Amazon is losing its attempt to overturn a historic union vote at its New York-based warehouse.
Employees at Amazon’s Staten Island location were finally handed a victory Thursday after a hearing officer for a federal labor board certified the result of their union vote.
Initially, the online retailer had contested the election results, filing 25 objections with the National Labor Relations Board. In addition, Amazon claimed the vote was improperly influenced by organizers and the agency that oversaw the election.
Some members of the Amazon Labor Union took to social media to celebrate the accomplishment.
“Today is a great day for labor,” tweeted Chris Smalls, a fired Amazon worker who now heads the union. The Amazon Staten Island workers voted 2,654 to 2,131 on April 1 to join the (ALU).
It was not a quick decision for the federal labor official who presided over the weeks-long case that started on June 13. After twenty-four days of hearings in which Amazon unsuccessfully sought to close the proceedings to the public, the federal labor official recommended Thursday that the union be certified.
Lisa Dunn, the agency officer who handled Amazon’s case, determined that the e-commerce giant’s objections should be entirely overruled and that the union should be certified as a bargaining representative for the warehouse, a spokesperson for the NLRB wrote in an email.
Amazon “has not met its burden of establishing that Region 29, the Petitioner, or any third parties have engaged in objectionable conduct affecting the results of the election,” the spokesperson said, explaining Dunn’s recommendation.
A spokesperson for Amazon said the company would continue to contest the decision to unionize.
“While we’re still reviewing the decision, we strongly disagree with the conclusion and intend to appeal,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. “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.”
All three parties, including Amazon, the union, and the agency representing the voters, will have until September 16 to file any exceptions to the report. If any arguments are successfully made, the case will move to the regional director, who can either issue an order to certify the election or officially order a rerun vote.
Amazon will still have one final option to appeal the results based on the regional director’s decision. The last line of defense for Amazon is the five-person labor board, which is likely to be sympathetic to the union.
Amazon should have known to not contest a union vote in the state of New York where every single worker is required to be a union member. 98% of union contributions go to Democrat candidates and the other 2% goes to RINO candidates. Unions also pay lots of money under the table to Liberal activist and corrupt judges. I cancelled my Amazon account then delete my account completely when Bezos took down Parler. I’ve found that I can get better service ordering products directly from vendors. Most of the time I get cheaper prices, faster shipping and a lot of the time free shipping. I have not missed Amazon at all.
Too bad you’re not cognizant of how unions have protected all Americans for over 100 years now. Without unions you wouldn’t have limited time work weeks (40 Hours), holidays, sick pay, and many of the other benefits that are firmly entrenched in all workers’ expectations.
Every employee in NY is NOT required to be in a union. If you work in a union-shop then you pay union dues, because you’re receiving benefits from the union representation. Once the vote is taken then everyone lives with it, just like we all live with whoever our fellow citizens have elected to be our congressperson, senator, etc.
It is obvious you have bought into the extreme conservative position with no basis in reality. When you say someone is buying “corrupt” judges, then back that up with who paid what $ to what judge and how you have determined they are corrupt. Now if they’re corrupt like our last three nominees to the US Supreme Court, we all get that. They lied in their hearings to get on the court so that they could enact their extreme views upon us all. We all KNOW that because their hearings were public, as are their decisions on the Court.