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On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s attempt to delay a union vote set to begin on Monday, February 8. For many, the online giant’s bid was seen as a stalling tactic, including a motion to demand votes take place in-person — a clear health risk, as the COVID-19 virus still poses a major threat in the United States and globally.
“Once again Amazon workers have won another fight in their effort to win a union voice,” Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union President Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement regarding the NLRB’s decision. “Amazon’s blatant disregard for the health and safety of its own workforce was demonstrated yet again by its insistence for an in-person election in the middle of the pandemic. Today’s decision proves that it’s long past time that Amazon start respecting its own employees; and allow them to cast their votes without intimidation and interference.”
Amazon, however, said it was disappointed in the decision because it goes against the company’s goal of getting as many people as possible to vote in the election, Amazon spokesperson Heather Knox said in a statement to TechCrunch.
“Even the National Labor Relations Board recognizes that the employee participation rate for its own elections conducted with mail ballots is 20-30% lower than the participation rate for in-person voting,” Knox said. “Amazon proposed a safe on-site election process validated by COVID-19 experts that would have empowered our associates to vote on their way to, during and from their already-scheduled shifts. We will continue to insist on measures for a fair election that allow for a majority of our employee voices to be heard.”
Now, the mail-in voting process will continue as planned and ultimately determine whether Amazon’s Alabama warehouse — which employs around 6,000 — will join the RWDSU, an AFL-CIO affiliate in operation since 1937. The move would be a major watershed moment for Amazon’s blue-collar workforce — and could spur similar unionizing among the 110 or so fulfillment centers the company operates across the U.S.
The vote comes amid a sea change for both blue and white-collar workers in a tech sector that has traditionally rejected such movements. Notable recent examples include a group of Google contracts in Pittsburgh, followed by this year’s launch of an Alphabet Workers Union that includes more than 800 employees. Last February, Kickstarter voted to unionize its workforce, followed by developer platform Glitch the following month.
Tech workers unionize
Unions, which act as an intermediary between workers and their employers, advocate on behalf of employees for better wages, working conditions and other benefits through collective bargaining. While it does cost money to join a union, unionized workers tend to make higher salaries than their non-unionized counterparts. Among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median weekly earnings of $1,144, compared to $958 for non-union members in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Often times these unions are the product of months or years of planning behind the scenes — likely not a surprise for anyone possessing a basic knowledge of the history of labor in the United States. The formation of an Amazon union would present a historic move for labor and tech in the U.S. — a potential outcome the company has been looking to stop dead in its tracks.
Besides seeking to delay the vote, Amazon has also gone all-in on trying to persuade its workers in Bessemer not to vote to unionize. Amazon’s Do It Without Dues website encourages workers to keep things the way they are, instead of having to pay union dues.
“If you’re paying dues…it will be restrictive meaning it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with each other,” the site states. “So be a doer, stay friendly and get things done versus paying dues.”
Meanwhile, workers have complained that Amazon’s anti-union tactics are too much. One worker told The Washington Post they were bombarded with anti-union messaging in the bathroom stall.
Amazon opened the Bessemer warehouse in March 2020 and says it has created more than 5,000 full-time jobs starting with a pay of $15.30 per hour, including healthcare, vision and dental insurance, and 50% 401(K) match, Knox said. She described the work environment as “safe” and “innovative,” and added, “We work hard to support our teams and more than 90% of associates at our Bessemer site say they would recommend Amazon as a good place to work to their friends.”
But Amazon’s labor history has been a spotty one. The company has often come under fire for its treatment of workers — particularly those in logistics and shipping, like the 6,000 currently employed in its Alabama fulfillment center. Many of those issues were amplified throughout 2020, as Amazon employees were deemed “essential workers” in the earliest days of the pandemic’s arrival in the States.
In November, former warehouse employee Christian Smalls filed a suit against the company, citing a failure to provide workers with proper PPE amid the pandemic.
“I was a loyal worker and gave my all to Amazon until I was unceremoniously terminated and tossed aside like yesterday’s trash because I insisted that Amazon protect its dedicated workers from COVID-19,” Smalls said at the time. “I just wanted Amazon to provide basic protective gear to the workers and sanitize the workplace.”
Smalls was fired last March after organizing a walkout at a Staten Island fulfillment center. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that he was fired after “putting the health and safety of others at risk and violations of his terms of employment.”
In April, employees Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa were fired for “repeatedly violating internal policies,” according to the company. The pair were vocal critics of the company’s treatment of warehouse employees — criticism that came to a head during the pandemic.
Then, in September, reports surfaced that Amazon was looking to hire an intelligence analyst. Specifically, Amazon in a job posting said it was seeking someone who would inform higher-ups and attorneys “on sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company.”
Amazon swiftly took down that job post, saying it was “not an accurate description of the role – it was made in error and has since been corrected,” Amazon spokesperson Maria Boschetti said in a statement to TechCrunch at the time.
While Amazon did not give a specific revised description, the company said the role is meant to support its team of analysts that focus on external events, like weather, large community gatherings or other events that have the potential to disrupt traffic or affect the safety and security of its buildings and the people who work at those buildings.
However, that same day, Vice reported Amazon had been spying on workers for years to monitor for any potential strikes or protests. Amazon has since said it will stop using its social media monitoring tool.
“We have a variety of ways to gather driver feedback and we have teams who work every day to ensure we’re advocating to improve the driver experience, particularly through hearing from drivers directly,” Boschetti said in a statement. “Upon being notified, we discovered one group within our delivery team that was aggregating information from closed groups. While they were trying to support drivers, that approach doesn’t meet our standards, and they are no longer doing this as we have other ways for drivers to give us their feedback.”
By unionizing, Amazon workers hope to gain the right to collectively bargain over their working conditions, like safety standards, pay, breaks and other issues. Unionizing would also enable workers to potentially become “just cause” employees versus at-will, depending on how the negotiations go.
“Amazon presents a threat to the very fabric of society and the social contract we work to uphold for all working people,” the union organizers state on their site. “Corporations like Amazon have built decades of increasingly bold and aggressive attacks on workers’ rights that have dramatically eroded union density, harmed working conditions, and lowered the standard of living for many workers. And it’s not stopping. The RWDSU has always stood against anti-worker and anti-union companies. Our union will not back down until Amazon is held accountable for these and so many more dangerous labor practices.”
Mail-in voting ends March 29, with the NLRB set to begin counting ballots the following day on a virtual platform. Each party will be allowed to have four people attend the count.
TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon and will update this story if we hear back.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/07/amazon-warehouse-workers-begin-historic-vote-to-unionize/
TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.
Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Belfast and Northern Ireland will capture how things are faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic.
We’d like to know how Northern Ireland’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.
Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).
The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.
You can fill out the survey here.
Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.
What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?
This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.
https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/
For example, here is the recent survey of London.
You are not in Northern Ireland, but would like to take part? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to you next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.
The survey is covering almost every city and country on in the Union for the Mediterranean, so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).
Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com
(Please note: Filling out the survey is not a guarantee of inclusion in the final published piece).
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We crawled into an abandoned school bus, trespassed through dilapidated hallways, dodged fleeting thunderstorms and wandered through empty streets of Chinatown late into the evening. For two summery weeks, I couldn’t have been happier.
New York City was in lockdown. I’d been quarantined in my dinky apartment, disheartened and restless. I was anxious to do something creative. Thankfully, the Hasselblad X1D II 50C arrived for review, along with approval from the studio heads for socially-distanced, outdoor shoots.
Taking pictures of the mundane (flowers, buildings, and such) would’ve been a disservice to a $10,000 camera kit, so instead, my friends and I collaborated on a fun, little project: we shot portraits inspired by our favorite films.
Image Credits: Veanne Cao
Equipped with masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer, we put the X1D II 50C and 80mm F/1.9 lens (ideal for close-ups without actually having to be close up) through its paces in some of NYC’s less familiar backdrops.
[gallery type="slideshow" link="none" columns="1" size="full" ids="2109350,2109351,2109349,2109360,2109341,2109346,2109345,2109347,2109339,2109489,2109348,2109381,2109362,2109361"]
Before I get into any trouble for the last photo – Alex and Jason are professional stuntmen and that’s a rubber prop gun. They were reenacting the penultimate scene from Infernal Affairs – a brilliant piece of Hong Kong cinema (much better than the Scorsese remake).
While the camera is slightly more approachable in terms of cost and ease of use with a few upgrades (larger, more responsive rear screen, a cleaned-up menu, tethering capabilities, faster startup time and shutter release), the X1D II is essentially the same as its predecessor. So I skipped the standard review. 
Image Credits: Veanne Cao
What it is, what it isn’t
The most common complaint about the X1D was its slow autofocus, slow shutter release and short battery life. The X1D II improved on these features, though not by much. Rather than seeing the lag as a hindrance, I was forced to slow down and re-wire my brain for a more thoughtful shooting style (a pleasant side effect).
As I mentioned in my X1D review, Apple and other smartphone manufacturers have made shooting great pictures effortless. As such, the accessibility has created a culture of excessively capturing everyday banalities. You shoot far more than you’ll ever need. It’s something I’m guilty of. Pretty sure 90% of the images on my iPhone camera roll are throwaways. (The other 10% are of my dog and he’s spectacularly photogenic.)
The X1D II, however, is not an easy camera. It’s frustrating at times. If you’re a beginner, you may have to learn the fundamentals (ISO, f-stops, when to click the shutter), but the payoff is worth it. There’s an overwhelming sense of gratification when you get that one shot. And at 50 megapixels, it’s packed with details and worthy of hanging on your wall. Shelling out a ton of money for the X1D II won’t instantly make you a better photographer, but it ought to encourage you to become one.
Without the contrived studio lights and set design, our outdoor shoots became an exercise in improvisation: we wandered through the boroughs finding practicals (street lights, neon lights… the sun), discovering locations, and switching spots when things didn’t pan out.
We explored, we had purpose.
My takeaway from the two weeks with this camera: pause and be meaningful in your actions.
Reviewed kit runs $10,595, pre-taxed:
Hasselblad X1D II 50C Mirrorless Camera – $5,750
Hasselblad 80mm F/1.9 XCD Lens – $4,845
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/06/hasselblad-x1d-ii-50c-out-of-the-studio-and-into-the-streets/
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
It’s been a bizarre few weeks, with Robinhood raising a torrent of new funds to keep its zero-cost trading model afloat during turbulent market conditions, other neo-trading houses changing up their business model and more. But amidst all the moves in startup-land, something has been itching in the back of my head: Why are several rich people pumping crappy assets?
It’s fine for a retail investor to share trading ideas amongst themselves; it has happened, will happen, and will always happen. But we’ve seen folks like Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya use their broad market imprint to encourage regular folks — directly and indirectly — to buy into some pretty silly trades that could lose the retail crowd lots of money that they may not be able to afford.
Think of Elon coming back to Twitter to pump Doge, a joke of a cryptocurrency that is highly volatile and mostly useless. Or Chamath putting money into GameStop publicly, a move that he is better equipped than most to get into and out of. Which he did. And made money. Most folks that played the GameStop casino have not been as lucky, and many have lost more than they can afford.
Caveat emptor and all that, but I do not love folks with savvy and capital leading regular people into risky trades or into assets that are not backed by long-term fundamentals, but instead a small shot at near-term returns. Yoof.
Finally, keeping up the theme of general annoyance, Senator Hawley is back in the news this week with an attention-focused announcement of an idea to block big tech companies from buying smaller companies. As you would expect from the insurrection-friendly Senator, it’s not an incredibly serious proposal, and it’s written so vaguely as to be nearly humorous.
But as I wrote here on my personal blog about all of this, what does matter out of the generally irksome pol is that there is bipartisan interest in limiting the ability of big tech companies to buy smaller companies. For startups, that is not good news; M&A exits are critical liquidity events for startups, and big companies have the most money.
It’s no sauté of my onions if startup valuations fall, but I think there’s been plenty of attention noting that some Democrats and some Republicans in the U.S want to undercut top-down tech M&A, and not nearly enough notice concerning what the effort might do to startup valuations and funding. And if those metrics dip, there could be fewer upstarts in the market actually working to take on the giants.
Food for thought.
Market Notes
The Exchange caught up once again with Unity CFO Kim Jabal. We did so not merely to make jokes with her about games that we like or don’t like, but to keep tabs on how Jabal thinks as the financial head of a company that was private when she joined, and public now. A few observations:
- GAAP v. Non-GAAP: I asked about Unity’s recent Q4 net income, measured using generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. It was impacted by some share-based comp numbers. Jabal was clear that her team and investors are more focused on non-GAAP numbers. Why? They strip out non-cash charges like share-based comp and provide a different perspective into corporate performance. This is standard startup practice, but her comment shows how if your company is growing quickly post-IPO, you can stick to adjusted metrics and have no issue. If growth slows, I bet that changes.
- COVID: Will the COVID bump to gaming stick? Per Jabal, when her company has seen a bump in engagement historically, results don’t tend to fall back to prior plateaus. I wonder if this will be the case for all COVID-boosted parts of the startup and big-tech landscape. If so, it’s very good news.
- Know your metrics: Jabal said that her key metrics are non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow — apart from growth, I’d add. That’s super clear and easy to grok. Startup CEOs, please have a similar distillation ready when we chat about your latest round.
And speaking of startups, let’s talk about a company that I’ve had my eye on that recently raised more capital: Deepgram. I covered the company’s Series A, a $12 million round in March 2020. Now it has raised $25 million more, led by Tiger, so this is a fun case of big money investing early-stage, I think. Regardless, Deepgram was a bet on a particular model for speech recognition, and, then, its market. its new investment implies that both wagers came out the right way up.
And I was chatting with the CEO of Databricks recently (more here on its latest megaround), who mentioned the huge gains made in AI, and more specifically around generative adversarial networks (GANs) NLP, and more. Our read is that we should expect to see more Deepgram-ish rounds in the future as AI and similar methods of approaching data make their way into workflows.
And fintech player Payoneer is going public. Via a SPAC. You can read the investor presentation here. Payoneer is not a pre-revenue firm going out via a blank check; it did an expected $346 million in 2020 rev. I’m bringing it to you for two reasons. One, read the deck, and then ask yourself why all SPAC decks are so ugly. I don’t get it. And then ask yourself why isn’t it pursuing a traditional IPO? Numbers are on pages 32 and 40. I can’t figure it out. Let me know if you have a take. Best response gets Elon’s dogecoin.
Various and Sundry
Wrapping up this week, TechCrunch has a new newsletter coming out on apps that is going to rule. Sarah Perez is writing it. You can sign up here, it’s free!
And if you need a new tune, you could do worse than this one. Have a great weekend!
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/06/what-are-these-rich-people-doing-pumping-crappy-assets/
