Thanks for explaining the reasonably obvious, without adding much here.

Nobody is naive enough to think it's solely motivated by cost, nor can we ignore the successes and failures of historical action.

The US has a pretty long history of industry watering down industrial action, either directly, or indirectly by tying things like healthcare to employment right? So, if in spite of pretty serious risks, people collectively decide to strike, it's no longer a half-measure; to your point, the ideological part applies just as strongly to the membership, who will want to follow leadership that expressly works for the benefit of the members. Petals we haven't all worked in manual/production environments, but no matter what, less people familiar with a process and its tooling is all but guaranteed to result in more/many mistakes which will absolutely cause money problems for the organization.

But Amazon! Amazon hasn't cared much about the unionization efforts publicly because a) they've got tremendous marketplace inertia, which strikes and stuff still negatively effect, b) incredible profit margins and c) lack of marketplace alternatives. But look at how pernicious their anti-union messaging inside the warehouses has been. Almost seems like they know who actually has the power.

So: things are bad, but don't be pessimistic. This past year alone has plenty of loudly successful efforts to improve working conditions for the avg joe/Jane.