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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 02 2020, @09:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the virtual-water-cooler dept.

Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts:

Amazon is reportedly (and suddenly) enforcing rules limiting employees' internal communication as workers, critical of the company's behavior, become increasingly outspoken and organized.

Internal listservs with more than 500 participants are now required to move to a moderated model where a manager must approve any content before its distribution, according to emails obtained by Recode.

Amazon had almost 800,000 total employees worldwide as of the end of 2019, a number that does not include the recent addition of another 175,000 temporary warehouse and delivery workers the company just hired to handle increased demand due to COVID-19. Of those 800,000, more than 500,000 are in the United States, and at least 275,000 of those are full-time employees.

Those hundreds of thousands of employees use thousands of internal listservs to talk among themselves about basically anything. That "anything," of late, includes many criticisms of Amazon. The company has faced both internal and external reproof[*] for its management of warehouses, where some employees have called for better cleaning, more protective equipment, and more paid time off as COVID-19 has spread through at least 50 US facilities.

[*] Malformed link in original; corrected here.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @08:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 03 2020, @08:51PM (#989897)

    Very true. I work, for now, in PA state government. We have a very right-wing legislature and talk radio landscape that relentlessly pursues cutting jobs, cutting benefits, privatizing services, stuffing the state with no-work/no-show "advisory" "jobs" for their special friends, and raising taxes on working people.

    Back in 2003, they stopped paying into the pension plan for the next 11 years. Individual taxes didn't go down, mostly because they wasted the "savings" that were dubious to begin with. Starting in 2007, we had a 6 year pay freeze for non-union, which due to games played in the 90s affected most of IT workers. Health insurance is no longer "employer" paid, although it never really was with the benefits being offset by lower pay. People that hate unions and working people and public work always "forget" to mention the lower pay when they shriek about "Cadillac" benefits. Gee, I wonder why. Now we're paying a large percentage of worse but more expensive benefits. They also "forget" that government furloughed many people in the wake of 2008 because it's so much easier to pretend we didn't share the rest of the state's pain. They also forget that the pension isn't free either, as employees pay over 7% of their lower pay into it. Gee, I wonder why. And the pension by and large is on its way the dustbin. See, when the market was up, Republicans stole the money that would've been earmarked for pension contributions. When the market went down in 2008, the shortfall was everybody's fault but theirs. great at the borrowing and spending part but not so much at paying anything back. Surprise. So now to "solve" this, the pension plan is basically hybrid system, part 401K and part pension. But the 401K match is pitiful and nobody believes a government that didn't honor a constitutional mandate to fund the pension will bat an eye at dumping the 401K (let alone the match) when corporations need another handout. The pay freeze was lifted for a few years, but pay never recovered, so now there's a "shortage" of qualified people (we don't even have a civil service test anymore), which has enabled them to pump in illiterate Hindus by the boatload. That, in turn, has created over $1B in IT fuckups over the last decade. IBM got $180M for an unemployment system that never worked, Accenture got $250M for a tax system overhaul that never worked, the $800M police state radio system still isn't operational, licensing and elections are in shambles, and they're scrambling to offshore more and more to chase the phantom "savings" of these other offshore fuckups like a lunatic that keeps doing the same thing hoping for a different result. All the right wing does is try to dismantle and privatize stuff that brings in money like the liquor stores and Turnpike even as we're hemorrhaging money from every right wing fuckup we're endured and continue to endure. "Do more with less" they say as they do less with more.

    So for all that think government jobs are so great, I invite you to come get one for yourself or jump off a fucking cliff.