Amazon fires employees who supported “yellow vest” blockades of Amazon sites

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/transports/gilets-jaunes/amazon-licencie-des-salaries-qui-ont-affiche-leur-soutien-aux-gilets-jaunes_3174425.html

by zoobab • 7 years ago

75 91 7 years ago

francetvinfo.fr

entity34511• 7 years ago

Not because they supported the Yellow Vests, as anyone is entitled to support an union or political party.

They got sacked because they supported (on social media) the blocking of Amazon sites and warehouses. My understanding of French law is that such actions are illegal to begin with and, obviously, a breach of your duties towards your employer.

The title of the article (in French) is explicit.

zoobab• 7 years ago

The article says the motivation for firing them was that those employees have showned some support on social networks to the Yellow Vests movement:

"Motif ? Ils ont exprimé, sur les réseaux sociaux, une forme de soutien aux "gilets jaunes" "

I doubt that this is really the case though.

entity34511• 7 years ago

Both the title and the article are clear that this support is specifically support for blockages of Amazon sites.

Title: "Amazon licencie des salariés qui ont affiché leur soutien aux blocages des "gilets jaunes""

Which translates "Amazon sacks employees who publicly expressed their support for Yellow Vests' blockages"

They report that one posted the following on Facebook " "Bravo à tous pour le blocage d'Amazon", which translates to "Congratulations to all for blocking Amazon!" Another called on social media for people to join a blockage and to bring supplies to block the road.

To me that looks like a good and valid reason to sack an employee.

csomar3• 7 years ago

The title and the content are different. As I read through

Le Parisien cite l'exemple d'un employé qui aurait donné rendez-vous à des collègues "devant la porte de son lieu de travail pour partir bloquer un entrepôt voisin, à Lesquin", dans le Nord. Un autre aurait lancé : "Il faut du renfort et des palettes, les amis !"

Basically the guy organized with his co-workers to blockade a warehouse (I assume of Amazon).

I don't think they fired guys that vocally supported Yellow Vests demands. Those would be in the hundreds if not thousands. It seems to me like they fired trouble makers.

I have only a couple words: Good riddance. Saying this as someone who has been affected by blockades (in another country) and seen people, companies and business being affected and devastated by it.

There is a difference between complaining and blocking a road/access.

doktrin3• 7 years ago

I agree. The translated HN title is inaccurate. The article only goes so far as to mention two examples, so it's possible that some of the terminated employees did less egregious stuff - but based on the available data this is about more than simply voicing a political opinion.

close045• 7 years ago

The French title of the article in front of me states pretty much to the letter what the HN translation states. Was the HN one changed in the meantime?

The subtitle provides some info, stating that they were fired for showing a behavior that contradicts company values. Later on it says that the fired employees didn't respect their contractual obligations by instigating to block the warehouse.

To be honest I have to wonder what the balance is between freedom of speech and fulfilling your contractual obligation. I mean who's more right here? The employee who's free to state what's on their mind or the employer who's fires someone for trying to sabotage the workplace?

DyslexicAtheist4• 7 years ago

My understanding of French law is that such actions are illegal to begin with and, obviously, a breach of your duties towards your employer.

these people aren't part of being at the forefront of automation-innovation but are victims of it. If Amazon wouldn't have killed the bookstore and retail sector in large parts of rural France (and Europe), these employees wouldn't be working for Amazon. They work there because companies like Amazon fail to pay their taxes and are proprietary-algorithms which have drained all humanity and social cohesion (Uber, AirBNB et al).

Although I don't blame Amazon alone in this (companies like this are a symptom not the cause of our Capitalistic Technological Society, but I think whether this is illegal or not is beside the point and we'd be better off listening to their pain instead of siding with "the law". The Gilets Jaunes being called by the French state "Illegal" are a good example of why this form of protests works and drives home the message to these corporate overlords. Even an article like this fuels some rage during the coming "Act-XYZ" IMO the language of money is the only language these people/companies understand.

A shame they didn't think of better opsec for organizing this. Use a burner phone use signal and not some facebook account with your real name to spread the message. This is exactly how they'll get busted by their nanny-state and why the nanny-state is able to use language that otherwise is reserved for "terrorists" or threats to "civil order". Macron, the minister of interior, and their oligarch friends from Rothschild are the real crooks ... and unlike the protestors that risk losing their jobs, or their eyes from the police aggressive use of rubber bullets ("fireballs") and who have actual "skin in the game".

My point is that the law must change and these companies should be taxed accordingly so that the Precariat is lifted out of their precarious position. Unless this changes I fear that the only way forward is more protests (and violence).

gtirloni2• 7 years ago

It's very simple to validate your hypothesis: if this was a small French shop and its 2-3 employees were campaigning on social media for people to block access to the shop, could the owner fire them for the same reason? Would it be imoral as well?

fdggdfsvscvsd2• 7 years ago

Amazon didn't kill bookstores - people could have continued to shop in bookstores all they want. Amazon doesn't force anybody to not go to a bookstore.

There are actually still bookstores and other stores around to this day, in most regions.

As for taxes, that is another debate, but I don't see how Amazon paying more taxes would prevent people from working for Amazon?

nopriorarrests• 7 years ago

It's interesting that french employees working for american company was fired for complaining (or boycotting) about said company on website which belongs to another american company.

Sign of the times...

mc322• 7 years ago

Regardless of the merits or lack of merits, the Yellow Vest movement lacks the general support worker-related social movements tend to have probably because they don’t perfectly align with mainstream accepted leftist ideology.

On the one hand they are socialist, on the other hand they are seen as the French version of Trump supporters, so people who would ordinarily overlook their antiestablishmentarisnim aren’t (damaging private property, blockades, etc.), but on the other hand government strong tactics (teargas, student arrests, which is usually decried).

In essence, they are conflicted because they identify with workers’ movements just not this workers’ movement.

entity34511• 7 years ago

On the one hand they are socialist

A significant number of Yellow vests are on the far right or at least indeed a French version of Trump-ism.

drugme3• 7 years ago

They got sacked because they supported (on social media) the blocking of Amazon sites and warehouses

But action was aimed not at just those 3 employees. It was clearly aimed at all employees who expressed support the Gilets Jaunes - to intimidate them from further action.

As such, it was a shot across the bow basically.

entity34511• 7 years ago

It was clearly aimed at all employees who expressed support the Gilets Jaunes

And your source is?

csunbird2• 7 years ago

If only everyone in the HN were able to read/speak french.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

Seriously? Browsers will offer to translate it for you.

csunbird2• 7 years ago

It will not be a correct translation unfortunately, as discussed in the a parent comment above, the even the title seems to be not translated correctly.

wolco• 7 years ago

Relying on browser translation will make you sound or what you read unnatural in a lot of languages

youdontknowtho3• 7 years ago

Amazon will lash out at labor where possible. If there is some legal basis for it in France, they will claim that as cover. Pretending that this is some principled legal stance is naive.

It's an exercise of power that all of you should hope is never directed at you because, as this story illustrates, you will lose.

The thing I find amazing is how so many people who aren't, and will never be, a part of the capitalist class actually see themselves as part of it. It's interesting.

DyslexicAtheist4• 7 years ago

I find amazing is how so many people who aren't, and will never be, a part of the capitalist class actually see themselves as part of it.

it has puzzled me for years too. Jacques Ellul sheds some light on this in "The Technological Society". If you consider reading it then it helps to have read Charles Dickens "Hard Times" to get a feel of what he talks about when speaking of the displacement of peasant communities in Victorian times. We see the same thing in China (and every "emerging economy") and seem to accept it (maybe due to our incredible ability to engage in "doublethink") as just being the normal part of "progress".

patrickg_zill2• 7 years ago

The yellow vest movement has been tragically under-covered by the US media. Perhaps they don't want the proles in the US to get any ideas...

rb666• 7 years ago

Americans actually have something to protest about, French is comparatively speaking a social mecca. I am missing out any sort of realism from these yellow vests. Climate change is coming, organizing months of protests about your car fuel costs is shortsighted to say the least.

kaybe• 7 years ago

The way I understood it, the problem is not the fuel costs, it's only a small part of the problem. Prices are rising and wages are not, so people are struggling more and more to get by, and they feel it's about enough now.

mschuster914• 7 years ago

I am missing out any sort of realism from these yellow vests. Climate change is coming, organizing months of protests about your car fuel costs is shortsighted to say the least.

It's not about the car fuel costs per se, it's the feeling that the poorer parts of the population will have to bear the brunt of the cost of climate change while at the same time the richer parts enjoy massive tax breaks. People in France protest against the social injustice, the fuel tax was just the thing that blew the trigger on months of brewing frustration.

fenga2• 7 years ago

Hello, I am french and I continuously have to repeat that he situation has nothing to do with climate.

Long post warning, TL;DR at the bottom.

While it first started because of a tax on gas, it's not the tax per se that lead to the protest, but the fact that this tax was put in place to compensate the elimination of a tax on "fortune".

The whole protest is now kind of a clusterfuck of demands, but most of them are around 2 themes : - Fiscal injustice - Our model of democracy

Fiscal injustice: Pretty much every french feels like the high level of taxes we pay does not end up where we want nor where it is useful. It is not really that we want less taxes, but that we want them used intelligently. Our education system gets worse and worse every year because of budget cuts. Our healthcare system gets worse and worse every year because of budget cuts. Our justice system gets worse and worse every year because of budget cuts. Our retirement and social protection in global get worse and worse because of budget cuts.

Meanwhile, we get more taxes but nobody can really see where it goes.

On top of that, our government privatize what was once the best services that could show to the world. We had world class train infrastructure at a low price. That didn't go well because of budget cuts that lead to reduction of maintenance, that lead to the classic late trains that we are now famous for. Our small train lines are getting abandoned, leading to whole part of the territory being cut out of the rest of France (in a railway point of view). Our petrol foraging was state based and profitable, so was our electricity infrastructure management and production, engineering and such. Everything is getting sold for quick cash, when it was either profitable or at least a public service that was in a natural monopoly that will never be correctly managed under private ownership. The most famous example are our highways. State funded, then the exploitation was privatized. It's now expensive as hell, generates 60% of profit that ends up in the pocket of private companies instead of the state.

On top of this kind of economical ultra-liberalism that we're all culturally against pretty much in France, and empirically against if I can say, we have an ideological problem with the decisions that he government takes since decades. To make it short, it's always gifts to public companies or ultra-rich people, while continuing piling up taxes on the poor. Macron, because it's pretty recent, gave what was called the CICE to french companies, that cost around 60 Billions to the economy, at the condition that they were going to use it by job creation, and overall "trickling it down". The president of the french corporate lobby was fiercely wearing "1 million jobs" badge during the different discussions, because he promised 1 million new jobs at the end of the CICE. The last studies showed that the actual result of the CICE was a creation of between 0 and 250 000 jobs, and that's the generous margin.

While I could continue examples of stupid economic politics in favor of a few loaded people, I'll stop this example here to go on another rant concerning our democratic system.

French democratic system is representative. That means that people vote for other people to represent them in the government. And don't really take parts themselves in the democratic process. Experience has shown that this was indeed an aristocracy, since all representatives don't come from the people, because campaigning for a place in parliament is expensive, and you also need a network and friends in high places, so most of them come from the same class.

That leads to people taking decisions that are completely ignoring real life of common people, not measuring any impact, while also generously serving their own personal interests. A whole lot of corruption keeps getting revealed day after day, since decades, and people can't really do anything about. Even in good faith, these people didn't evolve in their life with "normal" people. They stayed in their own social class, and can't relate to the life of people living with minimal wage, or living in the countryside, or just having a normal job having a median pay. They are part, for most of them, of the 1%, and can't really realize what normal people go through because they're the product of their environment.

We also have a president that has a strong role in the politic of our country. The election system that we have is, in my opinion, one of the worse. It has 2 elections, a first one where you vote for the candidate you feel the closest to, and a second one that plays between the 2 most voted of the first vote. Let's be honest, while it's not as bad as the bipartisan system that the US has, it's not that far off. You get spread votes in the first vote, usually best you can get is 25% of votes in first turn, which is what happened in our last elections. We had 4 to 5 candidates with really close results in term of votes. Second elections, you get Macron vs Le Pen which is the far right leader in french politics. People, in France, pretty much never vote "for" a candidate in the second election, but "against" one. In this case, most people voted against the extreme right, but not really because they liked Macron.

So now we get a president that something around 25% of voters wanted (abstention because people don't really believe in our system is kind of high also), and that is also applying a program that is far much on the right side of the compromise he was publicly announcing that he was going to make.

People feel betrayed, feel that their opinion don't matter, and feel that the people that can change that have a conflict of interest in changing these matters. This is why it is the 12th week that people are in the street. This is also why most protester are also converging towards a common cause: the RIC (Citizen Initiative Referendum), that could make citizens able to propose laws, abrogate laws, revoke politicians or modify our constitution. All changes that people want could be proposed using this new tool, which is why a change in our system is now the first thing that people request during the protest.

I won't talk about he media propaganda around this event, or the repression of the protests in this post becuase this is yet another sensitive subject, but I wanted to provide at least a bit more context.

TL;DR : No, this is not about gas price. This is about fiscal injustice, and a poor representation of the interest of the citizens in our current political system and/or corruption. Also Macron keeps insulting the common people so that doesn't help I guess.

rsynnott• 7 years ago

If anything it’s been overhyped. It’s a smallish tax protest. The Irish water tariff protests a few years back were larger, for a much smaller country, and got very little international coverage, say.

patrickg_zill2• 7 years ago

Your statement is not supported by reality. As even a cursory web search easily shows.

andrewmcwatters• 7 years ago

From an ironic American perspective, it seems the Irish have a warped perspective of what's "smallish."

etaerc2• 7 years ago

In my country you are by law required to be loyal to your company even if its doing illegal or unfair things, even after you quit. So if you just get fired and not get sued for damages that would be considered a good result here. And I live in a country with relatively good employee laws.

saagarjha• 7 years ago

What country is this?!

sgift• 7 years ago

by law required to be loyal to your company even if its doing illegal or unfair things And I live in a country with relatively good employee laws.

No, you don't. These two quotes cannot be true at the same time, especially for the illegal part.

etaerc2• 7 years ago

welcome to the real world, bro.

ionised3• 7 years ago

Tell us what fictional country you originate from where the law dictates that you must aid and abet breaking of the law by a current or previous employer.

arcaster2• 7 years ago

This is why keeping your political and professional life separate is important. Speaking out against your employer is juvenile, although if they hadn't spoken out against their employer it's more of a grey area - but having a high paying tech job is not a right it's a privilege.

ionised3• 7 years ago

Speaking out against your employer is juvenile

Why?

arcaster2• 7 years ago

Doing this and not expecting to get fired is idiotic... Seems rhetorical to me...

A tech job isn't a right it's a privilege. Plenty of other people would love to have a tech job at <insert big tech co. here> and have enough sense to not tweet "fuck <insert big tech co. here> on twitter...

seszett• 7 years ago

high paying tech job

Employees in Amazon warehouses are not highly paid and don't even have a "tech job". They're paid minimum wage for a physically demanding job.

Amazon fires employees who supported “yellow vest” blockades of Amazon sites

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