It seems that union politics is swinging back. If we choose 1980 as a nominal endpoint for the union pendulum, it feels like 2020-ish may be the other one.
Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... 40 years is a long time, considering the "pendulum" took a long time getting to 1980. I'm not sure what from past experience transposes to the present and how. The world is very different.
What does an amazon union even look like? How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
I feel like most discussions fall into generic "for" and "against" union points. Realistically, unionisations is a wide space. Sports league unions. Newspaper Guilds. Germany's DGB. America's Teamsters. Teachers unions... all very different, and different in different eras.
What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
Agree on the pendulum analogy. Unions are effectively dead right now in 2020. A balance is needed, so you're seeing the shift back to protecting workers. But 40 years of anti-workers-rights propaganda is a tough line to break through
> What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]:
"""Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks."""
This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.
The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.
I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?
Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.
Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?
There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts.
> How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms?
They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread.
>What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.
In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here.
Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.
In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.
Usually those who advocate unions now are the ones who would be on board with it in all its forms. So far too left to have success in today's Western politics. That's convenient for the people on the other side.
But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.
In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.
Union politics in the west in the post WWII period started looking more like guilds and less like the pre-WWII left wing unions that dominated the 20s and 30s. Those unions were far more concerned with broader social transformation than those that came after, who were primarily interested in protecting only their workers and locking down seniority-based privileges. Corruption and conservativism ran through the labour movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and led in many cases to anti-union sentiment from the people they were supposed to be organizing. It will take significant rebuilding and rethinking of what a union is before they can have broad resurgence. Organizing in individual workplaces and industries means little when the vast majority of workers are working odd hours in multiple service industry jobs among several employers.
I think the biggest thing working against unionization is automation. At some point it just becomes cheaper to use software and robots.
Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage.
My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks.
Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.
One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions.
Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living.
Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers.
There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.
Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees.
I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.
Another way of thinking of it might be "good times." Industrial unions had their success decades when the sector was growing fast. It's always easier negotiating a growing pie.
Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more.
That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.
Bar associations are licensors that act as an ethical constraint and competence check on lawyers — and being kicked out of one (being disbarred) has direct impacts. The AMA is more of a professional organization — it publishes materials relevant to the profession (JAMA) and advocates and lobbies on behalf of medical professionals, but it doesn’t issue licenses or doctorates.
The last 40 years have seen information asymmetry decline like in no other era. Until now, that mostly benefited the rich. Workers are just catching up on the same phenomenon that led to the new Gilded Age.
I think that’s true. But I fear the swing back is going to be cut short if unions stick to the current strategy of a unified front between public and private unions. My rough impression is that public opinion is swinging in favor of private unions and against public unions. I’m already hearing liberals get grumbly over rising taxes and declining services due to unsustainable public employee benefits, and that situation is going to get much worse before it gets better.
As great as seeing workers get better wages and working conditions would be, I observe that Amazon and other companies (let's just call them "employers") simply have the upper hand in having a surplus of global labor wanting to work for the wages and conditions offered. (see the other story about "what happened in 1971" and the general stagnation of wages for the last few decades)
It's not like Amazon or others are forcing workers to take these jobs. This is voluntary, inevitable, equilibrium supply and demand of labor -- where willing labor is in great surplus lately compared to what was a previously stable pool of middle class jobs seeking employable bodies, leading to a very weak bargaining position. The floodgates of global labor competition were opened with a lot of underdeveloped countries' peoples willing to take up jobs at low (but high for them) pay, and that has rippled through every developed country's labor economy.
Until there is a relative shortage of willing workers, the situation will not change hugely I fear. (Aside from pockets of shortage due to education, credentials, monopolies of labor, other barriers to entry, etc)
Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.
Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? They don't solve the underlying problem.
And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
With enough free trade agreements without statues for worker protections, you can forget unionization to a large degree.
And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this.
You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
History disagrees. If you look at the paid leave in France in 1936, and look at the various direct and indirect advantages (salaries + paid leave +...) obtained between 1920 and 1940, you’ll notice that the huge strikes of 1936 to obtain paid leave played almost no role in obtaining this perk. And a lot of companies had started doing so 1 to 5 years earlier, and it was developing at the same time in other countries which didn’t have strikes.
Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
"Employers" as a group have the upper hand currently, but only because they were willing to kill to get it. Union busting up to and including a bunch of murders got us where we are now. In a democratic system with one vote per person, workers would have much more power than employers.
It's voluntary on some level sure, but it's also true that in any single 'negotiation', Amazon has an enormous advantage by virtue of size.
Corporations bargain collectively automatically, because they're already collectives. This is especially true in the case of enormous corporations with many thousands of employees.
When someone is getting hired by Amazon, it's literally a million versus one. That's a lot of leverage to bring to a negotiation, so it makes sense that a union would be necessary to even the odds for unskilled labor.
One of the greatest PR successes of the modern era has been the effort to convince the masses that an unacceptable relationship between labor and the owners of capital is inevitable.
It is not. As should be no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of history the inherent tension between these two groups has formed the basis for nearly all political competition.
When confronted with an example of that conflict persisting, such as today’s labor action described in the article, it’s not particularly good analysis to assume away the basic premise of what’s happening in step one.
What happens when an owner of capital manufacturers a product in a country where people are willing to earn 5% of an American salary, and then sells it in America for 50% of the cost that an owner of capital who chose to manufacture in America?
The root cause is consumers will purchase from the sellers that offers the lowest price, and so the sellers that drives down labor costs to offer the lowest price will survive.
> "Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay."
This concerns me but I still haven't seen any evidence that Amazon warehouse workers are treated differently to any other unskilled manual labor. Is Amazon different because its super successful right now? Or because it uses tech to make people work harder.
Yeah I used to work for a large retailer here in the UK when I was a student. That was far worse than any stories about amazon. My manager used to lock the toilets so we couldn’t go and forced us to break H&S regs by carrying shelves full of stuff rather than dismantle and move them piecemeal. If we didn’t do what he said he threatened to call the police and report us for the things he was actually stealing from stock. That job was 8pm to 8am overnight with no breaks and we usually had to do an hour of overtime. And this was for min wage and we had to fight to get the money out of them every week.
I quit after 6 weeks and reported him to their HQ who did nothing at all. Eventually his pride and joy Mitsubishi Legnum was mysteriously rolled onto its roof writing it off.
> If we didn’t do what he said he threatened to call the police and report us for the things he was actually stealing from stock.
For the record, and the benefit of everyone else reading this who might be too young or naive to know what to do, when your boss commits an actual felony (extortion) on you, you do not "report to their HQ". You go straight to the police.
That's my thinking, Amazon just seems to be a popular target. Even though they pay warehouse workers double the federal minimum wage at $15 and provide benefits.
From what I've read negative instances are isolated to specific managers which isn't really different from any other job and doesn't make for a systematic abuse of employees.
If I was an unskilled worker Amazon seems like a pretty good bet.
They address why they are targeting Amazon a bit further down. They view Amazon as one of the most extreme examples of problems many companies have, and Amazon has done exceptionally well compared to other companies during the pandemic.
The automation is inevitable. Amazon aren't keeping that a secret.
At most, they are singling out their Fulfillment Center to be the first trials but the automation is coming regardless of the strikes.
Imagine being able to run a warehouse in total darkness, with no heating or ventilation. The cost savings from things like having toilets and a canteen could be worth a bit too. You could also expand into the car park and use up most of that since you already own the land.
It's too good an opportunity to pass up I reckon (from an Amazon perspective anyway!)
I don't think you'll be able to escape ventilation and plumbing. There will still be people going to those fulfillment centers for maintenance and the like.
The parking lot size is likely determined by mandatory minimums too, so there's not as much gain there either
You could have said the same for the UAW, but I suspect the lifetime earnings and working conditions for those auto workers were much better than they would have been without the union.
Good. In theory everyone should be better off if we automate shitty jobs away, the only reason that isn't always so is because we've constructed our society to concentrate the results of this increased efficiency rather than distribute it.
Automation is a good thing. It leads to higher productivity and people can do other things instead. If a job cannot pay a living wage and doesn’t offer a decent work environment it shouldn’t.
In my lifetime though, the median worker has had their productivity go up and their real-pay stagnate. With the trajectory we are on, the people who "can do other things instead" will get jobs that generate more profit for their employer for the same pay as their previous job.
The saying is "a rising tide lifts all boats" but at this point it seems that only a select few are granted boats.
So, which 15 countries? Bangladesh mexico US and """Europe""" isn't precise. Which amazon workers are actually disstatisfied with amazon's operations under local laws? Why bother protest if vice gives anonymity for amazon?
For any future world's wealthiest, is having a non contentious relationship with employees a reasonable endeavor? The fact that this is about money while the person in charge has the most money of anyone living doesn't seem to be a desirable or targeted position given their fine tuned logistical approach to the world.
People will purchase from Walmart.com for 5 cents cheaper.
Also, the person in charge owns equity that when multiplied by the most recent share sale price equals a valuation that might be the biggest number in the world for a publicly traded company. But that isn’t the same as money, and if it were to be liquidated, the share price would not be worth nearly as much, which it partly is because Bezos owns much of it.
The problem is he has all those shares instead of the people responsible for producing that wealth. Wealth is fine in the abstract, but not when he has so much while the people who enable it suffer for the inability to fund basic needs.
Not quite. Larry Ellison created white-collar jobs, but still the Oracle workforce unionized and mobilized in several EU countries.
White-collars are traditionally less likely to fight only because they tend to enjoy better mobility and have better incentives to stay silent (even if they don't maximize their earning potential, their social standing typically compensates). If you mistreat them enough, they will react like anyone else.
I don't get the Amazon hype at all. Never ordered anything from them.
The last time I checked, their website looked very counter intuitive and also down right ugly. Many products are seemingly garbage or counterfeit, the review system is bad and the workers and sellers are not treated well or properly respected... and I could go on.
I don't want to lecture anyone about ethics, but it's astonishing how little personal responsibility anyone takes when it comes to using services from such a company. Doing business with them is just completely off-putting to me.
The combination of these means that buying from Amazon is largely a low-friction experience. Even though the website is horrible to navigate, you can order most of what you need on one site without searching for deals or coupons. Even though the site is filled with knock-offs and fake products, they ship quickly and are free to return, so there's little risk.
People (myself included, though I'm trying to do more of my purchasing locally or on other sites) get suckered in by the convenience and then don't have enough reason to switch to other stores, despite the overall subpar experience.
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Honestly, I don't know if that's a good or bad thing... 40 years is a long time, considering the "pendulum" took a long time getting to 1980. I'm not sure what from past experience transposes to the present and how. The world is very different.
What does an amazon union even look like? How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms? What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
I feel like most discussions fall into generic "for" and "against" union points. Realistically, unionisations is a wide space. Sports league unions. Newspaper Guilds. Germany's DGB. America's Teamsters. Teachers unions... all very different, and different in different eras.
What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
> What, besides achieving a union and negotiating power, would an amazon union want to be?
Well, part of the issue is Amazon's union-busting efforts prevent that conversation from even happening[1]. But they do have specific demands[2]:
"""Employees backing the union effort said in interviews Tuesday that the issues at the warehouse include safety concerns, inadequate pay, and 12-hour shifts with insufficient breaks and unreasonable hourly quotas, after which they lose more of their day waiting unpaid in long lines for security checks."""
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dm8bx/leaked-amazon-memo-de...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/employees...
The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this.
Here’s the most recent instance:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...
This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.
The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.
I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?
Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.
Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?
There are already Amazon unions across Europe, so I don’t understand the speculative framing here. They fight for better wages, working conditions, etc for their members. All of these are better than their American counterparts because of their present and others historical organizing efforts.
> How do unions operate legally/practically in global firms?
They don’t? They operate locally based on the unionization laws for a given country. In Europe, many are part of sector-wide bargaining systems that provide a floor for treatment and wages. The US, by contrast, specifically enshrined shop-level organization as the legal means for unionizing to make it more adversarial, limit its political influence and spread.
>What "package" would they want to negotiate for. One union? Many unions? Structure. Strategy. Tactics. Etc.
Again, these are locally determined by workers through democratic processes. The formation of these unions is to give workers back the power that’s stripped from them by the asymmetries of authoritian corporate structures and wage labor more generally.
In fact my 1980-2020 pendulum analogy doesn't work for (eg) Germany or France like it does for the UK or US. In a lot of western europe, there wasn't the same sharp de-unionisation. So, unions exist and their role is well understood. They more or less form for a regulatory body for labour by sector. It's stable. I doubt amazon themselves are concerned about these. Not much uncertainty here.
Interestingly enough, shop-level organization at amazon scale gets somewhat similar to sector-wide unions.
In any case, unionization laws aren't deterministic.
But there's a much larger contingent of people who are on-board with collective bargaining and better worker conditions while not necessarily liking the most prominent unions. There's not much of a voice for these people yet.
In recent generations, unions have been mostly receding. Being on board regardless of form is a feature of this. Union politics was largely concerned with holding some ground. Getting specific about form is something you do on the way up, moreso than down.
Look at McDonalds. In high wage areas, they use the automated ordering kiosks, but in low wage areas they still have humans taking orders. Because they did the math and realized the machines are cheaper than a $15/hr wage.
My supermarket just massively increased the self checkout area, doubling its size. It's no coincidence that minimum wage in our area goes up to $15.65 in five weeks.
Unions are a good thing, but they have a very fine line to walk between protecting workers and changing the calculus towards eliminating the workers altogether.
One is that automation proceeds with or without unionization. It's a labour issue, if it's an "issue" regardless of unions.
Second is unions aren't really about "minimum wages." If the game is lower minimum wages or automation... that game is long lost as a viable way of making a living.
Amazon is already highly automated relative to the malls it replaces. Still, it's one of the worlds biggest employers.
There's another way of thinking about automation. Automation raises labour efficiency, by definition. In that sense it increases labour's earning potential. Put even more blunty, the reason why unionisation @ amzn is meaningful is that amazon have a lot to bargain for. Amazon will always prefer to automate than to hire. But they'll also prefer to pay high wages than have disruptive labour disputes.
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Unions grow when there is disparity between companies exploiting employees. How else can you call companies like Amazon reaping fortunes but absolutely refusing to pay their employees.
I believe companies who earn well should be able to pay their workers enough to be able to afford very basic standard of living where they work.
Should is a big would, but companies that earn more can pay workers more.
That said... there has to be more to it than "pro union." Where's the goalpost. Say amazon organized... what sort of wage increases can they expect.
I hope we can avoid massacres this time.
Quick history lesson if anyone needs one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theo...
Dead Comment
And at the federal level, the unions have declared war on half the country by joining the “resistance” against Trump’s policies: http://laborpress.org/federal-workers-plot-resistance-to-tru...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/resistance-from-with...
It's not like Amazon or others are forcing workers to take these jobs. This is voluntary, inevitable, equilibrium supply and demand of labor -- where willing labor is in great surplus lately compared to what was a previously stable pool of middle class jobs seeking employable bodies, leading to a very weak bargaining position. The floodgates of global labor competition were opened with a lot of underdeveloped countries' peoples willing to take up jobs at low (but high for them) pay, and that has rippled through every developed country's labor economy.
Until there is a relative shortage of willing workers, the situation will not change hugely I fear. (Aside from pockets of shortage due to education, credentials, monopolies of labor, other barriers to entry, etc)
And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this.
You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
Corporations bargain collectively automatically, because they're already collectives. This is especially true in the case of enormous corporations with many thousands of employees.
When someone is getting hired by Amazon, it's literally a million versus one. That's a lot of leverage to bring to a negotiation, so it makes sense that a union would be necessary to even the odds for unskilled labor.
One of the greatest PR successes of the modern era has been the effort to convince the masses that an unacceptable relationship between labor and the owners of capital is inevitable.
It is not. As should be no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of history the inherent tension between these two groups has formed the basis for nearly all political competition.
When confronted with an example of that conflict persisting, such as today’s labor action described in the article, it’s not particularly good analysis to assume away the basic premise of what’s happening in step one.
The root cause is consumers will purchase from the sellers that offers the lowest price, and so the sellers that drives down labor costs to offer the lowest price will survive.
This concerns me but I still haven't seen any evidence that Amazon warehouse workers are treated differently to any other unskilled manual labor. Is Amazon different because its super successful right now? Or because it uses tech to make people work harder.
I quit after 6 weeks and reported him to their HQ who did nothing at all. Eventually his pride and joy Mitsubishi Legnum was mysteriously rolled onto its roof writing it off.
For the record, and the benefit of everyone else reading this who might be too young or naive to know what to do, when your boss commits an actual felony (extortion) on you, you do not "report to their HQ". You go straight to the police.
From what I've read negative instances are isolated to specific managers which isn't really different from any other job and doesn't make for a systematic abuse of employees.
If I was an unskilled worker Amazon seems like a pretty good bet.
At most, they are singling out their Fulfillment Center to be the first trials but the automation is coming regardless of the strikes.
Imagine being able to run a warehouse in total darkness, with no heating or ventilation. The cost savings from things like having toilets and a canteen could be worth a bit too. You could also expand into the car park and use up most of that since you already own the land.
It's too good an opportunity to pass up I reckon (from an Amazon perspective anyway!)
The parking lot size is likely determined by mandatory minimums too, so there's not as much gain there either
The saying is "a rising tide lifts all boats" but at this point it seems that only a select few are granted boats.
Also, the person in charge owns equity that when multiplied by the most recent share sale price equals a valuation that might be the biggest number in the world for a publicly traded company. But that isn’t the same as money, and if it were to be liquidated, the share price would not be worth nearly as much, which it partly is because Bezos owns much of it.
I won't buy from Walmart.com for 5 cents cheaper.
Don't speak for me, please.
White-collars are traditionally less likely to fight only because they tend to enjoy better mobility and have better incentives to stay silent (even if they don't maximize their earning potential, their social standing typically compensates). If you mistreat them enough, they will react like anyone else.
Dead Comment
The last time I checked, their website looked very counter intuitive and also down right ugly. Many products are seemingly garbage or counterfeit, the review system is bad and the workers and sellers are not treated well or properly respected... and I could go on.
I don't want to lecture anyone about ethics, but it's astonishing how little personal responsibility anyone takes when it comes to using services from such a company. Doing business with them is just completely off-putting to me.
Near-universal breadth of products
Typically decent prices on products
Generous return policy with free return shipping
Fast shipping (not so much anymore)
The combination of these means that buying from Amazon is largely a low-friction experience. Even though the website is horrible to navigate, you can order most of what you need on one site without searching for deals or coupons. Even though the site is filled with knock-offs and fake products, they ship quickly and are free to return, so there's little risk.
People (myself included, though I'm trying to do more of my purchasing locally or on other sites) get suckered in by the convenience and then don't have enough reason to switch to other stores, despite the overall subpar experience.
People I talk actually want to work for Amazon. The pay is great! Granted, these are software developers.
Where can I see data on the wages and perks of warehouse workers? I would like to see how they are treated by Amazon and non-Amazon.