Category: employees

Why Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize

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This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning journalism nonprofit. It is co-published here with permission. The union organizing drive at the mammoth Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama located 20 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, has the feel of both a social and religious movement. There are five days until the mail-in ballots will be counted to determine whether the company’s 5,800 employees will gain union representation. Last week, organizers and workers gathered at the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s scruffy office to go over their final push and to talk to reporters from around the world who have descended upon Birmingham. Jennifer Bates, an African American “learning ambassador” at the Amazon facility—she trains new workers—believes that her courage to fight the corporate giant comes from a spiritual source, “the Almighty, the creator of all things.” She also traces her personal strength to the civil rights movement that rocked Birmingham in the early 1960s. “I really believe that in this organizing drive we are following the foot soldiers who came before us,” she says. Josh Brewer, the union’s lead organizer, is an ordained minister from Michigan who found his way into the labor union movement while trying to ensure his life had purpose, and he was immediately given some of the toughest organizing challenges. Brewer sees the Amazon campaign as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, his biggest career challenge so far. On this day Brewer has one eye on the office television to see if a tornado sweeping through Mississippi and Alabama is going to require moving into the basement, as he reflects on the five-month and 24/7 commitment that he has made to the unionization effort Read More …

Employee surveillance software is here to stay, even when we go back to the office

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For many people, switching to work remote was a hopeful chance to escape the prying eyes of upper management. No longer would they feel pressure to act busy when bosses walked past, or feel guilty about logging into Twitter (even if it is for work purposes). But despite the physical distance, businesses are keeping closer tabs on employees than ever before. The use of performance monitoring tools has jumped significantly over the past year, as managers try to improve team visibility and track output. Even before the crisis, 62% of organizations were using monitoring tools to collect data on employees’ behavior during work hours.  After a year of remote work, those tools have become securely integrated into companies’ day-to-day. Although a return to offices is approaching, managers are unlikely to roll back software that’s provided insight, especially as many businesses will continue to offer work from home as an option. But there’s a fine line between surveillance and management, and there’s an even finer line between legitimate reasons to monitor staff and an illegal intrusion on people’s privacy Read More …

How tech companies can work with HBCUs to meaningfully improve equity

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Over the past few years, we’ve seen various efforts to address racial disparity in terms of opportunity, access, and financial support for Black entrepreneurs and technologists. This includes everything from big tech company reports that document progress in diversifying their workforce to the onboarding of high-profile diversity and inclusion officers to address and improve the lack of D&I internally. But progress has still been glacially slow. That’s why corporations need to adopt a “yes, and” approach when it comes to improving diversity in the technology industry. This way of thinking comes from the world of improv, where all actions are supposed to be built upon. Instead of adopting “yes, and,” corporations all too often follow the lead of their competitors or simply dust off last year’s playbook, choosing comfort over innovation—yes, we need a more diverse workforce, so let’s do more of the same. The technology industry’s engagement with historically Black colleges and universities as a vehicle to recruit talent is one area where a “yes, and” approach would pay significant dividends. Although companies like Google, Apple, and others from the Fortune 1000 have committed more than $66 billion to racial equality initiatives since the killing of George Floyd by police, this funding alone will not solve the issue of bias toward and ultimately lack of access for HBCU students when it comes to getting into the tech industry. Are HBCUs a great source for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates? Absolutely. Read More …

India’s punishing new social media rules could be a nightmare for the tech giants

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In late February, India, the second-largest internet economy, released new regulation that is supposed to hold social media platforms “accountable against their misuse and abuse.” The new digital media rules aim to tighten the government’s grip over how social networks regulate their content. Along with the changes, the country’s ruling administration has also reportedly dispatched written warnings threatening to jail Facebook and Twitter’s India-based employees if they fail to comply. The message is clear: Follow the government’s orders or risk prosecution. In a punishing move, tech companies only have three months to update their platforms to comply.  As the lines between political speech, hate speech, and misinformation blur, social media platforms have increasingly found themselves in a constant censorship battle with local authorities. Similar rules to India’s have been rolled out by many other countries before, like Germany, whose NetzDG law mandates removal of illegal content within 24 hours, and Australia, which penalizes social networks for not taking down abusive and violent posts in a timely manner.  But India’s new law edges closer to the digital censorship of autocratic nations such as Russia and China, and could endanger the very foundation of free expression online.  At its core, the new rules remove legal protections for tech companies over what their users post. If an “unlawful” piece of information—anything that’s prohibited under the country’s law— is reported by the local authorities, the new regulation requires that social networks act, else face the loss of immunity and potentially criminal prosecution.  That might sound reasonable on the surface. Read More …

The startup that saved the restaurant industry in the nick of time

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Nick Kokonas, CEO of the restaurant reservations platform Tock, is meeting a handful of new employees over Zoom for the first time. The latest hires of his rapidly growing Chicago-based company are tuning in from their apartments. He’s logging in from a house in Lake Tahoe that he’s rented for a few weeks in January in an attempt to take a vacation after an extraordinarily busy year.  The plan is to welcome his employees to the company with an introductory pep talk. He’ll explain how his 6-year-old reservation system is designed to help chefs manage both their dining rooms and kitchens more efficiently. He’ll go on to tell them about the way it threw a lifeline to independent restaurants during the pandemic by allowing their kitchens to offer take out and delivery service on better terms than other platforms. And then he’ll explain how the 140-person company is now taking on some of the biggest industry players with a tech platform that gives more control to chefs and restaurateurs. He is, after all, co-owner of Chicago’s renowned Alinea restaurant, along with several other eateries in the city, and has spent the past decade and a half thinking about what a restaurant needs to survive and even thrive.  But before he begins, Kokonas wants to set one thing straight: He did not purchase the large wooden yin-yang that hangs above his head. “This is not my house. This is not my yin-yang,” he tells his new hires. “This is T. Read More …