[rochester46]

Amazon has nearly a million employees. The gist of your comment is valid, but firing two people (or even two hundred people) out of a million doesn't even come close to meaning that they have an antagonistic relationship with its workforce in general.

[seanmcdirmid]

These are tech workers, whose relationship with the company is different from warehouse or retail workers, so the number is more like 60-80k.

[ajross]

Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies, and it's almost always news when they do. A general sense of shared cause and cameraderie is part of the way the industry is "supposed" to work, and part of that is a culture of reasonably open discussion of this stuff.

But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union. And in the process their alienating their engineering class too.

[rochester46]

You're speaking broadly about how a lot of stuff should be while ignoring how stuff actually is.

>Normally tech employers don't fire people for complaining about company policies

I've worked in tech for a long time, at a lot of different companies, and consulted for many more. Tech employers fire people all the time for complaining about company policies. You just don't hear about it because...

>and it's almost always news when they do

No, it's really not. When some 20 person startup lets someone go because of a disagreement, it doesn't appear in WaPo. It does happen whenever Amazon or FB or Google are involved because those are big names. But just because you don't see it in the news when every other tech company does it, does not mean it isn't happening.

>A general sense of shared cause and cameraderie is part of the way the industry is "supposed" to work, and part of that is a culture of reasonably open discussion of this stuff.

This sounds wonderful and ideal, but I've never experienced this at any of the tech companies I've worked at, even the big name Silicon Valley ones.

>But Amazon can't have that now, because the only resolution that they can see here is either victory or complete capitulation to a hostile union.

The world isn't this black and white. I assure you from talking with my friends at Amazon that there is plenty of open discussion about the working environment, while also plenty of satisfaction and happiness with their job. And a couple of particularly outspoken people being fired hasn't changed that in the past, and I strongly doubt will change it now.

[cactus2093]

You didn't address the comment you're replying to at all.

Normally, tech employers don't have many hundreds of thousands of employees. You'll always be able to find anecdotes to support any narrative you want when you're looking at that big of a workforce.