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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think.

This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.

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Amazon can afford to close warehouses where workers are trying to unionize. Walmart does the same:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...

How are the conditions through Europe? I know they went on strike or were about to in Spain, any news from other countries?

Germany did as well. I wish Bezos the best of luck if he thinks the EU unions are as easy to beat as the American ones.

That’s why Amazon already operates a handful, and opening new warehouses in Poland. Amazon doesn’t even sell in Poland, everything sorted and packed in Poland is shipped back to Germany. Beating EU unions is very easy, you simply move to the next town over the border.

The federal government and these huge corps REALLY do not want unions to form, and they will do anything in their power to prevent it from happening.

It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.

There are many problems with unions. But, every time there is no union, the company screws workers. Screws them to within an inch of common decency. This just seems to be a basic law of human interaction - those that can be exploited will be exploited. With the right legislative environment, unions can be very effective, especially for logistics industries where down time is very costly for the company.

Not sure there is an amicable solution to this. Company v union battles obviously harm productivity, but not sure how else to avoid the not-so-slow march towards inhuman exploitation of workers.

After unionising, why would Amazon listen to any of the union's demands? Would the union call a strike? Presumably there will be other employees waiting to take their place as these jobs do not require a lot of training and workers can be replaced quickly.

I would guess that Amazon would simply not even speak to any union representatives - there's no advantage to them in doing so.

The whole point of a union is to protect the rights of people who are doing things that don't take a lot of skill.

I know that’s the point - I can’t understand how they hope to achieve it as they have no leverage.

I don't know that I disagree with you regarding their lack of leverage, but I think it is more due to their inability to disrupt production because of Amazon's large size and ability to reroute order fulfillment.

Apparently Walmart forces workers to watch anti-union videos and will entirely shut down a store at the first hint of union activity (and then later re-open it few months later with new staff). Amazon likely does the same with the anti-union propaganda and can also afford to shut down factories or fire the entire staff.

Right to work, baby. It makes divide and conquer pretty easy.

Between that and the use of contractors, unionization is very difficult to achieve.

Agreed.

But if you watch the discussions on the Amazon internal Facebook groups, you constantly see somebody in the US bring up the case for unionizing, and immediately get shot down with anti-union tirades, talking about corruption and protectionism. There's a lot of anti-union bias in the US.

Yes, it's definitely ripe for some old-fashioned unionizing. As for automation, though... large parts are already automated, and they're constantly automating anything that can be automated. Humans are really the "last mile" here.

They are in some countries as far as I know. For example here in Germany there were strikes by amazon warehouse workers.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of working conditions between the different countries.

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