[danaris]

The pay being high is good.

It's not a good enough reason to not form a union.

Pay is only one piece of worker treatment, and when you're talking about hard manual labour, it's really not the most important piece—workplace health & safety is. Doesn't matter how much you were paid while you worked there if you get killed or crippled because the employer skimped on safety, either in equipment or in allowing you to take your time on dangerous tasks.

[rochester46]

I fully agree with your comment. I see no reason why these workers shouldn't be unionized. In my comment, I am addressing the pay and benefits argument that is being brought up by many HNers, because your statement "The pay being high is good" is a very rare statement on this website in regards to Amazon. And I am also not wholly convinced that a lot of people aren't conflating the two (I see a lot of arguments that these workers need unionization because they are paid 'poorly').

[Frondo]

Yes, agreed 100%. Pay is one of the many things collective bargaining is good for addressing.

Workplace safety is another. Greater autonomy is another; maybe these people want a 45 minute lunch break? Who knows? (Well, the workers know what they want...)

Another thing I've seen a lot, can't remember off the top of my head if this applied to Amazon too, is doing mandated security searches off the clock when people leave the job site. Imagine you're off at 5, but you don't get to leave til 5:30 because you're in a big line waiting to have your bag checked when you leave. Why should you be obligated to give the company that time? If they wanted, they could crunch the numbers and figure out what would cost them less, employee theft or paying for security checks, but they don't, because they can steal the worker's time at no cost to them. (And I guarantee you the security guards are being paid for that security check time, it's just the rank and file who aren't.)

Germany's got another thing I'd like to see here in the states, where the unions have a seat on the board and play a role in higher-level decisions as well. This is something I'd like to see even for high-paid tech workers, especially for morally questionable things like taking contracts with ICE -- there's been walkouts and worker organizing over companies taking contracts with ICE, but better still would be if the workers had a formal lever of power (in the form of a union) to stop that before it started.

[tomatotomato37]

I really don't see the connection between a union seat and blocking initiatives that run against progressive culture coming to play in practice. Amazon has a workforce larger than some US states mainly comprised of unskilled workers in locations with cheap enough land to make a half-kilometer wide warehouse remotely feasibly, aka rural or industrial locations; and if recent politics are anything to go by, unskilled rural labor tends to not align very well with that of skilled urbanites. If this union uses anything resembling a democracy for internal policies the woke software engineers in seattle are going to be vastly outvoted by the blue collar workers and rednecks working pretty much everywhere else.

Don't get me wrong a board seat would be great for preventing the company from pulling Gorden Gekko type shenanigans, it's just if the plan is to use it as a platform to further the progressive agenda than there's going to be some disappointment