My parents had good experience with their unions. Every interaction every person I know in my generation has had with them (CWA, UAW, teamsters, railway unions, etc, etc.) has been strongly negative.
The Amazon workers should form a new union if they want representation.
Cards from existing corrupt national unions are definitely a trap. Once enough people sign, they will swoop in to extract dues, bribe politicians on unrelated issues, and alternate between sabotaging Amazon's work environment and negotiating away whatever current benefits the workers get.
People that are good at negotiating union politics will somehow become unfirable, and just stop bothering to do their jobs.
If history repeats itself, the union reps will then work with Amaozn to create an underclass of ununionizable jobs and hire people at minimum wage to do the old $18/hr work, while the union cronies "supervise" for $25+/hr.
That doesn't mean unions are bad or useless. It would be like saying that since democratic governments can be corrupted, we should do without democracy.
> Unions can be corrupted or do mistakes
Industry in Detroit is a perfect example of what can happen when unions have way too much power. The current conversation really downplays how ridiculously powerful unions like the UAW were. It was effectively impossible to lose your job -- you would have line workers that would bring a portable TV to work and watch their work roll past them all day, and they were able to do that until the plants closed down because of the terms the union had in place. I have multiple drawers of tools from vendors that only ever sold B2B; in my father's time, you would buy them off UAW members that stole them from auto manufacturers in decently large quantities, because you wouldn't get fired for it. The only way to reliably lose your job was to cross the union itself. Even people who were part of a union at that time will pretty readily admit that they were unsustainably powerful. We're not even started on the organized crime that came out of unions in Detroit at that time.
The point isn't that unions shouldn't exist at all. The point is that you need to be really careful with comments like the root comment, which describe unions as the common man engaging in a heroic struggle against the forces of capitalist evil, while completely glossing over what they have become in multiple places at multiple points in history.
Better job opportunities for a part of the population means that all employers need to improve conditions to compete for employees.