under the weight of a sophisticated anti-union campaign by Amazon that combined threats of job loss with promises of improvement if workers rejected the union. Many workers in interviews that voted against the union, admitted that they knew little about unions. This allowed the company through anti-union meetings to create fear over the change that unions could bring, warning workers that their wages may actually decrease under a contract or worse that their facility may close.

………

Without a strong organizing committee already engaging the boss in shop-floor action, workers had no ability to see the potential upside of the union because they never got to see the union in action on the shop floor before being asked to vote on joining it.

(emphasis mine)

There are a number of people, including Mike Elk, suggesting that there are the seeds of victory in this loss, but I don’t see that.

If it were, many Walmarts around the nation would already be unionized.

The only people heartened by this development are Jeff Bezos and his Evil Minions™.

Amazon Fesses Up in Pissgate

No Comments

Amazon has been trolling its critics so unhinged lately that their own IT department thought that someone had hacked their Twitter account. 

This is because many public figures, indluding many leading lights in the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have been highlighting the brutal inhumanity of Amazon’s treatments of its workers, including allegations that the schedules for its drivers are so tight that they have no time to relieve themselves, and have to use pee bottles.

Amazon furiously denied those allegations, maintaining that they treat their employees well, and no one has to piss in a bottle to make quota.

Or rather, Amazon WAS denying those reports, but now they are saying that their earlier statements were inoperative:  Drivers were using pee bottles after all:

Amazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an “own goal” in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.

“We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed,” the company said in a blogpost.

Its admission came a week after the Wisconsin Democrat criticised working conditions for Amazon staff, saying in a tweet: “Paying workers $15 [an hour] doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles.”

Amazon responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

It subsequently walked back that comment.

………

Pocan tweeted that the company should acknowledge “the inadequate working conditions you’ve created for all your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionize without interference.”

Indeed.

Amazon is a horrible place, run by a horrible person, and if you buy from them, you are a co-conspirator.

I Hope That This Is Illegal

No Comments

Not that anyone will be prosecuted for it, because it is Alabama, but Amazon offering $2,000 “Resignation Bonuses” so that it can replace potentially pro-union workers with scabs ahead of the vote is skeevy as hell.

Bribes in union elections are expressly forbidden under the NLRA, and I am pretty sure that this is a bribe not to vote, particularly since they are giving the impression that they will hiring folks back after the union election: (Yeah, sure)

As the historic union election at Amazon in Alabama heats up, Amazon is pulling all the tricks to stop the union.

In violation of Amazon’s social distancing policy, Amazon has forced workers to attend anti-union meetings and sent workers constant text messages daily, hinting that a union could possibly lead to the warehouse closing. Amazon has even gotten the local authorities to shorten the time of stoplights outside of the plant so that union organizers can’t hand out pro-union literature to workers passing in their cars.

Now, Amazon is doing something that labor observers have never seen before in a union election; they are offering $2,000 “resignation bonuses” to quit.

Last night, workers throughout the plant received emails offering them bonuses if they simply quit their jobs. The emails offer workers, who worked for 2 peak seasons, at least $2,000 to quit. If workers have been there at least 3 peak seasons, they are offering them $3,000.

Some Amazon workers, who dislike their job at the warehouse, may find the bonuses a tempting bridge to quit their job and seek something better. Workers are even being told that if they quit now that they could regain their jobs later after the union election.

However, if workers quit now, they won’t be eligible to vote in the ongoing union election. In the meantime, many labor observers expect that Amazon will seek to hire replacements that will vote solidly anti-union.

“That should be illegal, how can you pay someone to resign,” says 48-year-old Black Amazon worker Jennifer Bates “They are going all the way, they are pulling out all the stops”.

Under federal labor law, the bonuses could be considered a bribe and could lead to the union election being thrown out. Employers are strictly forbidden from improving the material conditions of workers in the lead up to elections and the “resignation bonuses” could be grounds for the union to petition the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to order a new union election if RWDSU loses this round.

Keeping this in litigation for the next decade is a part of Amazon’s strategy.

You won’t stop this without frog marching senior executives out of corporate offices in handcuffs.