> You should know that cheerleading Amazon's continued abuse of employees is not a good look.
That's true, but that doesn't appear to be what happened here. It doesn't appear to be abuse.
> This is someone's livelihood you're talking about.
And, if I'm understanding it correctly, that person intentionally effectively brought a deadly weapon to the workplace after being told not to. Their response doesn't seem like abuse, it seems within reason, even if maybe there were other, better options.
>And, if I'm understanding it correctly, that person intentionally effectively brought a deadly weapon to the workplace after being told not to.
You are not understanding it correctly.
Amazon told the worker to quarantine three weeks (!) after they were near another co-worker who had COVID-19.
Amazon did not tell the person with the virus to quarantine. (!)
Amazon did not tell any other worker to quarantine. (!)
Amazon only came up with the "quarantine" argument AFTER the worker led a strike that demanded better health and safety measures.
It's clear Amazon acted unlawfully in this instance, and that the quarantine argument was a pretext in order to fire someone for an action that is protected by law.
You are not understanding it correctly, because Amazon is trying to make it difficult to do so.
The infected person last reported to work on March 11. A two-week period had passed. The striker was the only person ordered to self-quarantine, and he was ordered to do so only after announcing his intention to lead a strike, after any risk of infect had passed.
Can you explain why you only had skepticism towards the worker in this situation, and none towards Amazon?
I'm glad you reevaluated your position once you had more information, but I'm genuinely confused by the thought process in comments like your original comment. Amazon has a history of treating warehouse workers terribly (docking points for taking too many breaks, and firing workers with too many points etc), and this is documented in lots of news articles. They deployed a PR team on Twitter to talk about how their warehouse conditions were great - and the PR team felt the need to mention that they even got bathroom breaks, as if that is something to be proud of. They even have a reputation for treating their office workers like crap, although this varies somewhat from team to team (based on my own experience and those of my friends who also worked at Amazon as software devs, turnover is pretty high). It's actually not that easy to find a journalist willing to listen to you, and requires a lot of persistence and courage on the part of the worker risking their job. Especially with a company with as much power as Amazon, I'm sure many of the workers reaching out to journalists fear that Amazon will be able to figure out who talked.
So where does this skepticism towards the worker's stories come from?
I didn't express skepticism towards anyone involved. Rather,was basing my opinion based purely on the facts I saw presented in the article.
1. Amazon told him to self quarantined because he had been exposed, to not return to the place of work for 2 weeks
2. He came back before the 2 weeks was up
3. The fired him for it
Given those facts, action 3 seems reasonable. I even prefaced my thoughts indicating that they the actions only reason reasonable if I my understanding of the situation is correct.
Turns out, my understanding of the situation was incorrect. More information was presented. If that information is also true, then their actions (firing him) no longer seem reasonable.
