Amazon's Global Quest to Crush Unions

https://newrepublic.com/maz/article/167263/amazons-global-quest-crush-unions

by doener • 4 years ago

219 247 4 years ago

Submitted this a couple of days ago, but it’s relevant reading: https://www.gmb.org.uk/news/amazon-workers-ready-strike

“Amazon workers at a Coventry warehouse have voted they are ready to take strike action over pay. More than 300 workers voted in the consultative ballot at the fulfilment centre in the West Midlands, with 97 per cent saying they were ready to walk out.”

xhkkffbf• 4 years ago

I just wanted to offer this warning to the younger set who seem to think that unions are one piece to fixing the problems that ail the workplace: in every place I've worked with a union, the union did little to protect me or my colleagues. They were sort of a junior, parallel branch of management that would usually favor some groups more than others. I have friends who were essentially targeted by the factions in the unions. So the idea that unions are some how always thinking of the worker has been untrue in my experience.

There was probably a time when unions made more sense. When much of the work is exactly the same and people are just cogs in a big machine, well, I think the idea of collective bargaining makes sense. But while Amazon warehouse workers and delivery teams are doing pretty similar work, there are still differences. Some people just do more work and I don't see anything wrong with rewarding them.

Now all of that being said, I can see a better argument for breaking up Amazon to ensure more competition. I feel like an open labor market is the best way for workers to earn good treatment. When the market was tight, Amazon responded with higher pay and more benefits-- without the need of a union to get in the way and collect dues.

sofixa• 4 years ago

You can't say something like this without specifying the country under an article about Amazon's global anti-union strategy. Going off what you said, you're probably talking about the US, which really isn't in any way comparable. You have shit labour laws and dynamics all around and nothing which could be useful when talking about other countries.

chrisseaton6• 4 years ago

The younger American middle-classs hate their HOAs but want unions at work. If you don’t like your HOA telling you how to cut your grass you’re also not going to like your union telling you how to do your job. Both are ostensibly democratic but in practice oppressive.

subsuboptimal• 4 years ago

I'd take Democratic but imperfect over authoritarian any day. The company can also tell you how to "cut your grass", only you have no say at all in their leadership.

My union is fighting to raise my stake in the business I work for. Even if that means there are a couple new rules from the union it's still a hugely net positive.

acdha2• 4 years ago

This is a common anti-union talking point but I’ve never seen anything like it at that anywhere I’ve worked - the unions have been what shut down those actions by management.

I’m sure there are some bad unions but that doesn’t mean we should give up on the concept any more than bad moves by companies means we should give up on the concept of private business.

ropeladder• 4 years ago

The HOA comparison doesn't make much sense here. Unions give people a democratic way to exercise power against an existing powerful organization (corporations), in what would otherwise be an authoritarian workplace. HOAs are a way to exercise power as a group against individuals in the group. It's true that democratic institutions can be frustrating, but this (obvious) fact is not the clever gotcha you seem to think of is.

malermeister2• 4 years ago

Your manager is trying to tell you how to do your job. The union gives you a way to push back.

random3143• 4 years ago

This analogy makes zero sense. How is this analogy even supposed to work?

CEO = homeowner

Union = HOA

Employees = Grass on your lawn???

kennend314• 4 years ago

THIS!

i use to like r/antiwork on Reddit but dumped it over a year ago. It isnt about "antiwork" but "union drives". The answer to almost any workplace issue seems to be "join a union" but what about the major Union failures?

Here (Canada) we had an issues with a meat processing plant in Alberta. It didnt take long for the striking workers to lash out at their union as well for lack of support. The union felt there were not enough people for them to get involved. while they were content to take their union dues, they were reluctant to get involved in costly legal battles?

Unions are also a business as well, subject to the exact same "corruption" charges as any other organization, so it is ironic that r/Antiwork advocates them?

Look at the recent news from the head of the very powerful auto workers union (which also includes clergy?) here and his mystery $25,00. Naturally his excuse is his "prescription medication and alcohol abuse made me do it".

People complain about the "CEO" pay, but how much do union leaders earn?

Unions were very good in the past and did a lot for the country, but people would be far better off changing laws instead of joining unions.

This is what really kills me about r/anitwork. Not everyone can join a union, but legal changes apply to everyone. I actually had someone tell me once "why should my union fight to help ohters"?

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

Thanks. You have experience with unions in the real world, which the vast majority of American "progressives" don't.

The union often turns into another bureaucracy which has forgotten its original mission, and now exists just to feed itself. Your meat processing plant example is a good one -- the union leaders apparently just want to keep their cushy life and avoid trouble.

Nonetheless, as I said, if you're an Amazon warehouse worker and the company doesn't give a shit about you, then yeah, a union could look like the least-bad alternative.

slively4• 4 years ago

I think a common reply to this would be that it’s hard to change laws when an oligarchy has so much power, and siphoning the money and power from the oligarchs has to come first. Unions are one approach to attempt to do this. Unions are the workers that join them, and one of the more positive developments lately is the push to have more democratic unions. The teamsters even just changed their leadership drastically in this direction.

Jensson2• 4 years ago

In Sweden, the company uses third-party workers

I never understood why Americans thinks this is bad. This means that the local company can handle labour laws and you pay extra for the workers to avoid having to learn the laws of yet another country. The local company could even be labour owned and negotiate with the employer as if it was a union, and even if it isn't the workers will likely be unionized anyway and they can easily organize against Amazon if Amazon abuses them.

acdha2• 4 years ago

Many U.S. companies have a distinct social hierarchy where people who matter are direct employees and everyone else is outsourced. That lets them keep their reputations cleaner while blaming abusive conditions, various forms of discrimination or harassment, etc. on the other company. This improves their stats for employee compensation, job satisfaction, workplace injuries, labor complaints, etc.

If that company unionizes, they drop the contract and avoid their name in the headlines.

Kiro• 4 years ago

In reality it's bad because Sweden has no minimum wage and unionizing is voluntary. It's full anarchy in the 3PL sector and impossible for unions to use traditional conflict actions forcing companies to sign collective agreements.

becquerel• 4 years ago

The fact that businesses are anti-union should be all you need to know as to why you should support them. Workers and employers have nothing in common.

legitster3• 4 years ago

Why would a business support a union? It's inherently going to be an adversarial relationship.

I completely get why unions are necessary. But it would be like me hiring a divorce attorney for my own wife.

A business is almost never going to want a union. And it seems weird to expect them to.

ClumsyPilot• 4 years ago

There are things I don't want, and things I prioritise to get rid of. The fact that for amazon getting rid of unions is a priority, suggests that unions are effective

klyrs3• 4 years ago

Hiring your spouse's divorce attorney sounds like a smart play, honestly. Except for the whole "conflict of interest" thing.

Mountain_Skies2• 4 years ago

A recent story linked on HN that sadly didn't get much attention was that companies are in a crisis of not knowing what they can do to stop their employees from quitting. Glib answers like "pay them more" and "treat them better" aren't helpful because many of these are high paid jobs and everyone has a difference of opinion on what it means to be treated well (even if most will agree that being punched in the face all day is bad). Companies cannot get employees to tell them what they want. Exit interviews are mostly fruitless, surveys are avoided because workers don't believe they're truly anonymous, outside surveys have the same problem since the survey company is being paid by the employer.

How can a company get honest feedback from their employees without the employees fearing reprisals? A union is one way of doing it since employees (usually) trust their union to take their grievances to the employer with little risk to the employees as individuals or as a group. There was a case a few years ago where a European company opened a factory in the right-to-work state and wanted its workers in a union because that's how it maintained employee relations in their home country. They were confused by the hostility towards unions in that state, both by workers and by the government. IIRC, it was semi-skilled manufacturing so exploiting the workers would be self-defeating if they kept leaving for other jobs.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

You need to clear up the antecedent basis of "them." I think maybe you mean "unions" (although I could be wrong) but your sentence actually means "why you should support companies."

missedthecue• 4 years ago

"the fact that businesses hate supplier cartels tells you all you need to know and why you should support them"

How does this make sense? Is your ethical framework simply loving everything businesses hate?

krisoft• 4 years ago

They also pretty much all anti -arsonist. Does the logic apply there too?

kennend314• 4 years ago

As others posted, your logic is very very off on this one.

"the fact individuals are anti-income tax should tell you all you need to know.."

"the fact criminals are anti-law enforcement should tell you all you need to know.."

Why would a business support unions? Often UNION members dont support other union employees.

Go to a major unionized auto factory sometime and look at the parking lot and try to find "imports".

These same "pro union" individuals also shop at walmart knowing it is not unionized because they like the lower prices.

Spooky234• 4 years ago

If you allow companies to consolidate and exert unlimited political power, workers need to be able to self-organize to ensure their interests are represented. Full stop.

All of the things you complain about happen on the business side of the table. People are people and do stupid shit with power. Why are Azure VPs buying shit from Amazon? Why do companies park burned out executives for a few years on gardening leave?

Jensson2• 4 years ago

You need laws to protect workers from unions or unions will abuse workers. In Europe you are pretty well protected against unions, in USA you aren't. I think this is by design in USA, businesses doesn't want unions to be popular and unions doesn't want to be regulated.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

Workers and employers have nothing in common.

That's untrue. Especially when workers own part of the company as a part of their compensation.

aborsy• 4 years ago

Coming from a French perspective, in addition to corporate, workers should also oppose union. Unions will crush work and life conditions for anyone, but a small group of people. They will morph into a cancer, nothing like advertised initially.

I hate them. They made me (and many others that I know) miserable.

oifjsidjf• 4 years ago

This seems to depend on the sector.

Eg Hollywood vs some other union.

What sector do you work in?

desindol• 4 years ago

Coming from Germany they are fine.

christophilus2• 4 years ago

Yeah. Germany got it right (as far as I can see). Anyone know why the situation seems so different there vs here in the US?

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

Yet I hear the situation is better in Germany. Also the US during the industrial revolution appears to have benefited greatly from unions. Any large organization is prone to corruption and bureaucracy for its own sake. I don't think we should throw out useful tools entirely because some have problems.

legitster3• 4 years ago

Part of the New Deal legislation was the US Government effectively granted corporations monopoly power if they recognized labor unions.

It was FAR from an ideal framework, but it did mean we still had industrial capacity going into WWII.

christophilus2• 4 years ago

This was also my dad’s experience (in the 70s and 80s in the US). He saved up his money so that he could move to an non-unionized state. He worked his way from a machinist to a general manager, and worked hard to ensure his company remained competitive in the US as their competition moved all operations to China. It was a long play, but it paid off for his company. They’re the go-to for quality in their industry.

I’m sympathetic to unions, though, as many companies really are a terrible place to work, and employees need better representation in those situations. I just wish there was a better option than unions.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

For the opposite perspective: One of my uncles worked a non-union construction job in the 50's. He died on the job. Another uncle, who watched my uncle die, never worked another non-union job in his life, choosing to go hungry rather than working a non-union job.

sudosysgen• 4 years ago

The better option than unions is better unions. They can be meaningfully improved, especially given the large number of highly suboptimal unions.

rahen• 4 years ago

Ditto. Unions are just another lobby. They seek subsides, money, and power. Unions, like companies and governments, exist mostly for themselves. That doesn't mean they don't mean well (sometimes), but trusting them shows a bit of naivety.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

The fact that it's mostly about Europe is a genuine contribution. I had the (false) impression that in most of Western Europe, unions had won the political debate decades ago and this stuff didn't happen.

As for Amazon: they are the poster child for unionization. They treat their workers as disposable pieces of meat with no rights, and if you want to get unionized, that's how you do it.

People who have actual experience with unions in this country have a more jaded view of them: they tend to be run by cliques of people who enjoy the high life on their members' dime (cf. Teamsters). "Filing a union grievance" is often not at all a wise career move. However, I can still totally understand an Amazon warehouse worker voting for a union.

gkodpgfdgf• 4 years ago

Unions are crushing the European economy with the constant work stoppages. Why would you think European unions have won the political debate?

slively4• 4 years ago

I think they are referring the initial debate of whether or not to have a large union presence. In the USA that’s still a big debate, and the fact that there are large scale work stoppages in Europe only further proves the point that they decided having a large union pretense is good. After unions are established, then new debates will surely arise which seems to be what you are referring to.

Cupertino950146• 4 years ago

As the other answer says: "win the political debate" doesn't mean "everyone loves them." It's not a value statement.

It means "unions are highly encouraged, and companies pretty much have to recognize them."

hef198982• 4 years ago

And that's why the US are technically in a recession and the EU isn't yet, right?

traceroute662• 4 years ago

I had the (false) impression that in most of Western Europe, unions had won the political debate decades ago and this stuff didn't happen.

Your impression is not entirely false.

Compared to the US, Western Europe is paradise on earth for employees.

There are so many rights taken for granted by Western European employees that your average US-peep could only dream of.

Where Western Europe does have problems is around contractors and the so-called gig economy (zero-hours contracts). That's still a bit of a grey area in many respects.

blfr2• 4 years ago

Compared to the US, Western Europe is paradise on earth for employees.

No, it isn't. For example,

80% of the French earn less than €3k a month (equivalent to $36k a year) and 50% less than €2k a month ($24k a year). This is BEFORE taxes on income.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1564868574879129600

VirusNewbie3• 4 years ago

I believe you for low skill employees but as a SWE, I wouldn’t trade a job over there in a thousand years. People in Western Europe are likely to think i’m lying when I talk about the kind of lifestyle I can afford.

I’m not even at a FAANG company and I have a 3,000 sq ft newer house, I drive a tesla, I have a nanny for my children. I have plenty saved for retirement, I can vacation to Europe or Hawaii i luxury every couple years.

The average EU employee is what, in a two bedroom with half a kitchen and no yard?

zajio1am• 4 years ago

There are so many rights taken for granted by Western European employees

Most of these rights are given by employment law, not union contracts, so unions are less relevant.

__del__• 4 years ago

unsurprising (but disappointing) that hn readers are well compensated and lukewarm about unions

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

I think it's because we're older and have had the unfortunate experience of having to actually work with a union.

It's a nightmare. Do not ever engage a union worker if you ever want to get anything done.

legitster3• 4 years ago

The “Amazon Way” manifests differently country to country. In Sweden, the company uses third-party workers; in France and Italy, collective bargaining is predominantly sectoral, and Amazon chooses to identify itself with the sector that pays the least.

Everything in this article points to European labor laws working exactly as intended. The "weakening of norms" seems entirely confined to a) low strike participation and b) that Amazon continues to find people willing to work for them.

AlbertCory• 4 years ago

A (deeply) personal note:

"Albert" is my pen name, not my actual name. Albert was my dad's brother, who was killed in his very first day on the job at Swift & Co. in the Chicago stockyards. He either fell off a scaffold, or it collapsed, I'm not sure which.

Was there a meatpacker's union then, and did Albert belong to it? I don't know.

Worker safety is a sine qua non of unions. In some industries, the union enforces safety regulations rigorously; in others, the workers' comp laws force the companies to watch out for it. Before unions, the companies didn't have to care, and there were no laws.

As other people have pointed out here, safety laws protect everyone whether or not they belong to a union.

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

This is why OSHA was created.

It turns out that the centralized government can conduct safety inspections and enforce safety rules.

It's one of the reasons unions fell out of favor in America. They never enforced safety, and many fell in with the mafia instead to shake down companies while providing no service.

nakor2• 4 years ago

I have very conflicted views on unions.

I worked for ~2 years as a contractor for a government entity in Canada. ~3500 headcount of employees. What I observed there was sickening. This was a place that had white-collar unions for all non-management employees. This union had completely hijacked the mission of this institution. It was no longer about serving the people that this entity was created to serve, but rather to protect the union and its contributors.

The software we were in charge of writing had direct, material impact on the physical and mental well beings of people in the province. Life and death. And at times I saw things like a deployment of features being delayed by weeks/months because a union member who was responsible for _manually_ deploying the changes was on vacation. To automate that deployment meant automating a union employees job and was impossible. These features directly served the needs of people that were in critical need of them.

On the other hand, I have family friends who work for UPS and other delivery services and see the brutal toll it takes on their body and mind. Pushed to absolute limits and exploited because they don't have a union.

But to me, it seems unions can and often do exploit people. After witnessing all of this I've developed a very dim view of humanity. We all just want to exploit someone.

throwawaywu• 4 years ago

UPS is fully unionized and has been for a long time.

nakor2• 4 years ago

I may be wrong about exactly what company he worked for. Also it could be they're not unionized in Canada. Anyway I don't think it changes much.

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

This explains why they lose all my packages.

xyzzy_plugh• 4 years ago

This mirrors my experience with unions pretty closely. I would much prefer that the sort of workers rights unions provide were instead at a government policy level.

That being said, there will always be some need for collective bargaining. I only wish it were possible to limit these extreme union grabs for power.

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

Hence the creation of OSHA and why union nearly entirely disappeared in America

RHSeeger5• 4 years ago

It's hard to even have a reasonable discussion about unions with most people, because (it seems like) the vast majority of people either fall into

1. Unions are great and everyone should be part of one. Anyone who points out the bad parts of unions is an evil conservative and hates the middle/lower class.

2. Unions are evil and cause nothing but problems. Anyone who supports unions is a fool who doesn't see the horrors they cause.

Any discussion that includes the viewpoint that unions have both good points and bad points (as you allude to above) has a high likelihood of being attacked by _both_ sides.

It also doesn't help that it appears to very hard to actually set things up so that you get the good sides of a union without also getting the bad sides.

froh2• 4 years ago

some European countries, the Netherlands, Germany and France for sure, have not two but three pillars of employee company relationship: unions, works council and individual contracts.

the works council (aka 'company codetermination') involves employee elected colleagues in company leadership decisions like during, hiring, reorgs, raise distribution, working hours, shift planning guidelines, ... while the unions focus on salary and compensation negotiations

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

It's not random that people who have had to collaborate with union workers in their company all fall into that second bucket.

zdragnar• 4 years ago

So long as the SEIU is around, I'll probably be in the second bucket. I get the theory of why unions can be beneficial, but the reality of the way they are structured in the US is fundamentally flawed.

Frankly, anyone who raids PCA funds the way they do is evil, plain and simple.

kennend314• 4 years ago

I live in Ontario as well.

This is why we need more PPP (private-public-partnerships) here.

Just look at the MTO. It use to be an absolute cesspool or inefficiency which would make the old USSR envious.

Drivers license expired? Time to go stand in line where there are two tellers and 6 people "on break" in the back. The lineup is out the door, but who cares? Certainly not the union slugs who work there.

They finally introduced kiosks, which charged a "convenience fee" (probably at the request of the unions).

Fast forward, there is now a PPP in place for the MTO. Automation all over the place, you can renew your license online (FINALLY).

if not for the ability to step away from their union staff, none of this would have taken place. The union fights changes which leads to efficiency as this often means job losses.

Any "tech" the government builds looks like it was done by high school students and it is a shame they pay for this garbage.

Again, imagine you went to your bank site, and it looked like it was built 10 years ago and never been updated?

kyrra• 4 years ago

In the United States, our ports have the same problem. They run almost entirely by unions and do not want any kind of automation whatsoever. Pors another major countries have automated a lot of the moving of cargo, but unions here have fought it and prevented it.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ports-problem-decad...

bloodyplonker22• 4 years ago

It was no longer about serving the people that this entity was created to serve, but rather to protect the union and its contributors.

This is exactly why Milton Friedman was against unions. Unions would eventually evolve into this amalgamation that only protects the union and its contributors while disallowing other qualified workers from getting jobs at the respective companies.

GekkePrutser8• 4 years ago

This is not how unions work in most of Europe. Except perhaps France where the unions have grown a bit much and strikes are too common. In the other countries I've seen they established a healthy and stable counterbalance. So I would argue it's not inevitable.

GekkePrutser8• 4 years ago

This is absolutely not how unions work in (most of) Europe. They don't get involved in day to day business. They just negotiate working conditions, pay scales etc.

Just saying it doesn't have to work that way.

riffraff• 4 years ago

In Italy Amazon reached a decent agreement with the unions a year ago, and as far as I know workers are reasonably happy.

The article says "they choose to identify with the lowest paying sector", but that sector in Italy is "logistics" which makes pretty much perfect sense for warehouse workers.

franczesko• 4 years ago

People outside of EU tend to demonize unions through the lens of their own economic environment and lack of knowledge of the matter. The truth is that they should unionize, as this would be the best way to secure their rights (advice from a former Amazonian with exposure to operations).

Amazon would s*t bricks, if the same standards would be implemented in US, as in UK, Germany or France. That's the reason why they're so afraid of it.

ozzythecat2• 4 years ago

Amazon’s game is squeezing out every ounce of value they can.

I worked in one of the Seattle buildings. It was still a culture of people crying at their desks, incompetent managers being checked out or just stressing out everyone around them.

Then you had the more seasoned people who figured out how to play the game. Something is broken or had some outage?

Find a way to blame another team. Think of the most sleezy used car sales manager you’ve met in the finance office of a car dealership. Now give them a “Sr. software development manager” role. That’s Amazon for ya.

Managers going on vacations to Hawaii while their teams are slaving away over the weekend to meet unrealistic deadlines. Utter lack of leadership. A house of cards held together by H1Bs and other visa situations where people put up with it out of fear of losing their jobs and having to leave the country.

I pray the government breaks up that scam. It’s a stain on humanity.

ChildOfChaos• 4 years ago

Interesting. So not knowing a lot about the situation, is this actually a hiring strategy?

Hiring people into the country on Visas, because then they have to perform to very high levels and crazy demands else they have to go back home?

That's evil genius stuff right there.

LEDThereBeLight• 4 years ago

It’s not so much that it’s explicit strategy. It’s more that tech companies look for high performers, and the H1B situation creates high performers through extortion. The companies are happy to take advantage of it.

ozzythecat2• 4 years ago

It absolutely is a hiring strategy.

Come visit Amazons campus around Denny Triangle and SLU in Seattle.

The majority of the foot traffic (Amazon employees) are #1 Indian nationals.

If you sponsor someone from Bangalore or Chennai, you pay some up front costs. But that person is going to work double/triple time and deal with a huge amount of shit. Otherwise, they have to pay themselves to move back to India within a limited amount of time.

If you see organizations like Prime Video, Alexa, Kindle - pretty much the entire org is Indian. You want to tell me white, black, Hispanic people can’t code?

The HR pipelines are set up where most new recruits come through specific colleges that have an abundance of Indians studying abroad.

If someone from Chennai has to be on a miserable on call, they’d rather do that and send their kid to a school in Seattle or Redmond, instead of moving back to India.

WalterBright7• 4 years ago

Amazon’s game is squeezing out every ounce of value they can.

Of course. And the union's and worker's job is to squeeze every ounce of value they can out of Amazon.

It's how marketplaces work.

kennywinker• 4 years ago

And amazon has enough power to undermine the union’s power through legal, dubiously legal, and illegal means. Thus tilting the market in their favor. Does that seems ok with you?

Not to mention most of amazon’s workplaces are not unionized, so it’s amazon vs a single worker in the marketplace. Who’s gonna win in that pairing?

matheusmoreira3• 4 years ago

Yes, that is how a healthy marketplace works and why it should be illegal for Amazon to use its trillion dollars to crush unions.

culi2• 4 years ago

Interesting perspective on the white collar part of Amazon. But given that Amazon is the second largest employer in the world and the vast majority of those jobs are blue collar, I don't think this is exactly what the article is mainly referring to?

s3r3nity• 4 years ago

And yet, Amazon continues to be a highly ranked employer [1] consistently.

Last I checked, these employees don't _have_ to work for Amazon.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/amazon-is-the-no-1-company-t...

arberx• 4 years ago

I'm sure there's no way to game or no bias in Linkedin's "top companies" list...

Wells Fargo at number 2? Come on.

qazwse_• 4 years ago

On Wednesday, the networking platform released its annual Top Companies list identifying the 50 best places in the U.S. for professionals to grow their careers. Amazon ranked No. 1 on the list, followed by Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Wells Fargo.

From the LinkedIn article:

LinkedIn Top Companies is a ranking of the 50 companies that are investing in their talent and helping people build careers that will set them up for long-term success.

Our 2022 LinkedIn Top Companies list is the 6th annual ranking of the 50 best workplaces to grow your career, all based on unique LinkedIn data. These are the companies that are offering stability in our ever-changing world of work — the ones that are not only attracting workers, but retaining them.

And this survey has nothing to do with quality of environment. This list, and the accompanying article, are completely meaningless.

dralley• 4 years ago

Every employer tries to game those surveys, I have little faith in them.

But there is also a huge difference between "best employer to grow your career" and "best employer to work for".

Simply having the Amazon name on your resume is great for your career, but your career will probably be outside of Amazon.

pydry3• 4 years ago

I always assumed those lists (& others) were like Christmas cards from media organizations to the advertisers who keep the lights on.

GekkePrutser8• 4 years ago

You don't have to work there no. But employees should always feel free to unionise if they want to. No matter how well reviewed the workplace is.

pyuser5835• 4 years ago

Amazon has H1B visa workers who pretty much do have to work for them.

kaffeeringe• 4 years ago

Amazon likes to open warehouses where they are the only bigger emplyer in the area, so that it's not so easy for people to switch jobs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

RicoElectrico• 4 years ago

That's why I'm jaded that IVONA TTS, a world-class product from my hometown founded by graduates of my alma mater, was acquired by a company with culture like this.

I guess someone else would acquire them regardless, but Amazon seems the worst outcome.

throw149102• 4 years ago

I'm confused by what you wrote, because when I worked there during the pandemic, or even a year into it, almost no one was in the office. The first plan was to bring people back by Jan 2022, but then it was decided that individual directors could decide for their teams what was best. From what I saw while I was there (approx 6 months ago), most desks were still empty.

I don't mean to necessarily disagree with the general tone of what you're saying, though. I felt some of that while I was there.

goostavos• 4 years ago

Just to give a minor counter point, I've been at Amazon for 5 years. In that time, I've been in two different orgs and 4 different teams. All in Seattle. I'm yet to see people crying at their desks.

The trick to happiness at Amazon is staying the hell away from anything tier 1 -- or, hell, just anything with direct lines to external customers. Those "9s" we give are delivered on the backs of engineers. I'd for sure break down and cry too if I was getting paged 50 times per week because the response time of some subsystem went outside SLA by 5ms.

Chill org, chill life.

GekkePrutser8• 4 years ago

I wonder how someone who founded a company like this could lead a rocketry company.. For all of Elon's flaws he does seem to reward hard work and taking responsibility. Bad leadership, blaming others, doesn't sound like a culture you'd want in something where more can go wrong than a few deliveries.

stevewatson301• 4 years ago

Granted, their rocketry company isn’t as successful as Elon’s.

Montaque• 4 years ago

The general positive rhetoric on HN for unions is a jaded. Take it from someone that lives in a country with very strong Unions that ultra strong unions are all they're cracked up to be.

koheripbal6• 4 years ago

... unless you need to actually get work done.

You've never dealt with American unions. Trying to get a union worker to help you do something means filling out paperwork to do things like moving a chair from one room to the next room.

At the company level unions in the 1980s became synonymous with organized crime. They would call strikes whenever they wanted a bribe.

andrekandre• 4 years ago

regardless of ones feelings about unions, instead of trying to crush unions, why don't they try to just make the workplace/pay better so people feel the need?

lastdong• 4 years ago

It’s so embarassing for a company that championed customer services improving quality of day to day life for so many people is now putting the basic rights of everyone (yes, market leaders tend to influence the whole game) at risk

Amazon's Global Quest to Crush Unions

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