The Wall Street Journal reports that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled that "a group of Amazon.com Inc. workers pushing to unionize a large company warehouse in New York won enough support to hold an election … Supporters of the nascent union, which calls itself the Amazon Labor Union, met the requirement for such a vote, the NLRB said Wednesday, which typically requires signatures from 30% of eligible employees at a facility. Organizers are aiming to unionize thousands of employees at a company warehouse in Staten Island."
Union proponents withdrew their first petition last year after it did not achieve the necessary support. Now, they say, they have more than 2,500 signatures; Amazon says that the facility has some 6,000 workers.
The Journal says that it "is skeptical that the union has obtained enough legitimate signatures and is seeking to understand how the signatures were verified."
Amazon also is facing a union election at a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, where the NLRB "found the company violated labor law during an election held at the site a year ago, a charge Amazon has denied," the Journal writes. "The NLRB this month said the new election will be held by mail, with ballots being sent to employees on Feb. 4. Voters will have almost two months to submit their ballots, with the vote count scheduled to start March 28."
- KC's View:
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It seems inevitable that Amazon is going to lose one of these elections, and then the dam is going to break … with a lot more elections and a lot more cases where Amazon employees decide to unionize.
