Yesterday, VICE reported that Amazon had posted two online job listings for intelligence analysts to monitor threats that included labor organizing. The company immediately yanked the listings, claiming they were made in error, but screenshots show Amazon explicitly looking for experts to collect “actionable intelligence” on “organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders” among others.

Amazon’s workforce is not unionized, and the company wants to keep it that way. Jeff Bezos would not be the richest man in the world if he weren’t versed in the fundamentals of profit maximization, suppressing labor costs, and dodging regulations chief among them. Unionization is antithetical to that aim because unions exist to secure better pay and benefits, and safer and more comfortable working conditions, which pushes labor costs upward and eats into profits. If Bezos has his way, there will never be a unionized Amazon warehouse.

Amazon’s opposition to unionization and other forms of labor activism is well-known. The company isn’t great at hiding it, such as when earlier this year it fired warehouse assistant manager Christian Smalls for organizing workers against hazardous coronavirus workplace practices, and then its executives hatched a secret plan to “make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement,” smear him as “not smart or articulate,” and, in a strange logical twist, accuse him of endangering his coworkers by returning to the building and possibly exposing them to COVID-19.