Benjamin Y. Fong’s Jacobin piece works from documents Amazon never meant to publish: internal “Employee Relations” trainings and union-threat spreadsheets disclosed in a British Columbia labour case, produced in open hearings and handed to him by Unifor. The brass knuckles of the Ford era are gone. What replaced them, he argues, is more effective — empathetic listening and fine-grained surveillance, run systematically.

The architecture is simple. Amazon collects worker sentiment constantly, then uses it against the workers who supply it.

  • Daily “Connections” questions on every workstation, compiled and analyzed with machine-learning models
  • Voice of the Associate boards, all-hands meetings, preshift standups, site walk-arounds — even birthday parties count as feedback channels
  • Managers then trained on TIPS (Threaten, Interrogate, Promise, Spy) — the illegal moves — and FORE (Facts, Opinions, Rules, Experience) — the legal workarounds

Facilities are then ranked like credit risks.

  • The “Atlas” model sorts sites into tiers 1 through 5 by union threat
  • A “Labor Continuity Score” runs from 100 (five-alarm labour revolt) to 900 (quiet); Tier 2 sits at 200–300
  • Tier 1 includes the KCVG air hub in Kentucky, the BC sites Unifor is organizing, and DBK4 in Queens, DAX8 in Palmdale, and the KSBD air hub in San Bernardino
  • JFK8 in Staten Island — where workers voted to unionize in 2022 and Amazon still refuses to bargain — wasn’t even Tier 1

The manager training is the part that sticks. It reads like an organizer workshop run in reverse: 1:1 conversations following a script that must not seem scripted, active listening, “acknowledging and validating any emotion… in order to reduce the emotional person’s resistance to logic.” Managers are told to find the “informal leaders” and to write off workers “who will never change their mind.”

Because BC labour law is comparatively strong, the disclosed slides are almost certainly the polite version — the deck itself notes that what managers may say varies by province. The vocabulary of care and voice isn’t a softening of corporate power here. It’s the delivery mechanism.