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by aqme28 2271 days ago
It raises the question of how to protest in the age of quarantine.

I agree that breaking quarantine is bad, but let's look at his side of this. Amazon has the ability to shut down any protest or picket by alleging that an attendee was sick, or that a strike organizer was exposed.
2 comments
claudeganon 2271 days ago
Here’s a tip: all the WFH employees should strike in solidarity with the workers until the company agrees to meet their demands. It’s easy, coordinate with your peers and just don’t login and tell your boss you won’t until they fix the situation.

Corporate employees have never had more leverage than they do right now.

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karatestomp 2271 days ago
It’s really easy to stop labor action without at least very strong solidarity-sentiments and community, if not legal protection. Otherwise all you do is start firing a person or two a day and let everyone else know their name is in the hat for tomorrow unless they get back to work.
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claudeganon 2271 days ago
Sure, but this is what labor organizing has been threatened with since the beginning of wage labor and they’ve still won lots and lots of victories.

Google employees organized largely online, internally and did just this. And the situation at Amazon for low wage workers is arguably worse.

If workers at Amazon are legitimately motivated to do this, there’s not much that can stop them. Also, firing workers on top of workers for organizing tends to not play out very well in the courts and Amazon HQ people are well-paid enough to find good lawyers.

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tenpies 2271 days ago
It also honestly becomes a matter of national security.

Amazon is crucial right now in maintaining social order. It's one thing to be quarantined at home, but to be quarantined without anything arriving to your house is a quick recipe for riots on the streets. Anyone or anything disrupting this is potentially as dangerous as a famine.

I 100% sympathize with the protestor's plight, but it's an interesting situation.

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ceejayoz 2271 days ago
> to be quarantined without anything arriving to your house is a quick recipe for riots on the streets...

Target, Walmart, grocery stores, etc. all are able to do curbside pickup and in many cases deliveries via stuff like Instacart.

Amazon isn't the only option.

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mynameisvlad 2271 days ago
Instacart and Whole Foods employees were also striking at the same time.
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ceejayoz 2271 days ago
Whole Foods is part of Amazon, and there are lots of competing grocery stores.

Instacart is not the only game in town, either.

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lapnitnelav 2271 days ago
Maybe it's the perfect time to highlight how critical the job those people are doing is?

Amazon isn't exactly a champion of taking care of your employees, so yeah, you go guys.

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SolaceQuantum 2271 days ago
This may be a bad interpretation but-

If a company functioning is a matter of national security, it should be significantly more controlled by the nation.

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amazoniancrooks 2271 days ago
This is a rather massive exaggeration. Amazon isn't the sole distributor of goods, it's certainly not too big to fail.
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sudosysgen 2271 days ago
If the company is so essential that strikes by its employees are too dangerous, then it should be nationalized both in the interest of the nation and to prevent conflict of interest.

Having a private company and having it's employees banned from striking is really contradictory ideologically and dysfunctional. If a company is private, then the employees should be able to have their private right to strike.

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Turing_Machine 2271 days ago
If anything like that occurred, I would expect Trump to quickly invoke the Taft-Hartley Act and order the workers back on the job, replacing them with the National Guard if they did not comply.

It's been done before, numerous times.

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Turing_Machine 2269 days ago
Ah, yes. "Make the inconvenient facts go away".

The Taft-Hartley Act has been around for a long, long time. Among other things, it gives the President power to order workers in an essential industry back on the job if they strike.

I wasn't able to quickly find the current total number of times it's been invoked, but here's a WaPo article about Jimmy Carter using it in 1978. Even at that date, it had been used 34 times.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/03/07/p...

I learned about this stuff in history class. Did you not? If not, perhaps you should ask yourself why that is.

And maybe you should ask yourself what exactly you're accomplishing by downmodding factual, noninflammatory comments just because you don't like the facts.

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