Originally published at: Amazon posts signs telling workers not to sign union cards | Boing Boing
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Talk about encouraging unions. That would make me want to sign up to unionize even if I hadn’t previously thought about it.
Where’s @Melizmatic with St. Babs?
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almost surprised they didn’t work off the ambiguity of what ALU stands for (“Arithmetic Logic Unit?”)
Alu The sequence alu is found in numerous Elder Futhark runic inscriptions of Germanic Iron Age Scandinavia between the 3rd and the 8th century. The word usually appears either alone or as part of an apparent formula. The symbols represent the runes Ansuz, Laguz, and Uruz. The origin and meaning of the word are matters of dispute, though a general agreement exists among scholars that the word represents an instance of historical runic magic or is a metaphor for it. It is the most common of the early runic charm words…
anyway Bezos “wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time…”
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This is illegal!
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Yeah, and if the government ever decides to crack down on it, does all the work to investigate and find them guilty, the only result will be that Amazon will be told not to do it again. That’s it. If they do it again, the same result happens. I can understand why there’s rarely any enforcement of the law, that being the case…
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Different union, but it still applies
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That’s useful context, as my first thought was “how can that possibly be legal” and my second thought was “well, America”.
If a company is willing to do something like this openly, you have to wonder what they’re paying Pinkertons to do discreetly.
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Yeah. It’s another one of those “can we really say it’s ‘illegal’ if we don’t enforce the laws which have no consequences for breaking them anyways?” situations.
It’ll be interesting to see what eventually leaks out about what Amazon’s doing behind the scenes, because what they’re doing publicly is bad enough - surveillance, trying to get the cops to arrest organizers, stealing union materials, forcing employees to sit through anti-union propaganda, firing organizers… Maybe they don’t have to keep anything secret, as there’s no penalties for openly doing whatever the fuck they want, no matter the laws they break.
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DID YOU KNOW?
Amazon may ask you to provide your credit card information, or share a QR code to fill out an online agreement to share your credit card information.
This is a legally binding document.
DID YOU KNOW?
By providing your credit card information and your delivery address, you are providing Amazon your personal information.
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Would-be oppressors continue to offer their advice, going back to at least when Sparta told everyone they shouldn’t build defensive walls.
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With the nascent resurgence of unions these days, I’m surprised that big companies haven’t tried to create their own, tame unions to muddy the waters. I mean they do that all the time to influence politics.
Since that means that they’re paying employees to not work, I’ll regard that as a little victory.
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That’s kind of what “we think of ourselves more like a family” is.
And of course, where unions exist, Capital will try all manner of fuckery to make them tame (often quite successfully). But I don’t think a company would ever institute anything close to a union on purpose, because if you let workers elect their own reps there is always the danger that they’ll organise for real. Even the idea of unions is a threat, because if people stop thinking of unions as the devil, they might end up reading Jacobin, or thinking of themselves as human beings, or other nightmare scenarios.
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Actually I’m not sure even that was true…
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In fact this is right out of the union-busting consultant’s playbook. Do everything illegal because the punishments for doing so are basically zero.
Unfortunately the opposite happens to these workers. Union-busting tactics work, and they have become incredibly refined. Workers are scared and/or brainwashed into voting against their own interests. The days of firehoses and police dogs are over. The war is psychological now, and the companies are winning.
Always remember- everything these companies do to prevent unions is directly from the playbook of union-busting consultants. Every company hires them. They have a system that works that they sell to these corporations. Corporations will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to these consulting companies to prevent unionization.
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In order to work for them?
Oh, FUCK THAT NOISE.
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No, no. I’m parroting the “logic” expressed in the digital signs that were displayed to workers (if you see the images in the article), with the intent to fool them into thinking joining a union is a scam.
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I was commenting regarding my own workplace contrarian personality.
It also doesn’t have to be so obvious.
I work as a purchaser for a very small manufacturing company and you’d might be surprised how much parroting of our CEO is done by our workers. I’ll be on the phone with one of them (who are located in NV) and they’ll complain about something (taxes, logistics, CA laws or gas prices), which sounds exactly like something our CEO has said recently.
I’m generally suspicious because I know that my employer does NOT have my best interest in mind. Most workers are brainwashed into believing the opposite.
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