Not a big fan of most modern day unions, but I hope they unionize the shit out of Amazon. I am happy to pay more. Their treatment of the rank and file is despicable. Here in Seattle I have met very few people who enjoyed their time working at Amazon, and that includes tech folk.
At what point should we be ok with low-level Amazon jobs sucking?
I worked at a fast food restaurant. That sucked. But I was also a high school kid with no marketable skills. So I sort of understood I was “putting in my time” and this is the way it goes. I never thought “we should unionize and demand more money.”
If Amazon needs career people in these positions, they’ll be forced to treat the employees as career people and not like the fast food industry treats employees like myself.
Why does working in a restaurant have to suck? I've worked at plenty here in Norway during my youth, was always nice. They pay according to a collective agreement, with extra pay for evening and night work. So a pay it was possible to survive on.
Why demand that "unskilled" labor should suck? Why want to inflict that pain on others?
I’m sympathetic to that perspective, and it’s the one I would normally take. But the working conditions at Amazon warehouses and for their delivery people seem to include things like peeing and pooping into bottles, breaks too short to get to a bathroom across the warehouse, etc. I had menial jobs myself but never quite so demeaning or physically punishing—holding it in all day seems like hell.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with this perspective. While I do remember getting yelled at for taking a, literally, 10 second drink break (“you need to ask”), I never found myself peeing in a bottle.
