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The union isn't a blanket union for all Amazon employees. It only covers about 5,800 employees who want to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union

• tzs 6y ago
  Engineers in the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union seems absurd, but strange things like that can happen. For example, a lot of engineers in aerospace and defense (including software engineers) were members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of American (UBC). That came about because when Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose he hired a bunch of UBC labor. They only built one Spruce Goose, but as the company did other things, many of those workers stayed, and UBC continued to represent them. When Hughes started Hughes Aircraft, more workers turned to UBC to represent them. As late as 2000, Local 1553 of UBC was still representing all kinds of engineers at various companies that have arisen out of the various splits and mergers that the Hughes companies have been involved in. I don't know if that is still the case. There's something funny about satellites and missiles, which are about as far from wood-based projects as you can get, being built by people represented by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. But then there is "Japan developing wooden satellites to cut space junk" [1], so maybe it isn't so funny after all. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55463366 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55463366