I suspect the reason for this is that it postpones the need to resolve the action before providing relief to the workers. Without this notice, Amazon could continue to to illegally fire people and eventually might have to pay a price. With an injunction and a threat of contempt the stakes for Amazon to do that are much much higher. Contempt it not something you want to mess with either as a lawyer or as an entity. This basically says "if you continue to fire people and we find (now or later) that you have done so illegally you will be in contempt.
Probably the issue for Amazon is whether they will be able to successfully argue that they had no idea what they were doing was illegal. I'm unclear on what will happen to a lawyer (if anything) for knowingly participating in contempt. Not a lawyer and not a legal expert so just guessing.
Ideally the company's officers would be held in contempt and serve time, but realistically it will just be a monetary fine and no real justice will be had for the employees lives who have been disrupted.
I'm clearly not a lawyer or expert in labor laws, but why a "cease and desist" vs actually initiating legal proceedings against the company?
Is it a good-faith action to allow Amazon to change their behavior before an eventual suit is filed?
I had thought that we had laws preventing exactly what Amazon is being asked to stop doing. Wouldn't breaking those laws be grounds for legal proceedings?
I think the confusing here is between a “cease and desist letter,” which is a letter can anyone to anyone else warning them that you’ll sue them if they don’t stop doing something, and an “injunction to cease and desist”. An injunction is a temporary court ruling made on an urgent matter. The NLRB had to show the court that workers would be permanently harmed if they waited till the full lawsuit was over to force Amazon to stop. Cease and desist just means stop, so you can read this as an injunction to stop firing workers for protesting unsafe working conditions.
Edit: I missed that this was about safety protests, not unionization.
Amazon: We claim that this thing we're (allegedly) doing is technically not illegal.
Court: Fine, you can argue that as a defence, but until you actually win the case, you're ordered to stop doing it anyway, on pain of comtempt of court regardless of whether the thing itself is technically legal.
If Amazon were a person, this would be somewhat unfair for SLAPP reasons, but it's not since it's a corporation, so this is fine and reasonable.
Legal proceedings take a while to initiate and even longer (months/years) to conclude. Injunctions are more "do this immediately or be held in contempt of court".
The article says "The injunction was issued based on a petition for Section 10(j) injunctive relief filed by Kathy Drew King, former Regional Director of Region 29 of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)."
I had missed this. I guess the NLRB asked for this injunction.
I'm still not clear on what if anything changes here though.
Again, to me this "injunction" is like a parent saying "don't do that again...or else!"
To elaborate, a lot of a legal case is determining how an actual situation should be matched to a law.
An injunction essentially says: the court has good reason to presume they match in this way, ergo don't do X, Y, and Z while the case proceeds.
If you then do X, Y, or Z, you have directly defied a court order, which is itself illegal.
So the difference is between being able to construct a defense around "We didn't think what we were doing was illegal" (the original case) vs "We did that thing you told us was illegal while the case proceeds" (violating an injunction). Obviously, it's a lot harder to win a case on the latter.
This is not a NLRB notice / consent decree, this is a court order injunctions so the better question would be "Do you have examples of executives being jailed of violations of court orders"
> ...The injunction also directs Amazon to post, distribute, and read the Court’s order to employees at the Employer’s Staten Island facility (“JFK8”).
But sure, to the wording of the order, they just have to post / distribute / read the order, and:
> ...cease and desist from discharging employees, and from engaging in any like or related conduct, in retaliation for employees engaging in protected activities...
So what's to prevent Amazon from saying, "we haven't broken the law so far and will continue to not do so," while maintaining business as usual in terms of how they respond to unionization attempts?
If anything, what concrete changes are the court requiring here?
The first quote implies there's more things the injunction requires. Your second quote, the content of the the cease and desist clause, is covered by the injunction.
More of the quoted sentence:
> ... issued a Section 10(j) injunction against Amazon.com Services LLC directing Amazon to cease and desist from discharging employees, and from engaging in any like or related conduct, in retaliation for employees engaging in protected activities
Being a corporation and doing illegal stuff that directly harms the lives of lots of regular citizens is OK. At worst, there'll be some trial and you might have to pay a big fine.
Pissing off a judge, however, is something entirely different.
this isn't don't do that again or else, it's "stop doing that because we are charging you with a crime, but it will take a year or two for that to go though all the courts"
An injunction is a legal command, not a demand. This might be semantically dubious. But the former is the judiciary saying, “thou shalt cease and desist.” While the latter is a party saying “stop that or I’ll make life very difficult for us both.”
If you meant the store closings in Seattle, even if Starbucks is acting in bad faith, it is such a horrible situation with how the city council and SPD are handing and responding to crime that it would be impossible to prove anything in court.
It's gotten so much worse since Bruce Harrell has gotten into office. Wild to see the Seattle Chamber acting like he is making things better in Downtown when 2 blocks down the hill from City Hall 7-Eleven closed up shop due to all the tweakers.
Go towards Pioneer Square and the London Plane Coffee Shop there is closing permanently this month, leaving that block of Occidental mostly devoid of foot traffic.
I disagree. Things have gotten better under Harrell, we no longer have an encampment at the Ballard commons, but we are so far in the hole that we have a very long way to go. We also need changes at the county level.
Where did the encampment move to? Cause you realize they don't just go away? They move? The only way to make them go away is to actually find a place for them to live that you're happy with...
Oh even if they find places for them to live, the problem grows with every inbound greyhound. In fact, that’s what happened: they would offer everyone places in a motel or tiny houses, they would leave, more people would move in the next day to take up the free space. The more resources we throw at this problem, the worse it gets. Which makes sense actually, who wouldn’t come to Seattle for a free tiny house and free things at the store (since shoplifting isn’t prosecuted anymore)?
Yes, that's exactly what they say! "It's not my fault I'm addicted to fent, its your fault!"
> The housing first strategy only works of a critical mass of communities participate.
It works for people whose main problem is lack of housing. It doesn't work with people who have other serious problems, all that happens is the house gets burned out and has to be constantly refurbished (so costs are around $100k/year per hard case housed).
You got data with that fear-mongering? I've heard the "problem grows with every inbound greyhound" a lot from the NIMBYs on Nextdoor. But I've never seen anything to demonstrate the problem. Also, it seems pretty easy to build a lot of low-income housing, but no one is willing to do that in an environment like Seattle with high property values. Maybe that will change with higher interest rates.
I think you're also demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of what stops crime... It's not prosecuting crime.
> Which makes sense actually, who wouldn’t come to Seattle for a free tiny house and free things at the store (since shoplifting isn’t prosecuted anymore)?
I wouldn't. Would you?
Neither would anyone who's at, above, or even slightly below that station in life.
That's the thing right, obviously this logic fails once you have a job, friends and some level of comfort. This is what we should actually be investing in.
No, but I’ve encountered many people across the spectrum from lower class to upper middle class who for some reason have no problem with stealing from businesses. Even less reticent if it’s a big chain.
> Neither would anyone who's at, above, or even slightly below that station in life.
Your model of people is incorrect. This is even touched on in an episode of Seinfeld where the parents casually mention “only stealing necessities like batteries”.
> No, but I’ve encountered many people across the spectrum from lower class to upper middle class who for some reason have no problem with stealing from businesses.
What does this have to do with moving across the country to live in a tiny house with a bunch of homeless people? Do you know anyone who would do that? Personally I don't. I also don't personally know anyone who shoplifts once they turned 20.
> Your model of people is incorrect.
Thanks, gonna disagree, although your citing a comedy TV series that ended in the 90s did nearly sway me.
“I’m gonna bury my head in the sand for no reason.”
> citing a comedy TV series that ended in the 90s
Your appeal to absurdity isn’t helping here. Shoplifting hasn’t changed since then and it was on the show precisely because of the weird social divide around it.
Let me help you out with some Wikipedia since you’re shooting from the gut on this one:
> Economists say shoplifting is common because it is a relatively unskilled crime with low entry barriers that can be fitted into a normal lifestyle. People of every nation, race, ethnicity, gender and social class shoplift. Originally, analysis of data about apprehended shoplifters and interviews with store detectives suggested that females were almost twice as likely as males to shoplift. However, since 1980, the data suggest that males are equally or more likely to shoplift than females. The average shoplifter first did it at the age of ten: shoplifting tends to peak in adolescence then steadily declines thereafter. People of all races shoplift equally, and poor people shoplift only slightly more than rich people.[8]
This is exactly my point. Our goal as a society should be to make sure that nobody's in a position where moving to Seattle and living in a tiny house stealing from a Walgreens is a better situation.
This is what I meant when I said: "That's the thing right, obviously this logic fails once you have a job, friends and some level of comfort. This is what we should actually be investing in."
Hasn't the Ballard Alliance been employing ambassadors similar to the Downtown Ambassadors to defend the blocks (pick up trash, encourage homeless to not sleep on defended blocks, etc)?
IIRC their grants and ability to tax local businesses came through under Jenny Durkan's reign, same for the Uptown Alliance covering Queen Anne and Belltown. Jenny Durkan's reign of rainbow colored tear gas was truly awful, but this (and further roads investments) were bright spots.
> Wild to see the Seattle Chamber acting like he is making things better in Downtown when 2 blocks down the hill from City Hall 7-Eleven closed up shop due to all the tweakers.
This apparent contradiction is easy to explain.
Forcing people into rehab is considered inhumane. Tweakers are deemed to be victims of society, and therefore the 'correct' solution is to have more tolerance for tweakers. More tweakers out on the street is evidence that the tweakers feel tolerated, which must mean that it's working.
This won't change until you vote out the local politicians who believe these premises: that forcing people into rehab is inhumane. That tweakers are victims of society's intolerance, and that tweakers wouldn't be a problem if we had more tolerance for them.
You have me laughing my ass off right now. I know one person who is in involuntary detox currently (then onto court ordered rehab). The King County Municipal Court is dishing these out left and right, but that still doesn't prevent relapse 6 months after getting out of rehab.
Then we get all the suburbs dumping their druggies in Pioneer Square and Chinatown. It's a neverending pipeline of addicts the Eastside and south end is dumping on us.
We need to start tracking all non-city LEOs entering Seattle and turn them around if they are giving courtesy rides. Called 911 on one from Bothell yesterday and started filming the occupant and cop. They raced off right quick but I still filed a complaint with Bothell PD.
The east side simply enforces it laws. Ya, they don’t go anywhere in the King County Justice system, but the harassment of getting arrested in Bellevue for doing drugs in public is enough to push them into Seattle where that would simply never occur.
The Eastside dumps it's problems elsewhere, the current homeless situation and lack of facilities east of Seattle is but one example.
Everett has made a huge effort with their rehabilitation and detox programs, but they have the same shitty situation of being the dumping ground for Snohomish County.
There are facilities in Bellevue (east gate) and they do contribute money to the regional shelter fund. But generally the really bad cases will go wherever they are best tolerated (like camping, smoking fentanyl on the bus, shoplifting whatever from Fred Meyer while the cops just watch). So Everett, Seattle, and much of south king county, Tacoma, etc..
They are nowhere near immobile, while metro and sound transit doesn’t even try to collect fares anymore. Bellevue doesn’t need to transport anyone to Seattle, they just send out 5 officers 5 minutes after someone lays down on a park bench. Surely Mill Creek does the same forcing people to Everett. (Lynwood probably has a problem just as bad as Everett)
> The King County Municipal Court is dishing these out left and right,
Hardly, the number of tweakers they throw into rehab is nothing compared to the number of tweakers on the streets. A small percent of tweakers being thrown into rehab isn't going to solve the problem if most of them aren't thrown into rehab.
> suburbs dumping
Local politicians always love to blame others. It's never their fault, of course, and the blame casting always comes with fantasy solutions that will never be implemented, like your idea to "track all non-city LEOs". And each year the problem gets worse. The city is filled with people who think as you do, elect ineffectual politicians who think as you do, and so the city gets what it deserves.
(As someone, unfortunately, living in Seattle) Why wouldn't they, really? I mean, there's a reason the problem is not symmetrical - Seattle PD could do the same with Bothell to balance it out and make it a MAD type of thing, but they don't - why not?
I think willfully stupid people should suffer the consequences of their willful stupidity. It's a bummer I cannot move away from them right now, but I do see how this is totally fair to the stupid people.
Metro or Sound Transit mostly. The east side makes itself inhospitable to porch pirating and public drug use/selling, so the problems wind up in Seattle where the police do much less in those areas.
I’m a fan of the way the east side does things, none of their voters will fault the police for being too strict on enforcement of quality of life issues. But Seattle voters are different, so this is what we get. It’s neither’s fault, people will just go where they can live life the easiest, do you blame them?
Which it's worth noting also requires incentives in your life to actually improve it. Kicking someone out of rehab when they're cured with no job prospects, no support network and no home has rather predictable results.
> Tweakers are deemed to be victims of society, and therefore the 'correct' solution is to have more tolerance for tweakers.
You should strongly consider that these suppositions are fundamentally wrong. I suggest you read Sanfransicko, written by a longtime progressive democrat activist who had the vanishingly rare intellectual honesty to examine in hindsight the results of the drug and homeless policies he himself fought for. He found that they were disastrous!
> Forcing people into rehab is considered inhumane.
How is it otherwise? Or do we just forget other people's freedom when they do things you don't like?
> Tweakers are deemed to be victims of society, and therefore the 'correct' solution is to have more tolerance for tweakers. More tweakers out on the street is evidence that the tweakers feel tolerated, which must mean that it's working.
Instead of strawpeople and rants, how about trying to find solutions that help everyone?
So what? Do we do nothing at all in life, because it cannot be done perfectly? And I'm not sure you are correct; we probably could help at least the vast majority. Why aren't we? Why stand around debating it. Let's act!
> it’s unfair to expect those living normal lives to suffer because drug addicts exist.
It's life, it's the world you are born into - none other ever has existed. Let's raise ourselves up, and especially abandon the absurd trend - is there a more vicious and dangerous one? - of lacking empathy. I understand disruption; it's a tool; what are we trying to accomplish by eliminating empathy?
You and I need empathy too; we give it, in great volume, and maybe in life we get a little back. We live in the real world, not on an island, and this is very much part of the world. We're expected to do these things - it's necessary, basic life and responsibility, along with being humane and responsible. You weren't born into a pain-free, suffering-free world. Civilization, society, your community runs on these efforts, whether you realize it or not - if not, you are sitting back while others do the hard work. And you cause your share too (including trying to take away others' freedom and dignity) and so do I. These are vulnerable people; they need help and support; they might not be nice, and God knows who is deserving. I'm not throwing any stones.
It is even worse than that when customers who went to those stores are not surprised they were closed down. So like, I’m totally expecting Ballard Starbucks to close eventually given how depressing it’s become, I wouldn’t consider it union busting. I can imagine Capitol Hill and Westlake center were in that boat.
It is really hard to get public support for a union busting narrative when things are in bad shape.
I'm not a lawyer of course. Would they be able to find information during discovery? Either they can find a comparable store that wasn't shut down, that is all the factors that would matter to the business, or a document about why?
They might find something if it got to discovery, but you need a credible case to get there in the first place. Even if they found email saying "lets close the store because we don't want to work with unions" im not sure what that would be illegal.
Firing people for organizing a union is explicitly encoded in law as being illegal. Refusing to publish people's content on your website is covered by no such law; instead, there are laws to the contrary.
People and companies get away with illegal stuff until / unless caught, prosecuted and punished.
You indicate its a genuine question, but I feel you'd have to have just landed on this planet for that to be the case. In kindergarten there are rules, and not everybody who doesn't follow them gets caught. Or if you have siblings, surely you've noticed they would sometimes get away with stuff - unfairly and agonizingly so. And onward it goes with life.
I don't get the hostility. It was a genuine question because my assumption is any sufficiently large corporation is aware of the legal implications, and are a bigger target for litigation.
I know that corporations break laws, there's no need to be flippant.
It was not hostile; but, both questions still seem either disingenuous, or naive (noting that your original question as stated was "how do they get away with it", not "how come some corporations break the law").
As I think Patio11 recently said on another topic - unless you can name a person or role, we should challenge our internal assumptions that "somebody somewhere is keeping track | investigating | doing something about it". There is SO much going on in the world. And unfortunately, a lot of people / companies try to get away with a lot of stuff all the time. So an unbelievable amount slips through. Some of it gets noticed eventually. I'm increasingly saddened by my awareness of how much (vast majority) does not.
Maybe I'm too cynical without knowing it, but based on cursory reading of virtually any news, companies (and/or their leadership, depending on one's framework) do frequently engage in questionable or clearly illegal behaviour, based on their values, needs, priorities, and assessment of risk vs reward.
What you perceive as a contradiction is non-absolutism with regards to the freedom of association. In the collision of two rights, balance is found in nuanced consideration of the particulars of a situation. Here, you're contrasting the rights of workers with the rights of shitposters.
I never considered the two in such light as I deem them completely separate issues, in law and morally. I suppose I'm one of those? I believe it's illegal to fire people for attempting to unionize, and I don't believe there's a law that prohibits social networks from banning arbitrarily (in addition, I suppose, to the law-required bans).
Should there be? Maybe! That'd be a very interesting separate discussion :)
I wonder what the overlap is between people who hate Starbucks for shitting on unions and people who want to be able to get other people fired over Twitter outrage. Really, the whole reason outrage mobs can get companies to fire people is because the people who were fired don't have a strong enough union.
And, no, a union which caves to social media pressure isn't strong.
Counter question, I wonder what is the intersection who believes that it's ok that protestors are violently thrown out of Trump rallies, but think it's a violation of free speech if Twitter bans a post.
Gives a slightly different vibe to them deciding it was a good time to lay off 10,000 employees. I wonder if there's a correlation between people doing protected activities and their manager perhaps thinking they are not doing as good of work.
Of course Amazon knows it's better to just do it and spend ten years in court forcing the other side to prove it, rather than going out of their way to make sure managers aren't biasing their recommendations based on who is being a pain about labor rights rather than who is actually doing good work.
Seems like a better world would make them very worried about even that perception, much less it being true.
There's a lot of misinformation in this thread. As far as I can tell, the injunction has nothing to do with unionization activities, but pertains to covid working condition protest.
While us labor law does protect unionization efforts, it also protects other forms of worker protest outside of the scope of unionization.
Additionally, it is an injunction. This is by definition a order to stop doing something prior to the completion of the complete court case. The final Court decision could come with penalties, or even be decided in Amazon's favor
No, he has been all over the place. The chips act, the student loan forgiveness(pending), the pro union EV moves pissed off his rich buddies but gave some crumbs to the people who voted for him.
This is such a non-excuse for forcing the Unions to work. The fact that US can't afford a rail shutdown could just as quickly be used to say that the railroad companies have to give the union what they want to avert a shutdown, but it went the other way ... Because you know, oligarchy.
If their service is so essential, they should be granted some sick days.
That's defeatest, but that is the Democrat's universal position: Avoid confrontation, start negotiations from what you believe the compromise point will be (I read an article talking about Dem leaders in Congress regularly doing that!).
It is possible to compete, confront, and negotiate for more.
And furthermore, there are a lot of working-class voters who depend on jobs that would be impacted by a rail strike.
And the deal the unions were forced to accept was one brokered by the White House after the unions and rail companies couldn't come to agreement. So presumably more than the rail companies would have been willing to settle on, on their own.
So in terms of voters pissed off vs voters pleased, he probably comes out ahead on this one.
The overwhelming sentiment in my friend group, including some blue-collar types who might not work for a while if there's a rail shutdown, was "please, strike—we can take it". We were all shocked to find out how poorly rail workers are treated. Everyone was very unhappy with Congress and Biden screwing them over.
I think everyone supports key industries striking, until they figure out how many other industries depend on them.
And rail is pretty unique in terms of transport cost : weight. There is no substitute.
On the one hand, I'm not in favor of any industry being required to work. On the other, I do recognize critical industries have responsibilities as well as rights.
A 14% raise w/ back pay + 24% raises (in total over 5 years) + no copay or deductible increases (or changes to healthcare for 5 years) isn't nothing.
In general, they face the same issue airlines do: their primary cost and schedule (aka revenue) limiter is skilled labor. So they try to limit that by maximizing utilization of a minimal number of employees.
It looks like in the US Congress controls railroad labor rules directly via Hours of Service laws [0], so could hypothetically create better scheduling for life events by altering the requirements (e.g. larger blocks of time, at home, in-between shifts) without railroad companies' involvement.
"Awesome, the Internet's down, best day of the year, thanks Baby Jesus, may it never come back".
Though, sure, a few days of that and we'd not be happy. Mostly for heating-related and food-spoilage reasons. All the more reason for Congress to force the railroads to cave—which is to say, to behave halfway reasonably. But, instead they screwed the workers.
I'm curious how hiring's going to go for them, as they start to run out of workers with a bunch of money in the pension system who can't afford to leave, and now that everyone knows what abusive employers they are. I suppose eventually they'll have to relent and go back to pre-Covid staffing levels, or something like it. Guessing they'll fund that by ditching the pensions entirely, or at least scaling them way back. Great excuse to do that, that they've created for themselves.
Can they ditch the pension system? Last I checked (job surfing), they had the RRB, which predated social security [0].
I believe it's been mostly homogenized with SS at this point, so distinct in name only, but I expect there are still active laws on the books from the 30s and 40s that govern it?
Ah, perhaps not. I figured they had a bit more control over it, like some other opt-out systems when SS got set up originally, but it looks like they don't.
I honestly don't know, and at this point it would be digging through almost 100 years of legislative patches to find the current state.
From what I read, they'd basically converged its cost of living and payouts to be Social Security-equivalent (and tied to it for the future), but I believe it's still a distinct program (that just happens to pay the same amount).
There were also some oddities with porting between the two systems (railroad work -> social security work, or vice versa).
It stuck in my mind because the idea of a government-backed retirement system before social security seemed such a weird historical quirk!
Biden did sign the bill, which sucks. But the only way it got to his desk was that 42 Republican Senators and 1 Democratic Senator (Manchin) voted for it. The President is not a king. POTUS gets too much credit and too much blame for things like this.
One major difference between the president and congress is that there is no posturing or "optics." Imagine all 100 senators want to pass a bill because it benefits their "donors", but it's something that society at large would oppose. They can, and do, then strategically organize the vote such that some figure around 50 will vote against it, prioritized by factors like how near their next election is, whether they plan to run again, and how close their elections are.
So when Joe Senator votes against (and, to a much lesser degree, for) something you can't ever really be sure they really do oppose/support it. The TPP was one of the most exceptionally visible examples of this with overt bipartisan strategizing against the voter. By contrast when Joe President signs a bill (or vetoes) it you have 100% certainty that it's his "real" agenda, because that is the ultimate and deciding "vote" excepting the increasingly rare scenario of a congressional veto override.
Put more succinctly, in our original hypothetical changing out those 50 senators who voted for the unpopular bill would have literally 0 impact on its passage. Yet changing the 1 president would. Even if congress might have the ability to override his veto of it, they would be unlikely to do so for an unpopular bill. In reality the bill would never be voted on unless the congress knew the president was on board.
Not sure if there's any criminal case here, but there should be. Fines, even "substantial fines", never seem to work. When executives start getting perp-walked then things will change.
Ideally it would be both, and the fall guy would be senior leadership and include the CEO by default.
Quite frankly, imprisoning the company is the next step - no access to, control or operation of funds, assets or company systems for the duration of imprisonment. It should be as much of a threat to a company's wellbeing as it is to the average man.
In all these situations the firing was illegal, so if you sue(d) then the court could force the employer to reinstate you and compensate you for lost wages.
Without an injunction, the default remedy to civil matters are damages. With an injunction the action can be compelled or prohibited and failure is now subject to _criminal_ penalty.
It is one thing to be a manager at a company getting caught with something and incurring a fine or pay-off a plaintiff. It is another to be held criminally liable. I expect the latter to have much more incentive for compliance.
On November 18, 2022, Judge Diane Gujarati of the United States District Court for the District of Eastern New York issued a Section 10(j) injunction against Amazon.com Services LLC directing Amazon to cease and desist from discharging employees, and from engaging in any like or related conduct, in retaliation for employees engaging in protected activities. The injunction also directs Amazon to post, distribute, and read the Court’s order to employees at the Employer’s Staten Island facility (“JFK8”).
Probably the issue for Amazon is whether they will be able to successfully argue that they had no idea what they were doing was illegal. I'm unclear on what will happen to a lawyer (if anything) for knowingly participating in contempt. Not a lawyer and not a legal expert so just guessing.