The flip side to being a general union buster and hard-nosed employer advocate during "peacetime" is that you lose the moral high ground in crisis and have no where to turn to but more employee-alienating policies. I mean, let's be honest: Amazon's warehouse workers look like heroes right now. And they need stuff, that they don't need under normal circumstances. And the public, on the whole, wants to give it to them. Yet without an existing healthy relationship, the only tool in the union's box is to threaten work stoppage. And the only tool Bezos has is to fire people trying to keep a lid on the thing.
And now we've seen that it's metastasized, and he's having to fire tech workers now too. Needless to say, this isn't where Amazon management would have wanted to be.
So folks: the next time a union calls up and wants to sort out a deal, talk with them and work something out. In the current world, it's hard to see anything but good guys and bad guys. And the workers are the good guys.