Seeing this on CNBC really makes me happy that it's getting some actual coverage. I hope having someone who isn't just a wagie quit in protest will make others at Amazon come to terms with their employer, and acknowledge their practices.
If you are very idealistic I would recommend working for a smaller company that aligns with your values. It is naive to join a company like Amazon or Google and imagine it is some progressive utopia. These are mega corps, and in my imagination I see them like The Empire from Star Wars, and you will be a storm trooper on the death star - just one worker among many. You will be on the winning team, well compensated, and destroying your competition. But don't pretend you aren't employee #517384 even if you are a higher-ranking manager. Darth Vader will still strangle you if you get in his way.<p>All that being said, I would still consider working for the empire, just as in the past I can envision myself working for a major European military power or the Dutch East India Company, or like ancestors of mine who worked for Standard Oil and AT&T. Amazon and Google are the big corporate powers of today and your silly blog posts about unions won't stop them.
Amazon needs to stop internally framing labour dispute problems as PR problems. Huge respect to Tim Bray for walking the walk in defence of his values, something I've only rarely seen from high-earning people with left-wing sentiments.<p>My own sense of the situation (and I could well be wrong) is that Amazon is not a particularly bad place to work as a warehouse worker (they after all employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled people at $15/hr, no mean feat), but that they have a justifiably high exposure to the press for their workplace practices due to their scale.<p>I think that this is why some middle-management jobsworths think it best to fire activist workers rather than address their issues. It's those managers who should be out of a job now, not Tim Bray. I feel Tim's railings against 21st century capitalism and praise for France for their bare-faced protectionism are misplaced, but understandable under the circumstances.
I think it would have been more effective if he just 'called in sick' (if that was possible for him) or staged an extended walkout of engineers. I have all my infrastructure on AWS and the prospect that it could all come to a halt immediately and unexpectedly makes me think of other providers or at least spreading my workoad to azure, google, etc.. and that should get Amazon's attention.<p>I really don't think a single top level engineer voting with his feet will have any measurable impact technically or financially on amazon.
In my opinion, it won’t do anyone any good for him to quit “in solidarity with” the fired workers. If he wants the situation to improve, he should remain VP and use his power to help make things better. Now he‘ll probably just be replaced with someone who is less sympathetic to the workers.