I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them

Apparently Walmart forces workers to watch anti-union videos and will entirely shut down a store at the first hint of union activity (and then later re-open it few months later with new staff). Amazon likely does the same with the anti-union propaganda and can also afford to shut down factories or fire the entire staff.

There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target.

One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.

The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.

Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.

Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.

[1] https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states...

[2] https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...

FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - top down opression.

> The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.

You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.

The federal government and these huge corps REALLY do not want unions to form, and they will do anything in their power to prevent it from happening.

It seems simple: Do the smart thing, form a union! But the reality is that the people working in these warehouses and these types of jobs are so terrorized economically, medically, and in just about any way you can imagine, that it's unrealistic for them to stick their neck out to try and improve things.