Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sat down for an interview with CNBC on Thursday and discussed the company as a whole while also touching on the topic of labor unions.
Jassy was asked how he feels about the labor union movement across the country following the Amazon Labor Union victory at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse earlier in April.
"It's employees' choice whether or not they want to join a union," Jassy said during the interview. "We happen to think they're better off not doing so for a couple of reasons at least."
Jassy went on to explain why he believes a union could negatively affect workers
"First, at a place like Amazon that empowers employees, if they see something they can do better for customers or for themselves, they can go meet in a room, decide how to change it and change it," Jassy said. "That type of empowerment doesn't happen when you have unions. It's much more bureaucratic, it's much slower."
He then added that the relationships people have with their managers is crucial for the business, and mentioned how Amazon has bumped up it's minimum wage and benefits for employees in recent years.
"I also think that people are better off having direct connections with their managers," Jassy said. "You think about work differently, you have relationships that are different, we get to hear from a lot of people as opposed to it all being filtered through one voice.
"If you want to keep the construct that we've had for this long, you have to have competitive and compelling benefits though for employees. It's why we champion the $15 minimum wage a few years ago, and we're up over $18 now. It's why we have full insurance, why 401k, 20 weeks of paid leave."
Jassy also spoke about the Amazon Career Choice program to help pay for full college tuition. He was then asked about safety issues within the company that was been brought up by people in the labor union, saying Amazon workers suffered more injuries on the job than other companies dealt with.
Jassy said that because of the amount of new hires the company had during the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years, that is a reason for the number of injuries on the job.
"Well look, there's a lot of ways you can spin the safety data," Jassy said. "Some special interest folks like you're talking about with this case will do it for their own interest, that data is not really accurate.
"... In our case we hired about 300,000 people just in 2021, most of whom had never worked in this type of industrial space and who had to be trained. And all the data we have says that the instances of injuries in the first six months is always much higher than there after, so when you have a lot of new people you'll have more instances."
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