Gadgets
Amazon Warehouse Workers Vote Against Forming Union in Alabama
Both sides have the right to challenge the eligibility of individual ballots and the campaign process, but a ballot count official on a Zoom call of the proceeding announced that there were not enough challenged votes to affect the results.
Amazon shares rose 1.8 percent Friday, adding to earlier gains.
Union leaders had hoped the election outside Birmingham would spark a new era of worker activism. Appealing to concerns that Amazon was monitoring their every move and associating themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement, organisers told the largely Black workforce a union could get more from the company controlled by the world’s richest man.
The defeat joins high-profile failures to start unions at auto and plane factories in the US South, and illustrates the challenges of organising a major company. Amazon required workers to attend meetings, for instance.
Still, some employees described relatively good conditions and pay. Amazon offers at least $15.30 (roughly Rs. 1,100) an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage, which applies in Alabama.
““Amazon is not perfect, there are flaws, but we are committed to correcting those flaws and management has been, thus far, on board with us,” William Stokes, an Amazon worker at the Bessemer warehouse said at a panel organised by his employer.
The vote was watched across the United States, with President Joe Biden defending workers’ right to form unions during the process.
The US South has been particularly anti-union. Nearly all the states in the area, including Alabama, passed so-called right-to-work laws that curtail unions’ abilities to mandate dues and other measures.
What’s next?
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which is trying to organise the Amazon employees, said it is filing objections, charging that Amazon interfered with the right of employees to vote.
“People should not presume that the results of this vote are in any way a validation of Amazon’s working conditions and the way it treats its employees, quite the contrary. The results demonstrate the powerful impact of employee intimidation and interference,” Stuart Appelbaum, RWDSU President, told a news conference after counting ended.
“”We contend that they broke the law repeatedly in their no-holds-barred effort to stop workers from forming a union.”
The dispute likely will play out before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and then in federal appeals court.
Union membership has been declining steadily, falling to 11 percent of the eligible workforce in 2020 from 20 percent in 1983, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Amazon, the second-largest private employer in America, for decades has discouraged attempts among its more than 800,000 US employees to organise, showing managers how to identify union activity, raising wages and warning that union dues would cut into pay, according to a prior training video, public statements and the company’s union election website.
The union objection will focus in part on what it described as Amazon pressuring the US Postal Service to install a mail box and then pressuring employees to bring their ballots to work and use the mailbox.
Out of 5,867 workers eligible to cast ballots, 3,041 voted. NLRB officials said 505 ballots were contested and 76 were voided.
Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president, who spoke at the union’s press conference, said, “This is not the outcome any of us hoped for… but make no mistake, you won the moment that you decided to take on Amazon.”
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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