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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 days

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Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #unions #coventry #amazon #union busting #qr codes #foxglove #one click to quit the union #labor #gwb

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b3aches · 9 months

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Companies That Union-Bust Must Now Automatically Recognize Union, NLRB Rules

The National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling on Friday that changes the framework for unionizations, making it easier for workers to organize and harder for companies to fight back against them. The new process comes as part of a decision in the case between Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, where the Board found that the employer had committed over 20 “instances of objectionable or unlawful misconduct” between the filing of the union election petition and the election itself, intending to dissuade workers from organizing.

#NLRB #national labor relations board #union #labor unions #union strong #union busting #cemex construction materials pacific #teamsters #international brotherhood of teamsters #teamsters union

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whatbigotspost · 1 year

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Lil update (11/28/22) on Amazon and union busting…

From Instagram

#Amazon #unions #unionization #union busting #solidarity forever #solidarity #alcohol cw

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dispatchesfromtheclasswar · 8 months

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#class war #class warfare #classism #unions #pizza party #capitalists #bosses #union busting #pizza parties

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reasonsforhope · 8 months

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Version that doesn't require sign-in.

"Hot Labor Summer just became a scorcher.

[On August 25, 2023], the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith [a.k.a. immediately] into bargaining.

The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.

Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing possible again, after decades in which unpunished employer illegality was the most decisive factor in reducing the nation’s rate of private-sector unionization from roughly 35 percent to the bare 6 percent at which it stands today...

“This is a sea change, a home run for workers,” said Brian Petruska, an attorney for the Laborers Union who authored a 2017 law review article on how to effectively restore to workers their right to collective bargaining enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which was all but nullified by the act’s weakening over the past half-century. Taken together, Petruska added, last week’s decisions recreate “a system with no tolerance for employers’ coercion of their employees” when their employees seek their legal right to collective bargaining...

Since the days of Lyndon Johnson, every time that the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to put some teeth back into the steadily more toothless NLRA. But they’ve never managed to muster the 60 votes needed to get those measures through the Senate. The Cemex ruling actually goes beyond much of what was proposed in those never-enacted bills."

-via The American Prospect, August 28, 2023

Note: I didn't include it because the paragraphs about it went super into the weeds, but the reason all of this is happening is because of the NRLB's general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was appointed by Biden. In fact, according to this article, this "secures Abruzzo’s place as the most important public official to secure American workers’ rights since New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who authored the NLRA in 1935." Voting matters

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allthecanadianpolitics · 4 months

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Indigo is closing a beloved Chapters bookstore in Scarborough in a move that has employees and regulars alike accusing them of union busting. The Chapters at Kennedy Commons is not only the largest bookstore in Scarborough and one of the best Indigo locations in the city, it's one of three unionized Chapters locations in Toronto. According to Indigo (which owns Chapters), the decision to shutter the business was merely a fiscal one. In a statement to CBC Toronto, they suggested that the location's profitability wasn't up to par. But employees of the location, as well as some locals, aren't buying it. For some, the company's decision to close this specific location doesn't add up, leading to accusations of union busting from the store's employees and supporters.

Tagging @politicsofcanada

#cdnpoli #canada #canadian politics #canadian news #ontario #union busting #chapters bookstore #support locally owned bookstores and libraries #boycott indigo

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robertreich · 9 months

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It’s Time to Roast Starbucks For Union Busting

Starbucks should be getting publicly roasted for union busting and refusing to even negotiate with unionized workers.

You see, if there’s one thing I love more than coffee, it’s unions. Because unions perk up pay.

And if there’s one thing I hate more than corporations who try to bust unions, it’s having to make my own coffee every morning.

I may be known for a lot of things, but making a good cup of coffee isn’t one of them.

I was thrilled to hear about workers in Starbucks’ stores across the country exercising their right to unionize.

A cup of solidarity brewed by a unionized barista? What could be better than that?

Definitely not me being my own barista.

Starbucks is a multibillion dollar company. Its new CEO will start with a pay package estimated to be worth over $28 million dollars. That’s roughly 800x the pay of the workers who actually brew and serve the coffee the business is built on — and who barely earn a living wage.

That’s why those workers have begun to unionize.

Since December 2021, Starbucks Workers United has won union elections in more than 300 Starbucks stores, covering more than 8,000 workers and counting.

And most of the union campaigns in individual stores won by overwhelming margins, gaining more than 70% of the total votes — and in parts of the country where private sector unions rarely win.

The Starbucks union campaign has inspired young workers across the country and breathed life into a U.S. labor movement that has been stagnant for decades.

It’s been so successful that Starbucks briefly brought its former CEO, billionaire Howard Schultz, out of retirement to bust the union, and still refuses to even sit down at the bargaining table.

That’s why I’ve been boycotting Starbucks.

As part of its campaign to tamp down further unionization, Starbucks corporate has fired scores of pro-union workers, closed stores that have unionized, threatened to withhold wage and benefit improvements from stores considering unionizing, and packed stores with outside managers to undermine organizing efforts.

The National Labor Relations Board, which oversees all union elections in the U.S., has issued more than 93 complaints covering 328 unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks — and ordered reinstatement of at least 23 fired workers so far.

Yet Starbucks is unwilling to change its anti-union ways — even though Schultz was grilled in front of Congress

Starbucks claims to be a “progressive” company.

But based on the way it’s broken labor law and put unionized workers in the percolator, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Now is an opportunity for all of us to make our voices heard and to tell Starbucks to stop UNION BUSTING and bargain in good faith with Starbucks Workers United.

And it’s time for Joe Biden, who calls himself the “most pro-union president in American history,” to send a powerful message: we won’t tolerate union-busting by Starbucks or any other corporation — including Elon Musk’s Tesla and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.

Otherwise, my boycott will continue — and perhaps you’ll consider joining me.

If we want to brew a future where workers have power and dignity, then we need to show solidarity with unions…

And stand up to corporate bullying.

#youtube #unions #corporations #politics #business #union busting #Gen Z #video #videos #starbucks #coffee #Joe Biden

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scavengedluxury · 2 years

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“This was a criminal offence, now it’s an option for business”.

What a disturbing sentence. The Tories legalising scabs.

Join a union.

#uk politics #union busting #employment rights #tory scabs

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msfbgraves · 8 months

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Seeing a lot of: "The selfish strikers are hurting the crew members 😥😫😭" takes on Tumblr suddenly.

Well hello AMPTP PR team!

If the retraction of your labor did not hurt anyone, strikes would be absolutely useless. An industry is supposed to suffer from a retraction of labor, to show the value of that labor. And that is exactly why nobody ever starts a negotiation there. Every negotiation goes: "I offer something against fair compensation. When not fairly compensated, I will retract my labor, with us both knowing full well that people are going to suffer. So let's not. Pay me fairly for all our benefits. You reap huge rewards from this labor. That comes with the responsibility of good stewardship." If they say: "Nope, I am unwilling to compensate you fairly," the "and I don't care who the hell suffers for it" goes without saying.

That suffering is supposed to be a pressure on the bosses, as their refusal to pay fairly is what causes it. What they're now doing is saying the strikers cause it, as if that action wasn't a response to them not taking responsibility.

Do you honestly think that the same people who want to squeeze writers and actors care a single fuck for the wellbeing of the crew?! The AMPTP is causing that pain and could end it with a 10th of what WB alone has already lost in revenue. But no they want to alleviate the pressure of the collatoral damage of their refusal by scabbing (lessening the pain for their consumers), and setting the workers against each other. Oh, it's not my fault for screwing my workers over, which hurts you! It's their fault for not letting me do it without a fight! They're so mean!

When this could all be resolved - already is being resolved! - by simply giving in to very reasonable demands! People, including crew, who have made agreements with the unions are in fact working!

Say some footballer was harassing someone and got kicked back so hard they couldn't play. If the game is cancelled because of that, do you say: well, they should have just let themselves be hurt so I don't suffer? Or do you say: that asshole footballer is letting us all down by not taking responsibility that comes with their position and being an awful person? Even a toddler knows who is at fault in that situation. But if I have to spell it out: it's the person that starts being awful when it is in their power not to be, and when in fact they had every chance not to be. It's the footballer kicking someone for no reason. It is the AMPTP who wants to exploit and underpay people and screw over consumers by only giving them AI crap, which was trained on stolen work, the copyright of which they don't own and never offered to pay for.

People suffer because the AMPTP won't agree not to hurt people. This stops - and has already stopped in some cases - the second they agree to a reasonable deal with inbuilt protections.

The AMPTP knew in rejecting these terms that they would throw the crew under the bus. They didn't give a shit as long as they could retain the power to exploit people.

I bet they are paying the PR people more than they're refusing to pay the unions to not have to come to an agreement, knowing full well how much that is costing not just the crew but the entire economy of California.

If I were a Californian representative, I would call Zaslav, Iger and Lombardini and pressure them to stop fucking over the entire state!

#wga strike #sag aftra strike #wga solidarity #Wga #union busting #fuck the amptp #They know Tumblr is a stronghold of support #Don't let them trick you into blaming the victim #victim blaming #We are too smart for that

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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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Half-Price Books, stop jerking your union around!

The booksellers at Half Price Books achieved union recognition in January 2022, but their employer still won't give them a contract.

That's a scummy way for a "family business" to treat hardworking booksellers, who are seeking a living wage - and are being offered a real-terms pay cut instead.

Booksellers can't live on love of literature - they need to pay rent, buy groceries and support their families. Half Price, give HPB Workers Unite the contract they deserve!

#half price books #half price books workers united #jennifer abruzzo #nlrb #thrive pet care #union busting #unions #labor

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wgaaudio · 5 months

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Mailchimp is union busting! If you have a second to send them a quick email (this form will write it for you), it would be deeply appreciated!

#wga #audio drama #audio fiction #mailchimp #union busting

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odinsblog · 3 months

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🗣️ Please pay attention

Amazon argues that national labor board is unconstitutional, joining SpaceX and Trader Joe’s

Amazon is arguing in a legal filing that the 88-year-old National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional, echoing similar arguments made this year by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the grocery store chain Trader Joe’s in disputes about workers’ rights and organizing.

The Amazon filing, made Thursday, came in response to a case before an administrative law judge overseeing a complaint from agency prosecutors who allege the company unlawfully retaliated against workers at a New York City warehouse who voted to unionize nearly two years ago.

In its filing, Amazon denies many of the charges and asks for the complaint to be dismissed. The company’s attorneys then go further, arguing that the structure of the agency — particularly limits on the removal of administrative law judges and five board members appointed by the president — violates the separation of powers and infringes on executive powers stipulated in the Constitution.

The attorneys also argue that NLRB proceedings deny the company a trial by a jury and violate its due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment. (source)

ICYMI, this is a case of corporations going, “7th Amendment Protections for me, but not for thee.”

It is strongly worth noting that in 2018 the John Roberts Court ruled 5-4 that companies can use forced arbitration clauses to stop people from joining together to fight workplace abuses - in effect denying individuals their 7th Amendment protections.

Subsequently, binding arbitration clauses used by corporations has proliferated; sneaking into all manner of common legal documents: personal banking applications, ordinary car loan applications, furniture purchases, and more. This is, unsurprisingly, a direct violation of the 7th Amendment that guarantees HUMAN BEINGS AND PEOPLE the right to a jury trial in certain civil cases and inhibits courts from overturning a jury's findings of fact. Republicans and SCOTUS are perfectly okay with corporations having more rights than workers and using forced arbitration to block people from having access to jury trials—but God forbid if corporations don’t have their right to a jury trial.

This legislative push to bestow corporations with more rights than people, while simultaneously taking away rights from human beings, has been nothing if not thoroughly and methodically done. At this rate, no corporation will ever need to fear a class action lawsuit again.

Amazon, SpaceX and Trader Joe’s are union busting.

But this latest case against the NLRB isn’t just an attack on labor and worker’s rights, it’s a fascistic attack on the very heart of fairness and democracy itself.

#politics #amazon #7th amendment #forced arbitration #spacex #trader joes #nlrb #workers rights #class action lawsuits #labor unions #union busting #collective bargaining #labor law #labor rights #scotus #john roberts court #john roberts #republicans are evil

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