Tim Bray, Early Internet Guru, And Amazon VP Quits Over The 'Chickenshit' Company's Targeting Of Employees Speaking Out About COVID-19

from the good-for-him dept

If you do anything internet related, hopefully you already know Tim Bray. Among tons of other things, he helped develop XML and a variety of other standards/technologies the internet relies on. He's also been a vocal and thoughtful commenter on a wide variety of issues, especially in the tech policy space. For the past five years he's been working at Amazon as a VP and Distinguished Engineer -- but as he's announced he has now quit in protest over the company's retaliation against workers who were speaking up over the company's handling of their working conditions during the pandemic. Bray gives some of the background of workers organizing and speaking up about their concerns, and then discusses the company's reaction (firing the vocal ones and offering lame excuses).

Warehouse workers reached out to AECJ for support. They responded by internally promoting a petition and organizing a video call for Thursday April 16 featuring warehouse workers from around the world, with guest activist Naomi Klein. An announcement sent to internal mailing lists on Friday April 10th was apparently the flashpoint. Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, two visible AECJ leaders, were fired on the spot that day. The justifications were laughable; it was clear to any reasonable observer that they were turfed for whistleblowing.

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Bray does not mince words about how terrible he thinks this response was, and even includes "some descriptive phrases you might use to describe the activist-firing."

1. “Chickenshit.”

2. “Kill the messenger.”

3. “Never heard of the Streisand effect.”

4. “Designed to create a climate of fear.”

5. “Like painting a sign on your forehead saying ‘Either guilty, or has something to hide.’”

Tim notes that while he does believe that the company has been "putting massive efforts into warehouse safety" the workers' own testimony can't be ignored either -- and that firing workers for speaking out and trying to make things better is exactly the wrong response.

Firing whistleblowers isn’t just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It’s evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison.

For reasons beyond just the coinage of the phrase, I find it especially interesting that Bray made the Streisand Effect comparison. Amazon has a history of somewhat ruthless employee practices, but straight up intimidation of a workforce speaking out for their health and safety in the midst of a pandemic, when they're more essential than ever... seems just insanely short-sighted and self-destructive. Hopefully, Bray taking a stand and quitting his job makes someone wake up within the company that this is the exact wrong approach.

While Amazon may be right that its warehouse workers have the short end of the power-balance stick, the company is still deep in competition for engineering talent. Bray quitting so publicly and with such clarity of purpose may certainly make a number of top engineers whom the company would like to hire think that they may feel better about their souls by choosing to work elsewhere.

On a separate note, Bray points out that the Guardian, somewhat bizarrely for a major publication like this, simply reprinted his entire blog post without first asking him:

Tim does have a CC BY-NC 2.0 license on his blog, where the post was originally made, but it's not clear whether the Guardian's use would really be considered "non-commercial." Of course, for years we've called out the vagueness associated with what is and what is not "non-commercial" use, but the Guardian is at least on a very thin borderline. I find it somewhat surprising that it chose not to at least ask before publishing it. At the same time, the Guardian has tremendous reach, and if the most important part to Tim is getting his message out, the Guardian is not a bad way to do it.

Update: Tim took out his list of descriptive phrases after someone suggested it was too far. We'll be leaving them in this post. Separately, he notes that the Guardian took down their post and apologized, and he seems content with this outcome.

Filed Under: covid-19, employees, organizing, streisand effect, tim bray, warehouse
Companies: amazon

Redditors Propose Setting Up A 'Consumers' Union' To Fight Back Against Broadband Giants

from the rethinking-collective-bargaining dept

A random factoid about my past that some people don't know is that I have a degree in "industrial and labor relations," which involved an awful lot of learning about the history of unions, collective bargaining and the like. While I firmly believe that most unions today are counterproductive (frequently holding back innovation and flexibility), the idea certainly made quite a lot of sense in the early days, in which you had parties (giant employers) with near total market power over employees who had absolutely no market power. Basically, many companies were market abusers, and they abused freely. Organizing workers for collective bargaining was a way to even the playing field slightly. That it later resulted in vast amounts of corruption and cronyism, let alone hindering the way in which companies could innovate and adapt, are certainly big issues to be concerned about -- but there were reasons why that happened as well (driven by leadership on both sides).

But, still, when you have a vast mismatch in market power, with one side being an effective monopoly, and the other side being dispersed among many people, there is a certain appeal to collective bargaining. And that appears to be the root appeal of an idea percolating over on Reddit right now for an ISP Consumers Union, inspired by a Reddit comment from a few days ago. The basic thinking is that if the FCC and Congress aren't all that interested in preventing big broadband company fuckery, then perhaps the consumers should take it into their own hands, join forces, and negotiate as a unified force with the ISPs. A bunch of folks have jumped into the discussion and are talking about a variety of different facets, from what the "union" would have the power to do to the legal issues to the administrative aspects of the whole thing.

There's something profoundly interesting about this from a few different angles. I have no idea if something like this will actually come together for real, let alone work, but the effective "market conditions" do match those that led to the rise of organized labor, with a few "monopolists" abusing their power to treat people (in that case, workers, in this case, broadband subscribers) poorly. The situation is certainly not identical, but there are parallels. Broadband access today is certainly considered by many to be as important as a job a century ago. In fact, many consider it essential to having a job. And, yet, there remain very few broadband providers and the big ones all have pretty long histories of abusive practices. That said, the "abuses" certainly pale in comparison to the way that big oil and steel companies treated workers in the late 19th century, but it's not a completely crazy concept.

Would people care enough to make a difference? And what legitimate bargaining power would they have? People could "strike" by cancelling their service. Or they could organize to move en masse to a competitor -- if there is a competitor. The whole concept is undeniably fascinating. While I'd still worry about the same ills that later plagued (and still plague, though not always to the same levels) organized labor, one would hope that with some knowledge of what went wrong there, an ISP Consumers Union could avoid some of those pitfalls. Frankly, the biggest problem with unions (and, again, this was often driven by company management) was viewing "management" and "labor" as being diametrically opposed forces, rather than different parties with different needs but an overall focus on a similar goal. That is, even when labor hated management, driving a big company out of business entirely was certainly worse than figuring out ways to get things done. The problem was that the two sides were often so antagonistic, that bargaining itself became a war of spite, rather than each side understanding the overall issues, and working out compromises so that everyone could be better off.

It's entirely possible that an ISP Consumer Union could eventually be plagued by similar issues -- making unwarranted demands on broadband providers that make it impossible for them to remain in business. But, as a way to hack around the current (failed) politics of net neutrality, and present an alternative option, one that is much more bottom up than top down, is absolutely fascinating.

At the same time, it's also profoundly depressing that broadband consumers of today have that much in common with laborers at the dawn of the industrial revolution...

Filed Under: broadband, collective bargaining, fcc, isps, labor history, market power, monopolies, organizing, unions

What's Illegal About Using Twitter To Organize Protests?

from the someone-please-explain dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in various versions of the story of a guy (described as an "anarchist") who was allegedly arrested for using social media tools like Twitter to organize protesters at the recent G20 Summit in Pittsburgh. The specific charges are for "hindering prosecution," but it seems like there must be some details missing. All around, the whole thing sounds pretty extreme. What's illegal about organizing protesters?

Filed Under: arrested, g20, organizing, protests
Companies: twitter