This Vice story is just part of the smear campaign.
Strategy:
“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
As applied:
“I was frustrated and upset that an Amazon employee would endanger the health and safety of other Amazonians by repeatedly returning to the premises after having been warned to quarantine himself after exposure to virus Covid-19,” he said. “I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.”
“I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.”
What a pathetic excuse from the General Counsel of one of the world's most powerful firms when caught engaging in employee retaliation. This isn't acceptable from any lawyer.
Better to make the world's worst excuse than lie in a way that'll instantly be revealed in discovery for any case that comes of this.
The surprise is that he let himself be reached for comment at all. Between that and the "yeah, I sure goofed it, huh?" style of what he said when he was, I wouldn't be too astonished to see a golden handshake eventuate in the fullness of time.
if you were cynical, you might say this is just yet another attempt at spin; to present himself as a relatable human (like "we all get angry, we all make mistakes", although note he didn't use e.g. angry, but "frustrated", "upset", and "emotions", vaguer and more passive options).
this could work, too, as long as you forget that drafting words seems to literally be his job (for which i'm sure he's handsomely rewarded).
Oddly, it reminds me of the way big banks handled Occupy movement. That was the first time I saw memes used as a carrier for straight propaganda. It was a sad moment for me. Mostly because having seen one of those memes, I immediately understood how terrifyingly effective they can be. Amazon has clearly learned a lot over the past few decades.
odd edit: Just in case. I was kinda doing a fair amount of shorts on Amazon lately, so my opinion is not unbiased.
You would be surprised how much you of what you see around you, you internalize.
The message sticks with you. Look at me. It has been years now and I just remember the message despite not remembering the exact words.
Just for that reason alone I was surprised/grateful, I did not see that great a push from ad industry to use memes yet. There are clearly some thinly disguised ads, but the various communities tends to weed them out fast.
Wait, are you saying this meme that you posted comes from the banks during the height of the Occupy movement? Or if not, how did their talking points / PR reach the undiscriminating masses and become this? I remember this meme, but always assumed it came from Apple-haters or unsophisticated Fox News types.
I am not saying that I know for a fact that this particular meme was concocted by a PR firm, blessed by an internal department and rolled out on imgur, 9gag, 4chan and anywhere else it could find fertile ground. I do not have access to that kind of records. That said, by now it is publicly available knowledge that lobbying firms were proposing ways to handle OWS(1).
I do remember it popping up in a lot of places with anti-OWS message and I just found it interesting in terms of timing and how the subject was basically designed to be hated at the time. Like I said, it is this meme template. I can't find the one with exact wording, which is why it got my attention back then. It does not help that I don't remember the exact phrase.
I will add as a general note that memes are ridiculously easy to create and disseminate en masse. You can obviously create metric ton of variants and see what sticks best. To your point, they can be done Fox News types, Apple-haters, dog-lovers, apple pickers, you name it and tracking its origin can be genuinely hard.
All I wanted to do was read the memo and I couldn't find the link. I'm not sure if I missed it or what but this is a common problem I run into on "news" sites. They quote (often out of context) parts of something but give no links to the actual source.
Supposedly so is the practice of using subtle variations in spelling, word choice, word order, spacing, typography, etc. to identify recipients of documents.
This is exactly what I worked on ~10 years ago at amazon, embedding steganographic information into a certain internal app that reported confidential sales numbers. Ended up catching the person who leaked this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/leaked-sales-data-puts-kin...
No guilt at all - mostly ambivalence. It was actually my idea to put it into the specific product, but it's not like I invented the technique or anything. It was only one small thing I worked on, 98% of my time was on something else.
I think the ability to leak information about the wrongdoing of corporations or governments is extremely important, but most of the leaks I see coming out of the tech industry seem designed just to score points in some internal political war or push the company in the direction that the leaker wants it to go. Or just for some weird form of self-aggrandizement
This is the difference between leaking and whistleblowing. Leaking is for one's own personal benefit. Whistleblowing is to expose something you feel is wrong for no personal gain.
I wouldn't call this a leak unless the news agency paid him or something else that benefited him.
What I worked on was more like a spreadsheet, so I didn't use any of the text-oriented steganographic techniques like replacing words with synonyms, etc.
I was able to develop enough variations that vastly outnumbered our users though, so even with just a portion of a screenshot, you could fairly easily figure out where it came from.
Just looking at possible CSS rules and you can see where the variations come into play - cell width, border width and styles, font color(e.g. the specific green or red that represents gain/loss), kerning, column placement , etc.
On top of that, I only fudged with display elements - the numbers were never changed. However, the numbers were updated on a near-continuous basis by ingesting various logs, so any column that was live(year/month-to-date, etc) would have only a very small time range where that number could have been displayed to the user.
For numbers like this, you can add a small amount of random variation to each number, and then save whatever variations you used to a database whenever someone views the stats.
Now when a leak happens of a specific number, you just check the logs to see who saw those exact numbers.
Word choice works best, assuming the source is textual; simple alternation of synonyms gives 2^n unique versions in the number of replacement candidates, and it's not hard to automate. You ideally want to take measures to reduce the likelihood of a given recipient seeing anyone else's copy and thus having a chance to spot the variance, but there are ways to do that and in most cases it's not all that likely in the first place.
On the other hand, news outlets that receive leaks are typically well aware of these techniques and will act to frustrate them. When you see a leak reported on but not directly published, that's why. If you want to evaluate veracity, a good method is to look at any response made by the source. In this case, it's legit; if it weren't, the Amazon GC would say so. He's not going to lie in a way that discovery will make
immediately obvious in any case that comes of this, so he made the world's worst excuse instead. The surprise is that he let himself be reached for comment at all - between that and the "yeah, I sure did goof it, huh?" style of what he said when he was, I wouldn't be too astonished to see a golden handshake eventuate in the fullness of time.
Are you making an argument for a news agency to never reveal the contents of any leaks, ever? There's always some risk involved, and that's the price of leaking the truth and expecting people to believe you. How can we expect people to "do their research" and be critical of information, when the news agencies themselves won't reveal it, and instead are paraphrasing and interpreting it for us? That's nonsense.
Its fairly common to embed canary trap into message to find out who the leeker is. Not saying this memo had one, but its generally no longer safe to just show redacted messages without compromising the source.
That's very much by design, in order to paint a certain picture, generate outrage, and ultimately clicks. Recall when the James Damore story was breaking? Many outlets like Motherboard (owned by Vice, authors of this story) circulated quotes and even modified documents that didn't show the full list of research references quoted by Damore, in an attempt to paint a certain picture.
Unfortunately this is the low bar set by a lot of modern journalism. We need a way out of it back to neutral, factual reporting.
Not OP, but it was my impression that quality journalism was generally the case in the 1980s (in the US at least). What I was reading then certainly seemed to be. Separation of church and state was taken very seriously.
These days, you can't start with the assumption that a story is written to J standards. Rather, you need to start with the assumption that it's pushing narrative, and hope to be surprised.
I think you should consider the possibility that the news wasn't necessarily any better just more people had faith in a few sources such as broadcast news and national papers, leading to less contention of the facts.
There definitely was bias then, but it was far more limited (with a few scandalous exceptions). As an example, TV news couldn't strongly push an agenda lest they risk losing their broadcast license. Mixing church and state at the NYT was a great way to get fired.
More personally, I took a J class during this period and wrote for a school newspaper. The instructor talked about J standards the way NRA instructors talk about gun safety--it was practically a religion.
These days, if you want facts, you have to plumb the cesspools of the right and the left and work it out for yourself.
You really don't think they teach the same high-minded stuff in journalism classes these days? I would bet you that if you sat in on meetings at the NYT or broadcast news outlets you would hear the exact same kind of intent as you attribute to them in yesteryear.
I could be wrong but I think the far bigger difference from then to today is not the quality of the journalism out of mainstream outlets but that the plethora of outlets available has removed the necessity of consensus myth making. Instead of a collected national myth that Americans share they can now choose their own myth.
They used to have to bend their views somewhat towards the major news because people seek to resolve their cognitive dissonance. Now they can change the channel. As an example, my parents are conservative and when Walter Cronkite criticized the Vietnam War and journalists put direct images of the conflict on TV they praised that. Yet when mainstream news which had generally backed the war in Iraq began to report on things going wrong there my parents were livid. When news outlets began reporting on soldiers dying and reading the names of the dead they were even angrier. Nevermind that the news was unable to air the kinds of direct footage of war they had in the 60s because the military had become much savier about the kinds of situations they let reporters into.
I think major news had almost the exact same, pro establishment, upper middle class ivy league bias it has today. I just think it's easier to confirm a contrary opinion. If Fox News existed in the sixties I think it would've run with slander stories about MLK for example and might've hampered Civil Rights. But they didn't exist and general regard for MLK as a hero became the default myth.
Again, I could be wrong but I think it's a perspective worth putting up against the common narrative.
I'm not sure. Simple mechanics like writing a good lede or headline seem to have almost disappeared.
And it seems to have become acceptable (on both left and right) for a news room to try to "get" a sitting President that they don't like, even if the result is sloppy journalism.
My impressions is that serious retractions (or worse, serious errors without retractions) are far more common now than thirty years ago.
As for MLK, even knowing what we do now, I still consider him a hero. But yeah, journalistic coverage of him back then was pretty uncritical.
Back in the day, news organizations could make money by just presenting the facts first ahead of any other news organization. Just being the first to collect and disseminate information was the key to success. Collecting and disseminating information is now a commodity and the way to be the first in front of someone to make money off add impressions requires virality, and the most clickbait biased content is how you produce profitable content.
Not saying that this problem never existed in the past, but it is far far worse now.
Go watch Walter Cronkite's reporting on the Kennedy assassination. He and his news room is just reporting the facts as they get them with no editorialization or agenda.
Back before collecting and disseminating information rapidly became a commodity. So basically before CNN approximately and definitely before blogs.
There's not a specific moment in time. There are specific innovations that accelerated and commodified the dissemination of facts, which each contributing to this decline in journalistic integrity and greater faithfulness to facts.
So is your gripe generally applies to all contemporary journalism or specifically with CNN and Fox News? Isn't it just as likely that legacy news sources are still doing the news pretty much the way they always have but that the availability of alternative sources has allowed people to diverge their opinion from a mainstream one more than they could before? (Which I'm not saying is good or bad. I think it likely has benefits and drawbacks.)
CNN is certainly doing things far differently than it did in the early days. It might not have been Reuters, but it was still quite neutral and of good journalistic quality. (These days it seems more reminiscent of Jerry Springer.)
There never was such a thing as neutral, factual reporting.
Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications.
The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism.
The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand.
Foreign Policy is another good example coming to mind.
News is produced by humans and humans have biases and always will have.
What's new is massive lying on an industrial scale and the fact that facts seem very relative nowadays, depending on the news medium.
See, I agree with everything up to that last sentence. Because from what I can tell most people who say that just have a different idea of which media outlets that are the problem.
I think in some respects we're better off now. An outlet like The Intercept couldn't exist 40 years ago. They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.
Our old media system had the benefit that it helped create a fairly singular truth for people to follow. But it created what I think was equal to the massive lying you are concerned about by just not reporting on lots of stuff.
> They have a clear bias but some of the stories they break are huge and are exactly the kind of thing the NYT in its heyday would've sat on.
I definitely agree that having a much larger ecosystem of news outlets is a big plus of the current era. One can almost watch the flow as things get leaked/scooped on obscure sites, and then often end up after a period of days/weeks/months on one of the "real" sites. (The Damore story and internal Google message traffic is an example.)
The downside is that it's a real grab bag of good stuff, junk, agitprop, and so on. In effect, we've all become journalists, in charge of sifting and verifying information to assemble a NPV story.
I know that the watergate scandal was in the 70's, but it's generally held to be a landmark of great investigative journalism. A few years ago, it came out that 'deep throat' was actually Mark Felt, a former FBI director with an axe to grind against Nixon. So this great demonstration of the power of a free press turned out to be actually a couple of ambitious journalists serving as the mouthpiece for a three-letter agency, and indeed, the FBI at that time (and Mark Felt especially) were a paradigm of overreach.
Which is kind of a depressing turn on what was once one of the American journalistic epics about the power of truth. Obviously it's hard to generalize, but it does seem to me that this is part of the advantage governments and companies see in a free press - it's a way to launder information, so you can be in every way obviously a rat, but have the voice of a trusted, independent organization.
I don't know if the watergate scandal was characteristic. Certainly, it's an extreme example. But if politicians and statesmen couldn't play journalists, why would they invite them to every occasion? If journalists were investigators in the sense that police are investigators - powerful people would quickly learn to shun them, just as criminals avoid every possible interaction with the police. Seems to me that investigative journalism is, in the final analysis, a way of giving credibility to a process that is at best haphazard and informal, and at worst, simple propaganda.
Unless, you were gay or an intravenous drug user. Then you got to hear journalists literally laughing along with the Reagan administration's jokular jokes about the disease that might kill you. Or you didn't because no one reported about that at the time.
That's a good point. I can't say whether we've ever hit the mark on that generally. However, old news broadcasts (you can find them on Youtube) do seem a lot less emotional and more neutral. They probably still had their biases; I am unsure. However, I feel like HN is often sources from outlets like Vox and Vice, both of which are recognized as having a strong bias (see https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings). We can at least do better, even if we can't be perfect.
There is as much bias in what you choose to report on as there is in the way you report it. For most of the mid-late 20th century major media outlets uncritically reported information stated by the White House and the military.
To do so without commentary or comparison to factual reality is a kind of bias but feels neutral because it doesn't create contention in an individual's mind. There are exceptions such as Cronkite's broadcast after the Tet Offensive which I am not lauding or criticizing here, only to say it was out of the norm.
Have you? That book was about how the pro-corporate media portray various regions & people so as to drum up support for war. This situation is roughly the opposite of that.
It's more generally about mass media and the manipulation of information to create a certain narrative. The same tactics of mass media can be applied to different agendas.
The quote from Zapolsky is especially funny, because it exactly follows the PR strategy outlined in the leak notes the paragraph prior. What an incredibly fake, dishonest person. Not really the best candidate to be calling a union organizer "not smart, not articulate".
I also think it's deliciously ironic that his description of someone as "not smart, not articulate" is in and of itself the way a dumb or inarticulate person would speak :D
articulate: "Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language"
That meaning is fine. What makes you think Zapolsky is wrong?
As far as I can tell this guy is a freaking PR genius. He managed to turn a leak into another chance to ram home his message.
The entire Vice article is ridiculous. People trying to organise a union smear their employers all the time, it's rather inherent in the task. Employers smearing back is now shocking behaviour? Double standards are rife.
What are the legal implications for Amazon from these revelations? I already know it's illegal to discourage union activity, but I'm curious about how this evidence affects the situation.
All of this evidence would have been found as part of discovery if there would have been real litigation, anyway, so I doubt it's going to be particularly painful for Amazon.
Amazon really could be just as big as they are without going down the Walmart route of being actively shitty / evil. It sucks that they're choosing not to do that.
The only way to beat Walmart is to out Walmart them. Overwork and underpay employees, find the cheapest products forgoing legitimacy/quality/etc. It's not very shocking this is where we are.
I know that that's the title of the article but I read the article and came away mostly thinking nothing was all that bad. Is it because the notes said the organizer isn't eloquent or smart that there is reason to be upset?
Not because they said the organizer isn't eloquent or smart, but because Amazon wants to make this person the face of the movement.
They're trying to make the whole movement look dumb by proxy, or that anyone who joined the movement is dumb because they're following a dumb guy. The public PR angle is that only a dumb stupid babbling person would deny the goodness that Amazon does for its employees and try to organize a walkout.
I think it's interesting the contrast with the SVP who said he let his emotions got the better of him. If the union guy says something not-smart, he's dumb and the whole movement is dumb. If the SVP says something not-smart, he was just trying to protect the workers.
Agreed with P that the dirty part is Amazon trying to smear an entire labor movement by focusing on this organizer. Ironically the strategy has completely backfired.
Agreed with GP that the other parts of the memo about obtaining and distributing masks don’t sound so bad at all, especially if they actually translate it into safer environments at warehouses and surrounding communities.
In general, I wish companies who want to avoid unions just treated their workers well enough that they don’t want to unionize — seems like the most straight up way to “fight” unions. It’s akin to simply improving your product to get more users instead of employing dark patterns or grey hat SEO.
I wish companies who want to avoid unions just treated their workers well enough that they don’t want to unionize — seems like the most straight up way to “fight” unions.
That's pretty clearly not the case. Unions aren't about being 'treated well' in so many cases, they're about granting power to the union organisers.
Look at Kickstarter. They got a union because they took down a project that was violating their own terms of service by fund-raising for political violence. The union organisers primary aim was literally to force Kickstarter to support violence against conservatives. Being treated well had nothing to do with it. Look at Google. A pampered workforce, talking of unionising to try and force the organisation even further to the left.
Smart managers fight unions with everything they've got, or else the most hard-left workers they've got will take over the company by force and subvert it to evil political ends.
How is this any different than the liberal media making Trump the voice of conservatives in the 2016? (which backfired spectacularly and led to his rise and eventual win in the election).
Before liberals downvote me. Conservative media does this too. In fact, journalism these days regardless of political views is riddled with making someone look bad to score cheap points. One of the most toxic more recent developments is taking particularly unflattering still images from high definition video to present someone as dumb, stupid, angry or any of the myriad emotions one might present in the course of existing while filmed.
Making your opponent look bad is sadly par for the course pretty much everywhere these days from politics to corporate PR to social media debates on facebook and twitter. Heck, you see it here on HN too these days. Certainly far more than in the past.
I seem to remember "liberal" media being quite obsessed with reporting on never-Trump and disaffected conservatives who were horrified by Trump. In so far as Trump is presented as the voice of conservatives it's because conservatives in the US have made him that by supporting him with absolutely insane approval ratings, no matter what he does.
Also complaining about downvoting usually just leads to downvotes...
Mm got the same feeling as well. You could even argue that amazon holds a function that is critical to society. Postal workers elsewhere still would have to work as well as Police officers. If say Postal workers in Finland who does basically the same work wanted to organize a strike, the laws of how and when you can have a strike would work against them.
I worked warehouse and factory jobs once. The good ones are unbelievably better and safer than the bad ones. I feel bad for everyone who was not able to find one of the good ones
If I could afford it, and if it really work, I'd be a vampire, too. Pay some young people to donate a bit of their blood to a facility, get a transfusion, and you might retain your youth for longer, with a longer quantity of life and longer + higher quality of life? I'm below 30 now, but I'd sign up for such a thing without hesitation even if it bankrupted me - if it truly works and is safe.
Of course it'll be many years or decades before we have any real clarity on that, but if it works, and if it's a negligible, non-risky amount of blood donated by each person which also isn't risky for the recipient, and if it can be afforded, it really feels very ignorant not to sign up, to me. They just need to lower the costs so ordinary people can easily partake as well, not just super wealthy people.
Wait, is this real? It seems deeply weird to me. I think they have a carve out for plasma, but surely selling your literal blood is illegal? If not, why can't people sell organs? I think this just introduces a sort of inequality that even American society can't stomach.
Yes, it's real. And yes, it's plasma, not blood. (It's just more sensationalistic to call it blood because then you get the vampire analogies and "blood boys" from the Silicon Valley show. I find it amusing, personally.)
Obviously giving away an organ is far more health-adverse than giving away a small amount of plasma. Unfortunately, lots of people already do donate plasma in exchange for money because they desperately need the money, and that's just for plasma that goes to sick people. In my opinion, if rich people are offering those same plasma donors 10x or more than the amount they'd get from donating to a typical blood bank, then it's at least a big improvement over the current situation. And hopefully they put limits and ID checks in place to ensure people never donate above a certain amount of plasma per day/week/month and risk their health.
Hopefully we'll one day be able to grow or synthesize the youth-preserving compounds in the plasma without requiring the donors.
>You ideally want to take measures to reduce the likelihood of a given recipient seeing anyone else's copy and thus having a chance to spot the variance, but there are ways to do that
How, exactly? If you know someone else received what you believe to be the same document, what's the disincentive?
Is it mostly a matter of attempting to not give away any indication of who else may have received it, so that no one knows who could be a candidate to compare with? Or including some amount of explicitly-marked data specific to the recipient which they somehow would have difficulty censoring before sharing?
I don't really see a problem here. It's not smearing, just PR strategizing. They think Smalls is going to hurt himself and his cause and they want to let him do that. (If he really did break 14-day isolation early it's going to work too.)
From the article itself, which quotes meeting notes written ostensibly by "Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky":
> “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,”
This statement from the notes is not accusing the former employee in question of anything, and it is not making false statements about him either. It is expressing an opinion. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Furthermore, this article and others from Vice, Vox, Huffington Post, and others are proving why Amazon does not want to explain for the "umpteenth time" what they are doing in response to the virus. There is only so much that can be done within the confines of a physical operation like an Amazon warehouse, and it is crucial that online stores keep operating at this time, so that shoppers stay home.
And yet, all these articles make it seem like Amazon has done nothing. In actuality, apart from providing industry leading wages for warehouse workers, Amazon has increased baseline pay, overtime pay, and enacted numerous reasonable changes to alter the operations of their warehouse. Vice buries one of the most interesting bits, which is how Amazon has been trying to get PPE but has had difficulties:
> Zapolsky’s notes imply the company’s attempts to purchase N95 masks from China fell through. “China has deemed N95 masks as ‘strategic,’” Zapolsky wrote. “They’re keeping them for optionality. They also want to use them for ‘diplomacy.’ The masks in China that we thought we had probably got redirected by profiteers.”
Even the "protests" outside Amazon's warehouses in response to this news story are overblown. For instance https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-chris-smalls-walko... notes that although activists claimed there were 50 employees protesting, the actual count was 15, and only 9 of those were Amazon employees. Yet mainstream left-leaning media keeps amplifying this story.
In actuality, it appears Amazon has been continuously attempting to improve working conditions, and were finally able to get masks based on orders they placed weeks ago - well before the recent social media / left-leaning journalists' attacks on Amazon began. See https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/02/amazon-begins-running-temp... for more on that:
> Amazon has already described some precautions it’s been taking, including mandatory paid 14-day quarantines for employees who test positive, as well as increased cleaning and sanitation efforts of facilities and infrastructure. The new measures to be introduced next week include taking temperatures of employees at the entrances to warehouses, with any individuals with a fever of more than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to be sent home, where they’ll have to have three consecutive days without fever to return to work. Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.
Lastly, everyone seems to ignore that this employee violated a direct work order to not come on site, because he had been in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Regardless of what people speculate about Amazon's reasons for firing this person, no one seems to be disputing that this employee violated a requirement to not come to the work site. That is clearly grounds for termination, irrespective of other considerations.
So can we please stop sharing these low quality articles over and over on Hacker News?
> Lastly, everyone seems to ignore that this employee violated a direct work order to not come on site...
Keep asking why. Why was this worker ordered to stay home. Was it because he had a brief, 5 minute contact with a covid-19 patient? Other news outlets say that Smalls was unique in his being sent home.
Or maybe was it because he was pushing for a union and the company wanted to find a way to keep him out. Given the article, the latter seems FAR more likely.
He had been complaining to management and organizing before that. Sending him, and ONLY him, home was a punishment under the guise of being quarantine. They did not quarantine any other individual that had contacted the same person he contacted of which there were dozens.
The arguments that Smalls was singled out and that it was already 18 days past his contact seem like notable things to look into further.
The "5 minute" contact argument doesn't make any sense to me, and only works to weaken his case. To my knowledge there is no minimum time requirement for virus transmission, so this argument comes across as naive.
The "5 minute" contact argument essentially boils down to "on that basis the entire facility should be shut down". For some reason it wasn't, and only the union organizer was sent home. How strange.
If five minutes of exposure is really that big of a threat - perhaps it is? - then why does Amazon care about their employees so much that they waited weeks to act and then only sent a tiny number of people home?
At the risk of making a generalization, it's interesting that political PR firms and/or workers from them tend to get companies in trouble. Recall that Facebook retained a republican PR firm that pushed anti-Soros conspiracies, for example.
Maybe the lesson here is that people who worked in politics/lobbying are not trustworthy and can be a liability to the integrity of your company if you hire them.
> Maybe the lesson here is that people who worked in politics/lobbying are not trustworthy and can be a liability to the integrity of your company if you hire them.
Well, if you give them very high paying jobs at weird companies you control through a few layers of obfuscation, it will look even more like you're paying them for services rendered.
He's an SVP at Amazon... what does being an "Obama-era staffer" have to do with him supporting the company currently paying his paycheck? Not to mention he was Press Secretary for Obama, played literally no role in policy.
The democrats are/were historically the pro-worker party. Yet here we have a major player from a recent administration managing a PR strategy opposing worker organizing efforts. It should make one question whether that party is still run by people who support workers.
But he wasn't a "major player" - he was a press secretary. While we can assume he's a Democrat, the role has nothing to do with policy and more-often-than-not is filled by someone who's just good at being a flak jacket. Scaramucci was Trump's Press Secretary - he also worked for the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
Claiming his current worldview is in any way reflective of the Obama Administration is a reach... at best.
Scaramucci was his comms director. Big difference. The position of press secretary is one of the most important in the West Wing (It's been diminished a bit in recent years, but there is absolutely a policy component).
It's part of the strategy of the far left to help push the Democratic Party further left by vilifying anything and everything associated with its party's center.
EDIT: Adding that I really can't see, otherwise, how it's relevant.
Carney stanning for a company trying to frame a black labor organizer with the “not articulate” dog whistle does enough of that work by itself. I don’t think they need any help from the “far left.”
Again, though, it's not really relevant that he worked as Obama's PR guy, right? I have no idea if he's dumb, this interview doesn't suggest so, but here's an interview[0] of him and he's definitely not particularly articulate in it. The concept of the "dog whistle" is pretty ridiculous. It makes it so that you literally can never have a black person be described as inarticulate regardless of reality. It's just another way to control speech.
>“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” wrote Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.
Never said he said it. I said he’s defending a company whose taking this line to discredit Smalls. Go read my post again and Carney’s Twitter feed if you need further clarification.
I know many good people work on tech at Amazon and that treating low-wage workers, organizing to defend their health and safety this way, is not something you all would embrace.
Now is your chance to organize and prove this is true. Google employees did it and so can you.
The definition of smear: "to damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander." Where is the 'smear ' here? Amazon has not made, or planned to make, false accusations against this worker.
The claim that he exposed employees to COVID is a transparently false accusation. His last time of exposure was well outside of the danger zone and Amazon waited until the last possible moment to quarantine him (and only him)
I listened to an interview with Smalls. He seemed perfectly intelligent and articulate to me. Demonstrably more than these people or his bosses, who put his coworkers in danger, while he’s trying to protect them.
It’s thus hard not to see attempts to frame him as “not smart” or “ not articulate” as classist and racist dog whistles intended to discredit a courageous man.
Racist dog whistle give me a break. All of this paranoia about hidden racists is just mind blowing. To me it seems as you have a problem with other "races", if you hear "not smart" or "not articulate" and immediately starts thinking of the color of someones skin.
not a term that is scientifically accepted when discussing humans
Referring to the way working class people talk (and especially working class black people) in this way is something the rich and powerful have always done to discredit them. Go read all the blood spilt by right-wing hacks about the “legitimacy” of AAVE, for example.
If you want to be a credulous dupe and think that the richest man in the world and his highly-paid PR team don’t understand this history and context, be my guest.
Strategy: “We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
As applied: “I was frustrated and upset that an Amazon employee would endanger the health and safety of other Amazonians by repeatedly returning to the premises after having been warned to quarantine himself after exposure to virus Covid-19,” he said. “I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.”