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Bulletins

Two Amazon warehouses in Staten Island are trying to unionize

Workers at two separate warehouses have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board to try to unionize, becoming only the second group of Amazon workers to attempt the feat in the last few years.

Amazon rally

Amazon workers and 'community allies' attend a rally outside the office of BlackRock in Manhattan, to protest against Amazon's working conditions and company policies in New York on May 24, 2021.

Photo: Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Two groups of workers in two of Amazon's Staten Island warehouses have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board to ask for a vote to unionize, becoming only the second serious union effort at the country's second-largest private employer.

The union, called Amazon Labor Union, is an independent group not affiliated with any national organization. The other major effort to unionize Amazon workers in the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse is run by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which already represents about 60,000 workers. Despite Amazon's massive size, no group of workers has ever successfully mounted a union campaign at the company, and the first Bessemer union election went in favor of Amazon by more than a 2:1 ratio. Amazon will face a second union election in Bessemer beginning at the end of this week, after the NLRB ruled that the company illegally interfered with the first.

The NLRB filed a complaint against Amazon's treatment of the Staten Island warehouse union movement in late January, alleging the company illegally interfered with workers' rights to organize. Amazon will get the chance to refute the accusations in a hearing set for April 5. The company also reached an agreement with the NLRB in December that gives the NLRB the right to investigate and sue Amazon more quickly and easily if the company violates labor laws.

The NLRB's lead council, Jennifer Abruzzo, also announced today that she was seeking the right to intervene (or "seek injunctions") early in the process when companies appear to threaten or coerce workers during union organizing, rather than waiting the many months often required for normal NLRB proceedings (for example, like the Amazon hearing that will take place in April).

Amazon did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

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Bulletins