There are bad unions out there for sure but the idea that having an organization that is able to at least somewhat compensate the massive power imbalance between billion dollar mega corps and the average worker in negotiations is just incredibly difficult to argue against by anyone being intellectually honest.

You’ve clearly figured it out and realized it just by hearing complaints about the union workers. The people complaining should probably ask themselves why they don’t have the same protections instead. But for some reason that cognitive disconnect is so hard for some people to grasp.

> "The more I hear about things like this, the more pro-union I become."

The evidence presented in the article is "... he saw security guards approach the box, after which one of them used a key to open a large box on the bottom labeled “1P."

If you Google "1P 2P mailbox", you'll see that those labels are used for the doors on a mailbox for incoming packages, not outgoing mail.

So what conclusion are we supposed to draw about a security guard opening a door for what may have been incoming mail? Maybe we should actually wait for testimony to be given and a verdict rendered?

> If you Google "1P 2P mailbox", you'll see that those labels are used for the doors on a mailbox for incoming packages, not outgoing mail.

Usually.

Then again, usually, clustered mailboxes are installed for use of multiple recipients with a small shared outgoing mailbox, not installed on the premises of a single entity at their demand for the express and sole purpose of collecting outgoing mail for a single union election.

Given what is publicly known about the mailbox (in large part from thr controversy over its installation and use that occurred before the balloting) it doesn’t seem plausible that this was a normal clustered mailbox deployed without modification, so it doesn’t seem reasonable to make conclusion about what provides access to what based on the assumption that it is.

> I hear at work how our union guys are "scumbags" and how they "only do what's in the contract" and how they "won't work overtime."

Sorry, not an American, but why those are bad things? Where I work overtime is paid 130% of the base pay and no one would do something not in their contract. I mean, that's literally the reason we have contracts. Genuinely curious about the rationale behind this mentality.

One of the issues is that the contracts are overly specific, can be extraordinarily difficult to change, and are not written by experts in the job to be done. There's always tension between "you need to be absolutely specific in order to stop people from cutting corners like crazy for profit" and "your one-size-fits-all instructions will always run into a weird special case where an expert can could just handle it without any extra effort". If they aren't permitted to, by the contract, the job can sit undone for months waiting for the organizations' legal departments to argue about it.

Unions are strict because it's too easy to backslide and lose all you fought for. Union guys will in fact work in excess of overtime if they want to, but they're absolutely not going to let you take advantage of it.

Some unions are corrupt, but most try their best to defend their workers

I read it, though. so you're wrong on both of your assumptions.

There is nothing in the article to suggest Amazon broke the law or interfered with the union vote other than someone who saw security open the package locker. Nobody saw the ballots being handled or moved. Nobody saw fake ballots being added. And based on the final vote, it would have had to been a massive fraud for the final vote to be 70%+ "no".