>> Part of the show, Kenny Clips, is back the follow up on amazon, which is course fresh off
its defeat, in the unionization of Staten island warehouse. A massive win for the labor movement,
really bad news for Amazon which has been fighting as hard as it can, to stop people from organizing.
In a lot of different ways, including illegal ways and in bizarre ways and that's where Ken
Klippenstein most recent reporting comes in. So they have apparently on their employee messaging
app, they have a list of words that will be banned. And get you flagged potentially
for disciplinary review, God only knows people, could end up losing their jobs.
They have an app, they can ban certain words, take a look at what words
there actually banning here. This is going to be basically any keywords pertaining to labor unions,
and by the way you can get a full rundown on this on The Intercept. Ken's got his piece up, now
this is an automatic word monitor that would also block a variety of terms.
That could represent potential critiques of the working conditions like slave labor, prison,
plantation, restrooms, just the word restrooms. And by the way, so this system to identify
problem employees was created back in November of last year. And there was a meeting,
following that they had an auto bad word monitor that they put together, a black list of words.
To give you an idea of how dumb this system is, the phrase this is dumb, is banned on the app.
You can't say this is dumb about anything, here's the full list of the no, no words by the way,
things like union, fire, terminated. You can probably understand that vaccine,
favoritism, trash, diversity, you can't talk about diversity, fairness.
Like literally Dan, this is among the most technologically 1984, anti union moves, I've ever
seen in my life, this is amazing stuff and great work by Ken. Yeah, shout out to Ken Klippenstein
bringing the heat since, I hope he was born in a year that Ryan was six, but whatever.
This is a great reporting from him, and also goes to show how
another thing that needs to be acknowledged as the National Labor Relations Board. They
are the policing body that's supposed to look at companies,
and make sure that union busting efforts are not happening. Especially these large corporations,
everything happening at Amazon, it's not just because it's such a big part of our lives.
We're always getting packages, a lot of people are seeing the trucks, I was out in a rural area
a couple of months ago. And I saw Amazon trucks moving through there along,
it's such a big part of society. It is literally
one of the biggest companies in the world that, we have records on, so to speak.
And if anyone are an example of what can be afforded to workers, what can be afforded to
employees. We did a story earlier about how Amazon did a sponsorship with Politico, because they
wanted to get in front of the eyes of political people. That hey, you don't need to do anything
about Amazon, one cool thing Amazon does for its employees, is that we pay for their tuition.
If they want to go to college or whatever, there might be some strings attached
to that. That's probably relying on you not typing the word restroom in your Amazon chat,
but okay sure they'll pay for your tuition. It's all part of a marketing campaign because,
they've done a calculation, it costs less money.
To weigh the risk of a lawsuit from the National Labor Relations Board,
which is woefully understaffed right now. It costs less money to do these marketing campaigns,
to convince people that Amazon are the good guys. That you don't need to worry
about these people doing unionization efforts, that were destroying because that's a problem.
It costs less money to do those things, than it does to treat workers with respect to make
it. So you don't have Aamazon employees falling out, during hardships working these wild shifts.
Catching COVID-19, because people want their groceries delivered in three hours,
these are things that Amazon has made a calculation.
That it's better to treat their workers almost like shadow, than it is to just
treat them better, and yeah, pretty much that I'm so annoyed with this story. Yeah,
100%, I mean they spend millions of dollars trying to stop unionization,
they illegally confiscate union literature. They throw out all, look at all of what
happened obviously in Bessemmer, where they tried to manipulate the vote and all that.
And now this too, by the way related note, the last episode of John Oliver on this Sunday,
was on trucking and there was a good bit on Amazon there. Many people don't understand
exactly how Amazon deliveries work, it's not how you've been led to believe. But in any event,
can in addition to this reporting also tweeted, and maybe this will be in a follow up report.
Can report that there are some surprisingly senior people at Amazon, sympathetic to the union
efforts. Sponson asked the following question, how sympathetic exactly, do they actually want
an existing union and collective bargaining, and Ken said yes. Now what good does that do Amazon
workers right now, that there's anonymous senior management that favors unionization?
Not a lot of good necessarily, doesn't seem to stop Amazon from trying to absolutely
destroy unionization, but maybe it could pay dividends in the future. We'll have to see.