In 1920 Appalachia, coal companies owned all the land, the homes and stores. They also paid workers with their own special money (that was useless everywhere else). The security companies they hired where armed and violent towards miners and their families.
Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.
This is where the Tennessee Ernie Ford song comes from, "Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store."
There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
(Probably) The first aerial bombardment on US soil was when private planes dropped homemade bombs on striking coal workers at Blair Mountain in 1921. The US has a looong and brutal history of breaking up labor movements.
We also had the ludlow massacre where the local militia and mine company guards attacked the miners with machine guns (pre nfa...) and dynamite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre.
For some reason, the history page on the Pinkerton website has a big hole in it between 1907 and 1962. What could they have been up to in the early 20th Century, I wonder?
https://pinkerton.com/our-story/history
Is there anything stopping workers from crowdsource their own protection anonymously? Does it have to be some kind of formal union?
If you think about it, work is just a business deal and wouldn't be possible for employees create some kind of company that deals with the companies they are employed? Pretty much like an agency, I guess.
I respect a history lesson, but honestly, I think old comrade tales are not helpful.
I don't mean that it's irrelevant, strictly, but we hear more of these than 2020 tales, 2020 strategies and concerns. This is 100 year later, and despite of how many union die hards see it... most workers aren't likely to buy int a centuries long struggle. They're interested in their own lives & jobs.
I'm all for the Amazon hate train but this is pretty weak. The journalist first says Pinkerton was hired in Poland to investigate irregularities in their application process. Amazon says they only hire Pinkerton to "secure shipments". The "acquired document" says that Amazon tracks social media information about labor organization and strokes. It's all over the place, and even assuming all parties report the truth, no one actually says that Pinkerton is doing surveillance related to unions.
Maybe NPR is missing something from the original article, which I couldn't find linked, but come on.
There have been sporadic reports for about a year of major hiring/contracting related to internal security and union activity. EG: publicly posted positions that said the "quite part out loud," anonymous whistleblowers and some leaked docs.
I think this article specifically relates to a report by motherboard a week or two ago where they got emails leaked to them from Amazon's "Global Security Operations Center."
Here's a better article by Vice. They Pinkerton hire seems to have been confirmed by amazon spokesperson.
"Internal emails sent to Amazon's Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division's team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action)"
It just astounds me that the Old Timey Pinkertons are still around, to be honest. That is a company that my 98 year old grandfather tells stories about from his childhood.
I know there are other old companies, but Pinkerton is one of those that just sounds old fashioned.
They're owned by Securitas today, the Swedish security guard company. Which makes the decision to continue using "Pinkerton" as a _brand name_ even more of an intimidation tactic, IMO. And I think it ultimately results in demonstrating how committed Bezos is to fighting this.
I was reminded of their continued existence earlier this year when, in a strange reversal of fate, a Pinkerton shot and killed a pro-law enforcement protestor:
Really disappointing to see the "Well, what did you expect?" comments already. Just because companies have been trying to prevent organization of their labor for over a century doesn't mean it isn't still messed up now. It's easy to say that it's just the way the world works from your desk, the people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions don't have that luxury.
It’s a very minor point but this article makes it sound like the generic term for a union buster is Pinkerton agent. Pinkerton is a private company who does security work these days, but has a long history of doing exactly this. Fascinating Wikipedia read if you’re curious.
(A quick search shows Lauren Gurley is a prolific writer on labor issues but doesn't mention any connection to the earlier Gurley - the names might be just a coincidence)
Indeed, everything old is new again. You know the saying, right? History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme. This is often attributed to Mark Twain, but there's no real evidence he actually said it.
"Pinkerton operatives were inserted into an Amazon warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that warehouse workers were circumventing sort of the application process for applying to warehouse jobs"
How does this match the title of the piece. Then,
"So I imagine that in the U.S., they're tracking labor organizing activity but not union members yet."
So they have no proof and this is all speculation. Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Amazon used some people to catch people cheesing their job application process and then because the US doesn't have strong unions and they know they look at labor stats for people joining Unions this "journalist" has extrapolated they are definitely "surveiling" people. This is really low quality.
Edit: I'm fine with the allegations being true, the point I'm making is this isn't the article that we should be discussing because it's lazy journalism -- another poster below me linked much more well thought out and written posts on the subject being discussed by this article.
Leaked documents from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center reveal the company’s reliance on Pinkerton operatives to spy on warehouse workers and the extensive monitoring of labor unions, environmental activists, and other social movements. [1]
This isn't "speculation" or "poor journalism", it is an assessment that exists within the context of a company that has been aggressively anti-union for years, for which employees are trained to rat out union organizers,[2] and, of course, in light of their retention of Pinkertons to infiltrate employee Facebook groups dedicated to organizing.
Amazon had all kinds of issues in Poland. They were paying so badly at the beginning that many people who applied for the job were former convicts. Some of them took advantage of the opportunity and start steeling stuff from packages (inventing ingenious methods of smuggling them outside in the process). This was a plague at some point.
Eventually thiefs were caught and fired. But then they applied for the job again through agency and came back (Agency was an employer, not Amazon, so, probably Amazon did not have enough data to check who i who).
The fact that Amazon needs to employ top notch investigators is in itself rather hilarious. Those super agents are chasing people who earn about $610 a month (minus taxes).
> > It involves collecting data, it seems, from Facebook groups, from social media. In some cases in the case of the Pinkertons, there is a line in one of the documents that we've obtained that says that Pinkerton operatives were inserted into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to gather intelligence on what their warehouse workers were up to.
The Pinkerton case seems to be one case out of several mentioned in the papers and while the stated reason is to sniff out the application process even that is in direct conflict with official statements by Amazon.
> So they have no proof and this is all speculation.
They list a few points they know about right before the line you quoted.
> Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Still a lot better than the copy pasted Amazon press releases after it lost the lawsuit in France. Those were pure fiction with Bezos in the role of the poor abused Emperor Palpatine.
"Pinkerton: for over one-hundred years, the ones to call when you've got a union problem."
I mean, that has to be their schtick, right, even if it's unspoken? Because that pretty much sums up what I know about Pinkerton, so I would assume they are happy with that.
As for the topic at hand, yeah well, that's what companies do...for over one-hundred years as well.
Ah, lovely of Amazon to employ the EXACT same people that Carnegie and Frick hired to beat and kill steel workers in 1892. How long before Amazon has the Pinkertons open fire on the unionizers?
Great prescident, Amazon. No bad choices here. Just the honest, fair dealings of the richest man in the world hiring the same people who've been murdering strikers and unionizers since 1850. Stay classy Jeff!
Interfering with unionization needs to be illegal, and not met with fines that affect only the bottom line of a balance sheet, but jail time for everyone involved, with mandatory minimum sentencing. If this is true Bezos should be behind bars.
How many corporate execs have actually gone to prison for wrongdoings done in the name of the corporation? There's Ken Lay from Enron, one completely random banker from the financial crisis of 2008, and not a whole lot of others I can think of.
To me, the lengths Amazon goes to discourage unionization hints at how vulnerable they feel they are to certain aspects of unionization (probably strikes).
This isn't that much of a surprise though. The more we automate stuff (excluding complete automation), the more important the squishy humans that keep everything running are.
At least in Europe, strikes don't seem to be the driving factor. They are hit anyway often enough by Verdi in Germany, and there is no way Amazon can prohibit people from signing up with a union. Not being able to enforce working conditions seems to more of a factor to me. Not that Amazon is harsher on warehouse staff than, say, DHL. It is more the monitoring and so on. No idea how things are in the US so.
Among other things the article differentiates between the internal Amazon org monitoring union-forming activities and the Pinkertons who were tasked with looking into warehouse workers for unrelated reasons which the NPR headline seems to conflate.
Pretty disgusting and completely unsurprising. Most of us (sadly) can't avoid if our companies use AWS, but a significant fraction can absolutely do without the "convenience" of Amazon, shopping at Whole Foods, etc.
I'm lucky enough to be able-bodied enough that I don't need package delivery, so I haven't used Amazon in a few years. I don't miss it, doubly so when articles like this come out.
I'm a brit, can someone give me an overview of the law on US unions? If one forms, are Amazon compelled to work with them like in European nations? If its still just At Will employment, I don't see how a union would make any difference there, Amazon can (will) just fire everyone who joins and replace them tomorrow right?
Pinkerton has a long history of criminal activity.
It's unbelievable that Bezos gets away with this with such minimal media attention. (Yeah, it's on NPR, but I highly doubt I'll see it on CNN, at the most, maybe Fox will say something because they view Bezos as a political enemy)
My great grandfather was a miner in southern WV during the time period where Pinkerton agents intimidated and harassed the families of union members, and often assaulting them. Eventually it all culminated in this:
It should be noted that Blair Mountain was the only time in history where US warplanes (very primitive at the time) dropped bombs on US soil directed at US citizens.
History repeats itself. Check out the story of the Molly Maguires, a somewhat vigilante labor group in PA's coal region, who were infiltrated by an undercover Pinkerton in the late 1800s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Maguires#In_the_United_S... I'm from the region of PA where this all happened, and it's a well-known story among locals.
In itself, this may suggest something is really going on here.
We're seemingly turning from ebb to flow in the union/anti-union pendulum. Meanwhile, amazon's employees are a genuinely vast group. Quantity is a quality, and amazon knows that scale can change how things work in hard to predict ways.
It's possible that amazon is ahead of the game. Most of what I've heard/read from the pro-union side is fairly generic. Why unions are beneficial generally. I definitely hear more positive sentiments towards unions, but...
I haven't heard much about goals, tactics, strategies, proposed unionisation structures. I haven't heard any ideas relating to novel 2020 realities: amazon's size, digital economics, amazon's record profits and market cap.
I haven't heard anything approaching deliverables. Pay rises? Who? How much? Benefits? Amazon have $250k aws engineers, part time whole foods workers? How does this relate to unionisation strategy or goals.
Even is the sentiment pendulum is swinging back to pro-union, a big role for unions still seems distant. It could take decades.
We are letting amazon going way too far. This is unacceptable. A global coalition of trade-unions is mobilizing against amazon, https://makeamazonpay.com/
Also legislators should get more aware of companies undermining workers right. But I feel legislators to be part of the problem.
unionizing amazon would be horrible, I've been working at usps for 15+ years and unions are the reason for most of our troubles. Please lets not turn a company who makes a good product and pays people well for it into the enemy
[+] [-] _wldu|5 years ago|reply
https://explorepartsunknown.com/west-virginia/coal-minings-d...
Today, people can tour these old towns and learn the history of how the coal companies trapped and abused workers. A lot of unions and labor rights groups came out of the abuses that occurred in Appalachia.
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
There was an episode of South Park last season where they played this song as a backdrop to Amazon workers in a warehouse.
[+] [-] rtkwe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EarthIsHome|5 years ago|reply
Here's a really short video of what used to be a "company town" in Appalachia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCxG_SCnQE
One of the host's grand dad was paid in scrip until the 1970s.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
[+] [-] ixacto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidAdams|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|5 years ago|reply
If you think about it, work is just a business deal and wouldn't be possible for employees create some kind of company that deals with the companies they are employed? Pretty much like an agency, I guess.
[+] [-] timoth3y|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
It's an incredible story of capitalism gone mad. Areal bombardment and poison gas were used against the miners and it did not end well for them.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] strathmeyer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|5 years ago|reply
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in...
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
I don't mean that it's irrelevant, strictly, but we hear more of these than 2020 tales, 2020 strategies and concerns. This is 100 year later, and despite of how many union die hards see it... most workers aren't likely to buy int a centuries long struggle. They're interested in their own lives & jobs.
[+] [-] kayson|5 years ago|reply
Maybe NPR is missing something from the original article, which I couldn't find linked, but come on.
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|5 years ago|reply
> We need to note that Amazon is an NPR funder.
The original Motherboard article [0] is extensive. The NPR version is deliberately incoherent.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
There have been sporadic reports for about a year of major hiring/contracting related to internal security and union activity. EG: publicly posted positions that said the "quite part out loud," anonymous whistleblowers and some leaked docs.
I think this article specifically relates to a report by motherboard a week or two ago where they got emails leaked to them from Amazon's "Global Security Operations Center."
Here's a better article by Vice. They Pinkerton hire seems to have been confirmed by amazon spokesperson.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
"Internal emails sent to Amazon's Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division's team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action)"
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Loughla|5 years ago|reply
I know there are other old companies, but Pinkerton is one of those that just sounds old fashioned.
[+] [-] scruple|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vulcan01|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _iyig|5 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/15/matthew-dol...
[+] [-] xyst|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|5 years ago|reply
“Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups” https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
Edit: Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25189167
[+] [-] patwolfe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattalbie|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
[+] [-] jonjacky|5 years ago|reply
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a famous union organizer who fought the Pinkertons more than a hundred years ago.
Coincidentally, the new novel The Cold Millions by Jess Walter portrays Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Pinkertons in Spokane in 1909.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gurley_Flynn
(A quick search shows Lauren Gurley is a prolific writer on labor issues but doesn't mention any connection to the earlier Gurley - the names might be just a coincidence)
[+] [-] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimm1|5 years ago|reply
How does this match the title of the piece. Then,
"So I imagine that in the U.S., they're tracking labor organizing activity but not union members yet."
So they have no proof and this is all speculation. Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Amazon used some people to catch people cheesing their job application process and then because the US doesn't have strong unions and they know they look at labor stats for people joining Unions this "journalist" has extrapolated they are definitely "surveiling" people. This is really low quality.
Edit: I'm fine with the allegations being true, the point I'm making is this isn't the article that we should be discussing because it's lazy journalism -- another poster below me linked much more well thought out and written posts on the subject being discussed by this article.
[+] [-] badRNG|5 years ago|reply
This isn't "speculation" or "poor journalism", it is an assessment that exists within the context of a company that has been aggressively anti-union for years, for which employees are trained to rat out union organizers,[2] and, of course, in light of their retention of Pinkertons to infiltrate employee Facebook groups dedicated to organizing.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports...
[2] https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-re...
[+] [-] piokoch|5 years ago|reply
Eventually thiefs were caught and fired. But then they applied for the job again through agency and came back (Agency was an employer, not Amazon, so, probably Amazon did not have enough data to check who i who).
The fact that Amazon needs to employ top notch investigators is in itself rather hilarious. Those super agents are chasing people who earn about $610 a month (minus taxes).
[+] [-] josefx|5 years ago|reply
Read again:
> > It involves collecting data, it seems, from Facebook groups, from social media. In some cases in the case of the Pinkertons, there is a line in one of the documents that we've obtained that says that Pinkerton operatives were inserted into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to gather intelligence on what their warehouse workers were up to.
The Pinkerton case seems to be one case out of several mentioned in the papers and while the stated reason is to sniff out the application process even that is in direct conflict with official statements by Amazon.
> So they have no proof and this is all speculation.
They list a few points they know about right before the line you quoted.
> Another Amazon hit piece, real quality journalism here.
Still a lot better than the copy pasted Amazon press releases after it lost the lawsuit in France. Those were pure fiction with Bezos in the role of the poor abused Emperor Palpatine.
[+] [-] mikestew|5 years ago|reply
I mean, that has to be their schtick, right, even if it's unspoken? Because that pretty much sums up what I know about Pinkerton, so I would assume they are happy with that.
As for the topic at hand, yeah well, that's what companies do...for over one-hundred years as well.
[+] [-] VonGuard|5 years ago|reply
Great prescident, Amazon. No bad choices here. Just the honest, fair dealings of the richest man in the world hiring the same people who've been murdering strikers and unionizers since 1850. Stay classy Jeff!
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheRealSteel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omgwtfbyobbq|5 years ago|reply
This isn't that much of a surprise though. The more we automate stuff (excluding complete automation), the more important the squishy humans that keep everything running are.
[+] [-] hef19898|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nabla9|5 years ago|reply
Europeans would be more familiar with the name Securitas as in three red dots security firm.
Pinkerton is a subsidiary of Swedish company Securitas AB. Securitas has over 330,000 employees.
[+] [-] khalilravanna|5 years ago|reply
Among other things the article differentiates between the internal Amazon org monitoring union-forming activities and the Pinkertons who were tasked with looking into warehouse workers for unrelated reasons which the NPR headline seems to conflate.
[+] [-] poidos|5 years ago|reply
I'm lucky enough to be able-bodied enough that I don't need package delivery, so I haven't used Amazon in a few years. I don't miss it, doubly so when articles like this come out.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JPKab|5 years ago|reply
It's unbelievable that Bezos gets away with this with such minimal media attention. (Yeah, it's on NPR, but I highly doubt I'll see it on CNN, at the most, maybe Fox will say something because they view Bezos as a political enemy)
My great grandfather was a miner in southern WV during the time period where Pinkerton agents intimidated and harassed the families of union members, and often assaulting them. Eventually it all culminated in this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
It should be noted that Blair Mountain was the only time in history where US warplanes (very primitive at the time) dropped bombs on US soil directed at US citizens.
[+] [-] michaelyoshika|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnjones4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|5 years ago|reply
We're seemingly turning from ebb to flow in the union/anti-union pendulum. Meanwhile, amazon's employees are a genuinely vast group. Quantity is a quality, and amazon knows that scale can change how things work in hard to predict ways.
It's possible that amazon is ahead of the game. Most of what I've heard/read from the pro-union side is fairly generic. Why unions are beneficial generally. I definitely hear more positive sentiments towards unions, but...
I haven't heard much about goals, tactics, strategies, proposed unionisation structures. I haven't heard any ideas relating to novel 2020 realities: amazon's size, digital economics, amazon's record profits and market cap.
I haven't heard anything approaching deliverables. Pay rises? Who? How much? Benefits? Amazon have $250k aws engineers, part time whole foods workers? How does this relate to unionisation strategy or goals.
Even is the sentiment pendulum is swinging back to pro-union, a big role for unions still seems distant. It could take decades.
[+] [-] neom|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0nducktr|5 years ago|reply
https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/agent-pinkerton-JV_IC1...
[+] [-] kome|5 years ago|reply
Also legislators should get more aware of companies undermining workers right. But I feel legislators to be part of the problem.
[+] [-] moocowtruck|5 years ago|reply