Not surprised. Tech companies (Facebook and Google in this case, and probably others) have been known to retain Pinkerton agents to monitor employees. Yes, <i>those</i> Pinkertons.<p>“Among other services, Pinkerton offers to send investigators to coffee shops or restaurants near a company’s campus to eavesdrop on employees’ conversations.”<p><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-never-sleep" rel="nofollow">https://newrepublic.com/article/147619/pinkertons-still-neve...</a>
This does not surprise me. I've been waiting to see corporate intelligence agencies pop up. When you think about it, Amazon had an operating budget last year of around $309 billion [1], already 75% of Germany's at $399 billion [2]. Facebook has an operating budget of around $35 billion, but that is still enough to field a small intelligence arm. Also, that is Facebook..not all Facebook properties combined.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/operating-expenses" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/operat...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-passes-record-budget/a-51463550#:~:text=The%20total%20German%20state%20budget,Bundestag%20chamber%20during%20Friday's%20debate" rel="nofollow">https://www.dw.com/en/german-parliament-passes-record-budget...</a>.
Beyond the creepiness of the tasks required, what sticks out to me is the persistent use of Amazon-specific jargon:<p>> Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders)<p>Does anyone who doesn’t work at Amazon know what “L7 + ER Principals” means?<p>Perhaps these are universally understood terms in some fields, but my guess is that the “error” was posting this publicly, and it was meant to be an Amazon-internal job posting.<p>Sometimes, for legal reasons, these sorts of jobs are required to be posted publicly, but not in a way that makes the underlying content clear to anyone [0]. So another possibility is that the mistake was posting the job with too many specifics.<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21851281" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21851281</a>
The relevant excerpts from the job listings:<p>>Analysts must be capable of engaging and informing L7+ ER Principals (attorney stakeholders) on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company, establish and track funding and activities connected to corporate campaigns (internal and external) against Amazon, and provide sophisticated analysis on these topics<p>>Analysts must be capable of creating and deploying sophisticated search strings tailored to various business interests and used to monitor for future risk; Engaging business leaders (L6+) directly is core to this support, and may cover topics including organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders.<p>>Analysts are expected to close knowledge gaps by initiating and maintaining engagement with topical subject matter experts on topics of importance to Amazon, including hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor
Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.<p>I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
This is just proof that not everyone is following the same narrative that you’re personally following or understands reality the same way you do.<p>It’s beyond me how that job post would make sense to anyone besides someone who is disconnected from the usual contending rhetorics Amazon is involved in.<p>Nobody raised a flag on how that would look like for them? You gotta be pretty oblivious to read that and say “yeah that looks good to me”.<p>I’m not even discrediting the value or purpose of that particular position since I have zero context besides the ad but I don’t understand how can you sprinkle those terms and reference those specific groups without reflecting deeply how it could be perceived.
It's so nice to know they group "organized labor" in with "terrorism" and "geopolitical issues."<p>I will never purchase anything from an Amazon-related company.
Why would Amazon want to prevent workers from unionizing? Look what it did for teaching, policing, mail delivery, port security, taxi driving, waste management, public service, and construction.
Is that even legal? I thought the US or most states at least like most other countries have laws against undermining the ability of employees to organise.
It seems perfectly fine and honest from them. Did anyone expect any different? I'm not saying it's bad, just that's the reality of the job.
It's fascinating how emotional of a topic this is on HN. A lot of people seem to be taking a staunch binary, black-and-white, us-vs-them approach to this issue.<p>I've known friends that hate their unions (usually retail), and those that love their unions (electricians, UPS drivers etc.) These are of course just a small group of anecdotes and not representative of a comprehensive dataset so I don't really have a strong opinion one way or another if the question is "are unions horrifically evil or a godsend that's universally necessary."<p>The framing of this type of debate doesn't seem to foster good faith discussion.<p>My only personal experience with being in a union was a call center job I had when I was 18. I don't recall dues being much, and everybody got full health coverage (including dental and vision) at 25 hrs/wk, and that ended up being a big draw for a lot of people in the area. So that was pretty cool.<p>I've also worked at a lot of places that weren't union where the employees were paid well, received benefits and treated fairly. That was also pretty cool.<p>I guess to me if I were to have an opinion it'd be something along the lines of "If people want to unionize, they have a legal right to do so, and I don't have any particular issue with that. If it works out with a positive outcome, great! If it doesn't, that sucks!"<p>I'm definitely not in favor of people being bullied or misled to go either way on this issue. It literally just seems like something people should talk about in good faith and make their decision accordingly. It's just a choice.
While being in Basic Income meetings frequent subject was "what will happen to people rights when AI takes over" sadly this is example of the answer of what is the most probable outcome...
Never ask the drivers about unionizing. I'm not saying that they will report it to their boss who will mess with your orders and deliveries.<p>But I am also not not saying that.
Jeff has a lot of money. Surely workers rights don't hit the bottom line that hard.
Does Jeff not know that everyone will remember him for this behavior?
HN title: Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’<p>My thoughts after reading the title: "Oh good, I always thought Amazon was scummy and lacked integrity, but credit where credit is due, <i>they did good here</i>.<p>.<p>The actual article's title and body: Amazon deletes <i>their own</i> job listings for union-busters, as a PR response due to public outcry.<p>My thoughts: #$%@!
It's mind-boggling to me that we allow this sort of thing, and that brazenly putting on a job description that you want to hire someone to help thwart legally-protected labor organizing isn't something a company can get fined -- or worse -- over.
I am surprised from the reactions here. What is the best way to deal with worker union blackmails according to you? I know people like to portray worker and amazon as good guy and bad guy, but I think most of us has seen some demands that are pretty outrageous from them. I think it is best if both sides have contact person with whom they can negotiate.<p>Don't get me wrong, I think worker unions are essential for pushing the demands of underprivileged and should exist, but nobody should agree every demand from them.
This is actually a really interesting recursive algorithm: That is, the job listing for analysts to track labor organizing threats turned out to be a labor organizing threat.
Man, it sure would suck if the lowest ranked and most precarious Amazon employees got a bigger piece of Bezo's pie. What an awful world that would be. /s
I don’t know why this is even controversial. American style unions are bad for business, plain and simple. And Amazon is legally required to put the interests of its investors first. Amazon is going to be doing whatever it can to discourage unionization, that’s just what’s going to happen, and I find it hard to blame them.
An interesting thing from Amazon’s labor organizing risk rubric: increased diversity drastically <i>decreases</i> the risk of employees organizing. In case you were curious why all the big companies are so strongly pro-diversity, that’s a pretty compelling reason for them.
As far as my understanding goes, companies of any size have the right to exercise a sort of capital strike at their discretion. The perfectly legal shuttering of The Gothamist after their newsroom unionized a while back is a good example of that (the story is a fascinating read!) (0)<p>I would honestly love to hear from those that aren't favorable towards unions about why it's acceptable for business management and ownership to punitively destroy jobs and value over ideological issues, but it's unacceptable for the employees to have that option as part of collective bargaining?<p>(0) <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561830256/billionaire-owner-shuts-down-dnainfo-gothamist-sites-a-week-after-workers-unioni" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/03/561830256...</a>
Why is this a surprise? If you work in infosec at any multinational you would know activists (hacktivism) and hostile nations/leaders are a serious threat you track. Has no one heard of Dataminr? What do people think it's used for. The "labor" part is a bit unusual but given their business it kinda makes sense.<p>This reminds me of how back in 2016 right before November US elections,I read threat intel reports and conference style presentations from threat intel vendors talking in detail about Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and the Steele dossier, this was before buzzfeed decided to publish it (all other media refused at the time). This is all public stuff now but big corps are very interested in learnig about the latest strategic intel so they can adopt. And that's perfectly fine so long as no laws are broken. This is similar to how big corps get a scoop on emargoed CVEs so they can patch before it's made public. A lot of times this is what intelligence community people do when they want to settle down and make money. I'll bet good money whoever they hire has background at FBI,NSA or DIA.
US law does not protect employees' right to unionize? I'm from Brazil where we have some strict (too strict IMHO) labor laws and this type of hunt (and punishment) for union makers is wildly illegal here.
Never forget The Ludlow Massacre:
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre</a>
Should probably be merged with:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345259" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345259</a><p>Even if not quite a dupe.
> The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 is a foundational statute of United States labor law which guarantees basic rights of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining for better terms and conditions at work, and take collective action including strike if necessary.<p>It's truly late stage capitalism if companies can impede labor organizing so brazenly in public like this and have only encouragement at the federal level to go further. HN a few days ago (the 787 structural issue) was also talking about Boeing closing plants and sacrificing safety to avoid union labor.
Bemused at the knee-jerk downvotes against anyone who has an opinion on unions in EITHER direction.<p>As in so many internet spaces, partisan zealots are degrading our ability to converse. I hope the mods figure out how to keep them from turning HN into yet another dunghole.
This is not unexpected. Merely the product of capitalism.<p>We build an economic system that rewards selfishness and drive for profit at all costs. Successful companies generate profit. More profit is generated by charging the highest cost for the lowest quality product and paying the worker as little as possible.<p>Unions threaten that profitability. Its simple math. Its cheaper to hire analysts to track and snuff out labour movements than it would be to capitulate to the demands of any labour movements that formed, such as wage increases or benefits.<p>Why are we shocked and appalled when the system we created does what it does best?
It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that a website for wannabe capitalists views workers having greater negotiating power extremely suspiciously, yet is enthusiastic towards employers having near-absolute power over their employees.
Why doesn't Amazon do what all monopolies do, lobby the government and cause Regulatory capture to corner the market?<p>It's easy, spend 100M dollars on a law that makes warehouse labor a mandatory union.<p>Mom and pop companies can't afford to fill out government/union paperwork for their 3 employees and customers can't go to cheaper alternatives.<p>But this means Amazon and Amazon employees win.
This article is ridiculous. It makes a bunch of unfounded assumptions and provides very little in the way of facts to support its claims. Did anyone actually read the job postings before jumping to conclusions?<p>><i>Monitor various collection platforms for incidents that pose direct and indirect risk to Amazon operations, personnel, or brand;</i><p>There is nothing in there about union busting or making sure employees don't organize. This author is naive to think that Amazon isn't dealing with state level threats. They likely need state level intelligence.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1026060/intelligence-analyst" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200901125940/https://www.amazo...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200901142713/https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1213610/sr-intelligence-analyst" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200901142713/https://www.amazo...</a>