Amazon’s bid to overturn the workers union win is rejected. According to a hearing officer’s report that was seen by Insider, the United States Federal Labor Board is going to dismiss Amazon’s appeal against its workers’ historic vote to join a labor union at one of its Staten Island warehouses. The vote was to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
The warehouse workers had been the first employees in the history of the e-commerce giant to successfully form a union. They voted in April to join the Amazon Labor Union, which had just been established at the time. The election held by the National Labor Relations Board required only a simple majority for the union to emerge victorious; they did so by receiving 2,654 votes in favor of the move and only 2,131 votes against it.
Amazon had filed 25 complaints against the election result, including charges that union organizers coerced workers to vote for their cause. The company had appealed against the outcome of the poll. In addition to this, it stated that the NLRB’s Brooklyn office gave the impression of supporting the union movement.
In the report that was handed in on Thursday, a hearing officer for the NLRB noted that each and every one of those objections will be “overruled in their entirety.”
According to the findings, Amazon had “not satisfied its burden” of showing that the labour union or any third parties had interfered with the election. Rather, the study stated that Amazon had “not met its burden.”
It was highlighted that the NLRB’s office in Phoenix was in charge of the hearing and the decision because the board wanted to ensure that its office in Brooklyn remained impartial throughout the process.
The officer stated that their conclusion was reached after 24 days of hearings through Zoom during which the attorneys for all sides had the opportunity to evaluate the facts and present their opinions.
Four months after employees decided to do so, the Amazon Labor Union has been given the green light by decision that was handed down on Thursday to pursue recognition as the first recognized labor unit in the massive logistics company.
The Amazon Labor Union issued a statement saying that it was “pleased” with the officer’s findings and that its members “understand that this is just the beginning of a much longer fight.” The statement was in response to the officer’s investigation into allegations of unfair labor practices at Amazon.
The workers’ union stated in a letter that it had written that “Amazon’s abuse of the legal process is just a stalling technique that is aimed to delay our negotiations and cause workers to lose faith in the process.”
According to CNBC, a spokesperson for Amazon named Kelly Nantel released a statement in which she said the following: “As we showed throughout the hearing with dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome of the election and we don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants.”
The requests for comments made by Insider were not immediately met with a response from Amazon or the Amazon Labor Union.
Over the course of the past year, there has been an increase in the number of union victories among industrial heavyweights that were previously regarded to be immune to unionisation. As an illustration, more than 200 Starbucks locations have submitted paperwork to unionise, and retail employees at Apple’s Grand Central store are discussing whether or not to join a union as well.
