The warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, will get a second vote to decide whether to form a union beginning Feb. 4, in a second mail-in election after the results of a sweeping Amazon victory were thrown out by the National Labor Relations Board.
The NLRB ruled that Amazon interfered illegally in the first election earlier this year — which Amazon won by more than a 2:1 margin — and that a second by-mail election would begin Feb. 4 and end when ballots are counted on March 28.
During the first election, Amazon's decision to have a mail-in ballot box installed in front of the warehouse was the primary violation of election rules that caused the NLRB to schedule a new vote. The months of mail-in balloting were rife with accusations of interference from Amazon, including the creation of anti-union Amazon Twitter accounts and an anti-union website.
After the initial Amazon victory, the company declared that the vote proved that workers are not interested in a union. "It's easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that's not true," an Amazon spokesperson said at the time.