(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Labor Board Official Says Amazon Effort to Overturn Staten Island Warehouse Election Should Be Rejected [1]

['Noam Scheiber']

Date: 2022-09-01

The Amazon Labor Union said that it was pleased with the findings but that its members “understand that this is just the beginning of a much longer fight.” It urged the labor board to certify the election results and require Amazon to negotiate with the union.

The election this year at the Staten Island warehouse was the first time Amazon warehouse workers in the United States voted in favor of forming a union. The labor board announced on April 1 that the Amazon Labor Union had won the election at JFK8 by more than a 10-point margin. Roughly 4,800 employees cast votes out of more than 8,300 who were eligible.

The union was not affiliated with an established labor organization, and its victory was considered a long shot. Amazon held hundreds of mandatory anti-union meetings with employees in the run-up to the election and sent them frequent texts and posted signs throughout the warehouse urging them to vote no.

In its objections to the election, Amazon argued that the labor board had conducted the vote unfairly and that the union had coerced workers into supporting it. The hearing officer found that there was little evidence for either claim and that the material Amazon had presented did not indicate that the outcome of the election had been altered.

For example, Amazon accused the labor board of failing to control the news media presence near the voting area. The hearing officer concluded that there was no evidence that the presence of the news media had pressured workers to vote one way or another, or that it discouraged them from voting. In any case, the hearing officer wrote in the report, it had been up to Amazon to tell members of the news media to leave its property if it felt their presence was problematic.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/technology/nlrb-amazon-union-staten-island.html

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.