Due to a country still reeling from the latest wave of COVID-19, Amazon finds itself the primary shopping location for most people, cemented by the model of sending every purchased item directly to your home door. This is accomplished through a variety of jobs for workers: workers packaging the products, shipping the products to destination regions and delivering the product to the customer’s doorstep. Due to the immense use of labor, Amazon’s shipping procedure employs over 1 million people.

Despite this, Amazon workers do not have good working conditions. Workers have had to deal with long hours of no pay, grueling conditions, and a culture of constant surveillance. For years, workers have been pushing to make conditions better, but progress has been slow because Amazon is resisting working condition reforms. This has also been facilitated with the company’s strict stance on unions. However, as a union at Amazon has finally formed, there may be progress on the horizon.

What is a labor union? A labor union is a union of people with the goal of deciding how people work. These unions can make it easier to do things such as strikes, where a large number of people decide to stop working for a particular purpose. With such a large labor force within Amazon, it’s easy to see how the company would want to block such unions from forming.

In a poll, thousands of workers working for Amazon stated that they would prefer if there was a union, and this shows that amazon workers are ready to fight back. With this new powerful resistance, Amazon has to take a new perspective into account-the perspective of their workers. This will likely lead to new changes that workers have long been fighting for.

Of course, unions are not always the best solution. There have been corrupt unions in the past, and due to this some are against unions. In fact, in a poll delivered on Staten Island, over 2000 people voted against the creation of the Amazon union. Unions as a whole have been growing less and less popular over time in the United States, perhaps due to the actions of companies such as Amazon to block their creation and peoples fear of corruption within them.

Customers who frequently shop on the site can shop in ease knowing that things are starting to change for the better for workers. Perhaps, workers will one day secure comfortable working conditions at Amazon.