Your counterpoints are reasonable but you really have to have a full picture to “get” it, which you don’t. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s hard to see how all the parts fit and work together, especially when Amazon is so secretive.

I want to keep this brief because a full response can be an article of its own.

Basically, the problems with worker mistreatment lie in a few areas. One is the ethos of constant improvement. Laudable, but taken to the point of being counterproductive. Floor employees bear the brunt. Hyper competitiveness in lower level management leads to a Thunderdome like atmosphere on the warehouse floor. Pickers, Stowers, and Packers bear the brunt, particularly competition over aisle space and bin space/integrity between Pickers and Stowers. Management is too in love with their own perfection meaning they are reactive now only. They’re incapable or unwilling to make hard calls when things go wrong or see to what needs seeing to so problems don’t occur in the first place. As a result, employees go to the hospital. Some have died on the floor.

The health insurance is problematic and not that great an offering. Maybe that’s just me, but I found the pet insurance to be far superior to what I was offered as an employee. Obamacare was better for me and my family.

I worked on the floor for over a year. It was a decent enough job in a lot of ways. It got me from point A to point B. It’s honest work. It was a long enough employment for me to grasp the fuller measure of problems with Amazon at large and small scale, and to have walked away with problems I wouldn’t have had had I not worked there.

I refuse to ever have an Alexa. I canceled my Prime membership. I do not buy from Amazon any more, nor will I. All as a result of having worked there.

I don’t know if unionization can fix these problems. I think more good will come from raising minimum wage and decoupling health insurance from employment. Personally, I tend to think the exodus of Bezos will do far more than unionization as well. He can go off utilizing his philosophy to make sure that colonizing Mars becomes something so miserable no one wants to be a part of it.

Unionization can’t hurt though and it’s a labor right, so I support it.