<story><title>Amazon&apos;s Global Quest to Crush Unions</title><url>https://newrepublic.com/maz/article/167263/amazons-global-quest-crush-unions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ozzythecat</author><text>Amazon’s game is squeezing out every ounce of value they can.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Then you had the more seasoned people who figured out how to play the game. Something is broken or had some outage?&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;I pray the government breaks up that scam. It’s a stain on humanity.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon&apos;s Global Quest to Crush Unions</title><url>https://newrepublic.com/maz/article/167263/amazons-global-quest-crush-unions</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nakor</author><text>I have very conflicted views on unions.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x2F;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t have a union.&lt;p&gt;But to me, it seems unions can and often do exploit people. After witnessing all of this I&amp;#x27;ve developed a very dim view of humanity. We all just want to exploit someone.</text></comment>