Apparently the union and Amazon were both granted the ability to have four observers present during the counting. Amazon wanted wanted to watch the ballot box itself (not the votes or counts or ballots) during off hours so both parties can confirm that it wasn't tampered with.
> Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the NLRB’s Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting, according to an NLRB order denying Amazon’s request. The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the RWDSU.
That doesn't sound as nefarious as the headline suggests. In fact, it seems strange that the secure ballot box would be deliberately stored somewhere without security cameras.
I think it's important to understand, for this decision, the context of the election process. Secret ballot union elections are conducted not by the employer or the union, but actually by the NLRB itself, a federal agency. These elections are carried out according to specifications and requirements produced by NLRB as administrative law.
So consider that Amazon's request for security measures beyond what the NLRB has previously found necessary will increase the time and cost for NLRB to run the election... it seems likely to me that the NLRB would reject the request simply because they feel it to be unnecessary and to impose additional complexity and cost on the NLRB (and thus potentially the taxpayer).
> In fact, it seems strange that the secure ballot box would be deliberately stored somewhere without security cameras.
I've been a voting official a couple of times in Germany. Here, the ballot boxes (which are literal trash cans, just in a different color) get loaded with everything (ballots, tabulation aids, even the pencils) at the end of the day and sealed off, then over night left behind in the room where the election and counting happens (usually a school classroom), and at the beginning of the next day we verify the seals haven't been tampered with, unload the cans and continue counting.
I can't think of a valid reason why one would object to having a camera over the box, unless they intend to tamper with it. I mean, I can understand objections to installing cameras where there might be privacy or ballot secrecy issues. But the box doesn't have privacy and it won't reveal anyone's ballot's content - so why the objection?
No idea about the camera (there's lively discussion here about that already), but the other measures like sealing the ballot boxes and restricting/auditing access all sound like "make sure the results won't be contentious".
It's totally in Amazon's interest (but also in the interest of anyone who wants a fair vote) to avoid any doubt/claims about tampering.
Well, from a strategic point of view, if you think you're on the losing side, wouldn't it make more sense to create doubts about the procedure? Then you can scream "Rigged election!"...
one of those times, you wish every working man knew what efforts are made into bursting unions. And then reflect internally, are unions bad for a company to put in such an effort to keep their works unorganized.
once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages, political representation and so on.
> once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages
I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.
Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.
Upon meta-consideration, I believe (but cannot prove, even subjectively) that it speaks volumes of the cumulative consultancy expertise Amazon has evidently hired to bear down upon this issue just how reasonable Amazon’s requests felt.
Sure, the headline optics of the webcam are bad, but the other requests... what’s not to dislike about them? More careful security and anti-tampering measures, what’s not to like about that? Sure, it’s a bit onerous, but also, who wouldn’t be willing to pay that one-off onus in order to head off the prospects of a contentious result further down the line?
And that’s the thing: I can’t quite answer my own implicit question. I’m pretty sure Amazon is really really upset about this, and they’re preparing to contest the legitimacy of the result, somehow? Is that what I’m getting the feeling of? I’m really not sure, but the whole request’s troughs and valleys strikes me as decidedly odd, and I feel strangely impinged-upon by it. Manipulated, even.
EDIT:
Several commenters have remarked below that it is actually a federal agency which conducts the election process. This is implied (or explicitly stated) to be FUD: Amazon preparing to discredit the election’s integrity by remarking that the unions hadn’t accepted their requests when it wasn’t the unions who could grant satisfaction of those requests (but rather, the appropriate governmental federal agency).
There have been cases in the past where someone did a vote for me or [some violent act that they were capable of following up on]. The audit trail needs to break someplace between the individual voter and the actual vote they cast. We still need a good trail to believe that all votes were counted correctly, only people who should vote voted, and nobody voted more than they were allowed. This is a hard problem.
The right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation actually has an extensive database of voter fraud, and while they try to make a big deal about the number of cases that have been found, the unwritten fact is that the rate is infinitesimally low.
>During this portion, the NLRB will read off each voter’s name and both sides will be allowed to contest ballots, likely based on factors such as whether an employee’s job title entitles them to vote or an illegible signature. Any contested ballots will be set aside.
What kind of job title would disqualify an employee from being allowed to vote to unionize?
The union isn't a blanket union for all Amazon employees. It only covers about 5,800 employees who want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
An AWS engineer casting a vote for the warehouse workers to unionize would be invalid, for example.
> What kind of job title would disqualify an employee from being allowed to vote to unionize?
Managers and supervisors, generally, including when supervision (including just giving out work assignments with some degree of discretion) is a relatively small part of the worker's job.
You are not allowed to be in an NLRB-recognized union if you are any kind of manager or supervisor (I believe the exact legal definition is having hiring and hiring power).
An important aspect of voting systems is that, while you want to authenticate that each voter is allowed to vote, you also want strong protections against discovering who voted for who. I understand why it seems like cameras would be a good idea, but it's very easy to imagine how such a system could be abused.
Can you tell a camera's field of view by looking at it? Could your grandparents? Trusting systems that secure the vote is much easier when they are designed resist being changed to abet oppression.
Because in order to be democratic, an election has to be fair, free and secret. That's why I am always a little bit disturbed with signed ballots for example. I never signed a paper ballot in my whole life. Or any other ballot as far as that is concerned.
I hope that they manage to secure the union. I don't think that unions have a place a lot of times, that said, the imbalance of employers like Amazon seem out of step with what should be negotiation, and setting what at least appear to be unreasonable terms.
Not to say that unions and employees can't overreach and overreact, in this case I hope they get things through. I also hope that Amazon doesn't close their local facilities as a result.
Amazon's request seems very reasonable. The NLRB is a union-favoring body - I can understand why Amazon may distrust the process, the participants, the overseers, etc. Both sides should want this process to be as secure as possible if we are to not end up in a state where we doubt the results. For this union vote and election in general, I simply do not accept arguments that there must be things just left up to chance (like voter ID or security of the ballot box). We should strive to make the process as bulletproof as possible. Having cameras, a log of when the storage room is opened, and tamper-proof tape seems like a very low bar to set and I am not sure why this request was not granted.
After spending some years in development of cryptographic software, I became an ardent fan of not-so-easily forged pieces of paper. (Try counterfeiting modern banknotes. NOT easy.)
Cryptographic software is tricky, very easy to implement incorrectly or with major security gaps, completely opaque to the amateur user, vulnerable to all kinds of zero-days and possibly even progress in mathematics (God save us from the day when someone comes with a fast factorization algorithm). If secure enough, it will be burdensome enough that people will try to circumvent it. It runs on a stack of OSes and hardware that may (read: of course they do) have fatal security flaws rendering your secure app insecure.
Votes are anything but easily forged, they are in fact quite trivial to secure.
What IS easily forged and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to secure is a result printed out by some opaque computer that is running a huge amount of software on an extremely complex processor which runs its own closed-source firmware, probably communicating over the internet 'securely' to some other computers.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
> Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the NLRB’s Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting, according to an NLRB order denying Amazon’s request. The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the RWDSU.
That doesn't sound as nefarious as the headline suggests. In fact, it seems strange that the secure ballot box would be deliberately stored somewhere without security cameras.
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|5 years ago|reply
So consider that Amazon's request for security measures beyond what the NLRB has previously found necessary will increase the time and cost for NLRB to run the election... it seems likely to me that the NLRB would reject the request simply because they feel it to be unnecessary and to impose additional complexity and cost on the NLRB (and thus potentially the taxpayer).
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 years ago|reply
I've been a voting official a couple of times in Germany. Here, the ballot boxes (which are literal trash cans, just in a different color) get loaded with everything (ballots, tabulation aids, even the pencils) at the end of the day and sealed off, then over night left behind in the room where the election and counting happens (usually a school classroom), and at the beginning of the next day we verify the seals haven't been tampered with, unload the cans and continue counting.
[+] [-] smsm42|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manicdee|5 years ago|reply
Are the Union or Amazon going to break into the offices of a federal agency to deposit fake votes or otherwise tamper with the ballot box?
Doesn’t the security of the building contribute to the security of the ballot?
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|5 years ago|reply
Why rule against it if it isn't a big deal? When is "too much security" a bad thing?
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|5 years ago|reply
It's totally in Amazon's interest (but also in the interest of anyone who wants a fair vote) to avoid any doubt/claims about tampering.
[+] [-] bellyfullofbac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzonga|5 years ago|reply
once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages, political representation and so on.
[+] [-] lnanek2|5 years ago|reply
I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.
Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.
[+] [-] jstanley|5 years ago|reply
It's completely plausible that unions are bad for both employers and employees.
[+] [-] beaner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaywalk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|5 years ago|reply
What's their perspective exactly?
[+] [-] _red|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|5 years ago|reply
Sure, the headline optics of the webcam are bad, but the other requests... what’s not to dislike about them? More careful security and anti-tampering measures, what’s not to like about that? Sure, it’s a bit onerous, but also, who wouldn’t be willing to pay that one-off onus in order to head off the prospects of a contentious result further down the line?
And that’s the thing: I can’t quite answer my own implicit question. I’m pretty sure Amazon is really really upset about this, and they’re preparing to contest the legitimacy of the result, somehow? Is that what I’m getting the feeling of? I’m really not sure, but the whole request’s troughs and valleys strikes me as decidedly odd, and I feel strangely impinged-upon by it. Manipulated, even.
EDIT:
Several commenters have remarked below that it is actually a federal agency which conducts the election process. This is implied (or explicitly stated) to be FUD: Amazon preparing to discredit the election’s integrity by remarking that the unions hadn’t accepted their requests when it wasn’t the unions who could grant satisfaction of those requests (but rather, the appropriate governmental federal agency).
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddoolin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mariodiana|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mullingitover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|5 years ago|reply
What kind of job title would disqualify an employee from being allowed to vote to unionize?
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
An AWS engineer casting a vote for the warehouse workers to unionize would be invalid, for example.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
Managers and supervisors, generally, including when supervision (including just giving out work assignments with some degree of discretion) is a relatively small part of the worker's job.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renata|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|5 years ago|reply
Can you tell a camera's field of view by looking at it? Could your grandparents? Trusting systems that secure the vote is much easier when they are designed resist being changed to abet oppression.
[+] [-] stuaxo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hef19898|5 years ago|reply
Cameras would limit the secret part.
[+] [-] tracker1|5 years ago|reply
Not to say that unions and employees can't overreach and overreact, in this case I hope they get things through. I also hope that Amazon doesn't close their local facilities as a result.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamaharbor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KirbyTetro|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl2718|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|5 years ago|reply
Cryptographic software is tricky, very easy to implement incorrectly or with major security gaps, completely opaque to the amateur user, vulnerable to all kinds of zero-days and possibly even progress in mathematics (God save us from the day when someone comes with a fast factorization algorithm). If secure enough, it will be burdensome enough that people will try to circumvent it. It runs on a stack of OSes and hardware that may (read: of course they do) have fatal security flaws rendering your secure app insecure.
No, thanks. Give me a paper ballot any day.
[+] [-] tsimionescu|5 years ago|reply
What IS easily forged and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to secure is a result printed out by some opaque computer that is running a huge amount of software on an extremely complex processor which runs its own closed-source firmware, probably communicating over the internet 'securely' to some other computers.
[+] [-] jayd16|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomschlick|5 years ago|reply