I believe it's just "corporation". Have you ever worked for a company that was run democratically? I've worked at good and bad places, but ultimately the orders came from the top. I don't think Amazon is very unique in their governance and attitude towards their workers, they're just more competent than most at execution.
They can do things that's within the law. Recording conversations have been considered harassment in the past. Blocking vocabulary related to unionization could be considered blocking employee from self-organizing.
Well good for Amazon then that The Federalist Society has managed to install extremely right wing and anti-labor judges over the past few decades. If there's any leeway in the law for consideration, I can tell you which way that consideration will go. Not so good for society sadly.
> Well good for Amazon then that The Federalist Society has managed to install extremely right wing and anti-labor judges over the past few decades.
You need to stop to see the world in black and white. The Federalist Society is a corporatist / statist organization. They hate labor. They love big pharma, etc.
So much of what we call "capitalism" is just creating authoritarian planned economies in the miniature and shrugging our shoulders and saying that it's all "private" so rights like free speech don't apply. And both factions of the elite who run the country like it that way.
I think you missed the whole "capitalism" vs "planned economies" comparison entirely. The advantage of capitalism over planned economies isn't that it's democratic or whatever. It's that in capitalism, individual companies are allowed to fail if they perform poorly, whereas in a command economy it takes the entire country down.
1) Within the United States, the largest corporations are closely associated with government, with a very porous interface between their highest levels. And they certainly aren't always allowed to fail.
2) Once a megacorporation has established dominance in a given market, a combination of network effects and regulatory capture removes competitive pressures. This allows the internal planned economy of the corporation to continue without competitive pressures. See e.g. Google, which essentially throws money earned through dominance in ad markets against the wall in every direction but produces little of new value.
The reason my "capitalism" has quotation marks is to point out that actually existing capitalism in the USA has pretty much nothing to do with competitive free markets.
It's fair enough for companies to set their own rules for internal communication, after all not every internal board is a public forum. The issue here is obviously the particular form of moderation, i.e. bosses trying to shut down labour organizing.
Over a chat app they provide for work use, I'm not seeing the ethical issue. Pay and overwork is one thing but why can't these employees use their phone for things they don't want the company to observe? Phones are cheap.
People are living social creatures, they are not robots, and the pursuit to treat humans as APIs for units of productivity will lead to a predictable outcome of causing human misery.
