Tech Brew Ride Home - Tues. 11/26 - Amazon Prime Cuts

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

Google fires four workers associated with labor organizing, Amazon's ruthless quotas lead to high rates of warehouse injuries, grass-roots opponents to Amazon's power form a coalition, a report cites the public cost of Amazon warehouses on Southern California, the California DMV is selling driver information, the Rev transcription service exposes contractors to horrific recordings, Facebook pays people to take surveys, Zuckerberg mostly listens to old white men, a TikTok teen spreads the news about Chinese mistreatment of Muslim Uyghurs, and Texas Instruments keeps toting up new profits from an old calculator style. Sponsors Silicon Valley Bank Mealime Links: Google fires four workers, including one tied to protests (Bloomberg) Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees (the Atlantic) Amazon's Own Numbers Reveal Staggering Injury Rates at Staten Island Warehouse (Gizmodo) Grass-roots activists on Amazon's power coalesce (New York Times) Amazon costs Southern California big time in public assistance for its workers, environmental and transportation impact (Economic Roundtable) California DMV makes $50 million a year selling personal information (Vice) Rev Transcribers Hate the Low Pay, But the Disturbing Recordings Are Even Worse (The Verge) Facebook pays people to take surveys (Engadget) Zuck talks to old white men (Bloomberg) TikTok suspended a teen who posted a viral takedown of China disguised as a makeup tutorial (Business Insider) The Texas Instruments Chained-Calculation Massacre (Medium's GEN) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Tuesday, November 26, 2019. Today, Google fires four workers associated with labor organizing. Amazon's ruthless quotas lead to high rates of warehouse injuries.

Grassroots opponents to Amazon's power form a coalition. A report cites the public cost of Amazon warehouses on Southern California. The California DMV is selling driver information. The Rev transcription service exposes contractors to horrific recordings. Facebook pays people to take surveys. Zuckerberg mostly listens to old white men. A TikTok teen spreads the news about Chinese mistreatment of Muslim Uyghurs, and Texas Instruments keeps toting up new profits from an old calculator style.

I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Brian McCullough, and here's what you missed in the world of tech today. Google fired four workers Monday for what the company described in a memo as clear and repeated violations of our data security policies. However, at least two have been publicly asked. in protesting internal company decisions and had previously been placed on administrative leave. In the leaked memo, which Google verified as accurate for several media outlets, the company said the four workers had engaged in systematic searches for other employees' materials and

work and had set up notifications based on calendar events to alert them about certain employees' personal appointments. The Abbasi Group Tech Workers Coalition said in a tweet, all four employees were involved in labor organizing. This is sure to exacerbate tensions between Google management and its employees, on Friday, 200 Google staff held a rally outside the company's San Francisco office to protest the suspension of Rebecca Rivers and Lawrence Burland,

two of the four fired on Monday. As Google workers have become increasingly vocal in public in opposing company decisions to work on government surveillance and identification programs and company guidelines on and enforcements of hate speech and extremism, Google has likewise reversed

two decades of encouragement of open-ended and freewheeling internal discussions. It's also pushed back heavily on public discussions and demonstrations. In August, 1,500 employees signed a petition arguing that Google shouldn't make a bid for a contract with customs and border protection. The next month, Google hired a former Homeland Security official, which resulted in questions posted on the firm's internal employee discussion boards ahead of an all-hands meeting. Those questions were reportedly deleted before the meeting, according to BuzzFeed. Employees have also complained about Google's handling of sexual harassment and

assault allegations. This resulted in thousands of Googlers walking out a year ago in protest. Then, in May, another walkout protested retaliation against some of those who had walked out in November 2018. Bloomberg quotes a statement from a group attempting to organize Google employees as a union who said, this is classic union busting dressed up in tech industry jargon and we won't stand for it. Last month, Bloomberg heard from Google employees who requested anonymity that Google had a team developing a monitoring tool for the custom Chrome browser used on company computers for internal searches. Just a few days ago, the New York Times reported Google had hired a firm known for consulting

on ways for companies to resist union formation. Federal labor law protects workers against retaliation from collective action, including organizing efforts. Enforcement is the key, though. The Trump administration may not support labor rights, but it also has a vendetta against Google, which it accuses of bias without evidence. Amazon has moved continuously towards faster shipping with its prime subscribers receiving products in some cities within a day, sometimes within hours.

This is part of an expensive and aggressive effort on Amazon's part to continue to claw away market share from bricks and mortar retailers. But four news stories today indicate the costs that come with the relentlessness that Amazon has been known for from the start. A disturbing analysis of warehouse injury data coupled with stories of death, maiming, and permanent disability appeared in a collaboration. collaboration between the Atlantic and reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Of the records obtained, Amazon's rate of injury in 2018 was 9.6 serious injuries per 100 full-time

workers. The industry average for warehouses is four per 100. This is in part due to a super fast pace that has to be kept and which was made worse by the introduction of robots to parts of the process. The Atlantic quotes David Michaels, the former head of the Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA, according to Amazon's own record, the risk of work injuries at fulfillment centers is alarmingly, unacceptably high. An Amazon spokesperson told the Atlantic that the high rate reflects the company's conservative reporting of injuries. However, injury reporting is strictly mandated and governed by law. The story also relies on interviews with a number of former workers, including those who oversaw

safety. In one gruesome incident, a new worker in Indiana was crushed by a forklift he was repairing. A state safety inspector concluded he wasn't given proper and required safety training. that inspector was allegedly, effectively overruled and outmaneuvered by superiors and officials all the way up to the governor. Some of those discussions he captured on audio. Indiana was one of 20 finalists at the time competing for Amazon's purported second headquarters, which was revealed largely as a sham process. The inspector's boss told him in the recording, quote, I hope you don't take it personally if we have to manipulate your citations, end quote. The state ultimately made it sound as if the worker were responsible for his own death.

The inspector quit his job. The governor received a $1,000 donation from Amazon notable because it was out of the normal fundraising and election cycle. While injury reports aren't a matter of routine public disclosure, an Obama-era-move towards making that so was reversed under the Trump administration, reveal relied on a smart loophole. Businesses are required under federal law to provide complete injury records to any current or former employee who requests them.

The data-driven news organization reveal advice. the number of workers on how to request the data and then compiled it along with some data from worker advocacy groups to cover 23 out of 110 of Amazon's fulfillment centers spanning 14 states. Amazon told workers the information was confidential and had to be kept secret, which OSHA confirmed was not accurate. The records may be freely shared. Next up, Gizmodo reports on exceedingly high injury rates at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse with data obtained in a similar fashion via worker request. The Staten Island warehouse house labeled JFK-8 had an injury rate of 15.2 per 100 full-time workers in 2018. That's about

50% higher than Amazon's overall average of 9.6 per 100 calculated by reveal. Gizmodo provided contrasting rates of average injuries in other industries, which include 6.1 per 100 for sawmills and 10.2 per 100 for steel foundries. Because injuries can include relatively minor ones up through the most damaging, a severity scale allows apples-to-apples comparisons, making JFK-8 comparable to the most dangerous professions, says Frank Curl, a staff lawyer with Make the Road, a nonprofit focused on immigrant justice. That includes solid waste workers and police officers. The severity was 64, a number which means that two months of work was missed on average for each reportable injury. Gizmodo says the warehouse opened in September 2018 and, quote,

garnered a reputation as grueling and unsafe, even among a logistics network broadly criticized as such, end quote. Last month, a New York nonprofit that keeps an eye on workers' safety released a report that severely criticized this warehouse. Amazon told Gizmodo via a statement in response to the article much of the same information it gave the Atlantic and reveal. The statement said, quote, efforts to paint our workplace as such based solely on the number of injury recordings is misleading, given the size of our workforce, end quote. But injury data is always adjusted for the number of workers, not the size of the workforce. Amazon said, quote, ensuring the safety, of associates in our building is our number one priority, and we invest heavily in safety. Now on to the New York Times, where David Streitfeld reported on three dozen grassroots groups that have issues with Amazon's labor policies, marketplace influence, and surveillance state products. They've banded together into a coalition called Athena. With Amazon's vast economic footprint, huge workforce, and nearly unprecedented political influence, the group hopes to provide scrutiny and data to keep the company's actions in check. The Open Society's

Foundations is providing some of the $15 million in funding the group is raising to cover its first three years of operation. George Soros funded Open Society, which would normally provoke a stream of vitriol from the right and far right, often veering to the anti-Semitic or even openly bigoted as Soros is Jewish and has been made into a stalking horse for dictators and GOP politicians. However, Trump's apparent hatred of Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and Amazon may mute the anti-soros tone. Stridefeld notes, Athena came after several successful grassroots efforts by different groups yielded success.

Amazon was shamed into raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour nationally last year. It gave up pursuing its faux HQ2 proposal in New York, seemingly unhappy to not be welcomed with open arms, and surprised to be mocked by community activists who didn't like Amazon's anti-union stance and what the city and state had ostensibly already agreed to, including big giveaways, without neighborhood or citizen involvement. By contrast, the Virginia Amazon announcement produced less reaction because Virginia gave the company quite a lot less relative to jobs promised and didn't hijack existing neighborhoods. In my hometown of Seattle, Amazon flooded the most recent elections we had for city counselors this fall with about $1.5 million donated to political action committees. That was part of $4 million spent overall by PACs that include both businesses and labor.

In opposing a socialist incumbent, Kshwama-Sawant, business interest PACs spent over $600,000 on behalf of her opponent. Peck supporting her spent a grand total of $1,326. She won her race. Five of the seven candidates not supported by Amazon won in total and a sixth had both labor and business support. Quote, we're learning from what makes Amazon back down and looking to replicate that as much as possible

with as many people as possible, and quote, Athena's director told Straitfeld. And for the final Amazon story, the Economic Roundtable released a report on the negative financial and public consequences of Amazon's footprint in Southern California. The nonprofit research group issues reports on social and economic issues, and this report was underwritten by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor,

which the Roundtable says didn't affect its research. Among other detail, the report said due to Amazon paying warehouse workers below a living wage, one that allows an individual or family to pay for food, housing, clothing, health care, and other basic costs of living, for each dollar in wages paid by Amazon, public assistance programs paid another 24 cents in benefits. That's over $5,000 an average per worker per year or nearly $100 million a year. The report says 86% of logistics workers earn below the living wage in their counties.

They make only half the living wage annually, 14% live below the poverty level, and 31% are just above the poverty level. The report also estimates $642 million in, quote, uncompensated public costs for warehouse trucking, end quote, a more speculative and likely controversial figure that covers noise, road wear, accidents, and harmful emissions. This results from what the report says are 21,500 diesel truckloads a day that traverse the four counties covered in the report. Other non-Amazon and non-Google news also happened. Motherboard obtained a document that shows the California DMV makes $50 million a year, selling personal information about the state's drivers, such as name, address, and car.

registration details. This isn't unusual. Many DMVs sell our data off to companies, but Motherboard called out the information that received in a Public Records Act request because California has ostensibly been at the vanguard of personal privacy. That includes a 2018 law passed that slated to take effect in 2020 that imposes a number of requirements on companies doing business in California about how they manage and secure information they obtain and retain about people. The law calls for fairly significant fines for misbehaving firms and those. that don't provide proper disclosure. Motherboard says from a previous investigation it conducted that LexisNexis, which has a division that accumulates information about consumers, and Experian,

a credit reporting agency, are among the firms that purchase DMV data. Some DMVs also sold information to private investigators, but the site says it can't determine if California has done so recently. The DMV told motherboard that buyers may also include insurance companies, vehicle manufacturers, and prospective employers. A spokesperson told motherboard, quote, information is only released pursuant to legislative direction and the DMV continues to review its release practices to ensure information is only released to authorize persons slash entities and only for authorized purposes. End quote. The firm Rev relies on what it says is over 50,000 piecework paid transcriptionists to create high quality text from audio and video recordings submitted by its

customers, which include news networks, police agencies, health care providers, and plain old normal corporations. Rev made the news when it cut its already low rate of pay further. Previously, its standard rate allowed at least some workers to meet the federal minimum wage of 7.25 an hour, though no hourly rate is guaranteed. Workers also claim that the company allowed unfettered access to recordings in its database that hadn't yet been picked up for assignment, potentially damaging the privacy and confidentiality of its customers. But the Verge report something even more disturbing. Audio isn't screened in any fashion, and that's resulted in the transcribers being exposed to a wide array of horrific material. The Verge says nearly every contractor of the service

it spoke with had been exposed to such recordings on multiple occasions. This included recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, the Verge reports, and in one instance, a breast augmentation filmed by a physician's cell phone being performed on a patient who is under sedation. It's often impossible to know at the start of a recording what material will appear in it, transcriptionists say, sometimes they are far into a job

and abandoning it would lose the compensation for time they'd invested so far and give them a lower score in a commitment category if that abandonment happened after the first hour of work. Rev told the Verge that all files are categorized, but the Verge had screen captures of many files without a subject assigned. Rev told the publication as well

that customers are, quote, prohibited from uploading offensive content. This included a long list, but contractors told the verge they routinely transcribe recordings that fall within that list of prohibited material. A new California law heading into effect January 1st imposes strict requirements on what constitutes a contractor, forcing companies to shift many people into employment status. This is an attempt to tighten up the gig economy and prevent people from being miscategorized as contractors who are in effect employees already, without receiving the benefits that come

with employment. That could give people like Rev transcriptionists, higher earnings, more power, and the ability to organize. Rev, however, recently sent out email that it will no longer allow residents of California to be contractors on their system. One of the many ways in which Facebook has earned criticism over privacy issues and adhering to generally accepted norms of behavior was when it paid teenagers $20 a month in gift cards to use a VPN and a special certificate that let the company observe all their behavior while also violating Apple developer guidelines or apps. Anyway, that was so last year.

Well, so January 2019. Facebook is back with a more above board approach, which it calls viewpoints. It pays you directly to take surveys, starting with users in the United States, who are 18 years or older. You can earn points by answering questions. The first one, according to TechCrunch,

is a well-being survey that takes 15 minutes to fill out and earns the equivalent of $5. Payouts will be directly via PayPal. I know it's shocking, but Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg listens mostly to old white men. Yes, I'm as surprised as you are. Zuckerberg creates a challenge for himself every year, like learning Mandarin, becoming a vegetarian but also eating meat he slaughtered himself, and helping foster genocide in Myanmar.

No, wait. That last one was an allegedly unintended consequence of his alleged management decisions. His 2019 challenge was to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology and society. Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner analyzed who he picked, and Zuckerberg spoke to nine people, eight of them were men and over 40, seven were professors or doctors, and almost all were white. Facebook's U.S. staff is 9% black and Hispanic and 37% female. A teenager in the U.S. managed to get the word out about China putting at least a million Muslims from the U.Gar community into re-education camps by creating a TikTok video that starts with advice on eyelash styling and segways into a political discussion.

China claims the camps are voluntary education and training centers. Her first of three videos has had 1.4 million views on the TikTok app, and versions uploaded to Twitter have been seen over 5 million times. The teen claims that TikTok blocked her from posting new content shortly after she posted three videos of this kind, claiming she had violated its rules related to political speech, and saying she had posted a video from another account that showed Osama bin Laden. TikTok is a Chinese firm and has a separate version of the app used in China that censors content that appears within that country.

Finally, did you wonder why Texas instruments graphing calculators have remained expensive around $100 for decades? Why hasn't anyone produced a cheaper replacement and why can't students use an app or a website instead? Maya Kossoff digs into the cash cow that is the TI 83, 84, and 89 series and the financial hardship it imposes

on schools and teachers where students' families may be unable to feed their kids consistently but are asked to come up with the cash for one of these devices. Some schools purchase units and have them on hand. In other cases, teachers use their own money and donations to buy a set and then take them with them when they move schools. The profit margin may be as high as 90%

on these devices, which have changed relatively little over decades. On donors choose, nearly $18 million has been raised since 2005 across tens of thousands of teacher fundraising projects to acquire T.I. graphing calculators. My advice, visit a pawn shop, a strategy noted in the article, and where my wife was able to get a fully functional modern model for about 40 bucks and that's the news I'm Glenn Fleischman in for Brian McCullough we'll be back tomorrow if you'd like to have your own collection of unique type and printing artifacts visit tiny tight museum.com to find out about my latest project and find related photos on Instagram at Glenn F dot G L-E-N-N-F-F-F-F-Fank

D-O-T thanks to the editors at TechMeme who tweet out every headline they post every hour of the day at TechMeme it's a great way to keep current have a great evening