Last week’s election at the Staten Island sorting facility, known as LDJ5 and counted on Monday, was the second to be organized by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a newly formed union started by a local group of Amazon warehouse workers. led by a fired employee.
The public election on Monday, held at the Brooklyn National Labor Council office and broadcast on Zoom, strongly supported not uniting. There were 618 votes against and 380 in favor. Of the approximately 1,633 eligible voters, 998 were counted. There were no disputed ballots. Two ballots were canceled.
In a statement, Amazon spokesman Kelly Nantel said the company was “pleased that our LDJ5 team was able to hear their voices.” We look forward to continuing to work directly together as we strive to make our employees better every day. ”
Although ALU did not immediately respond to CNN Business’s request for comment, it tweeted: “The organization will continue inside and outside the facility. The battle has just begun. ”
Both parties have five working days to file objections.
The LDJ5 election attracted considerable attention from prominent labor leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who met with Amazon workers on Staten Island the day before the election.
ALU’s unlikely success in its first election at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, which employs more than 8,000 workers and is also located on Staten Island, is seen as an important event with potentially wider implications for Amazon’s expanded network of facilities. The victory quickly garnered praise from advocacy groups, established unions and the White House.
Following the LDJ5 result, Teamsters CEO Sean O’Brien, who recently met with ALU leaders after the JFK8 victory, signaled that he continued to focus on organizing Amazon workers. “The struggle on Amazon continues. The only thing this greedy, abusive company has won today is a guarantee that Amazon workers everywhere will not give up until they form a union,” O’Brien said in a statement. AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler tweeted that she “stands in solidarity” with the organizers of the ALU workers, “who are changing the world and just beginning”.
According to John Logan, a professor of labor and employment research at San Francisco State University, the results are no doubt disappointing for the union. “If she had won, things could have hardened for the union to a great extent,” he said. But the stakes are higher for Amazon, Logan said.
“The second defeat could prove fatal to the company’s efforts to stop the organization from spreading like wildfire, just as it did at Starbucks,” he said.
ALU’s organizational efforts have grown out of tensions between Amazon and Staten Island workers over the company’s pandemic response, along with existing frustrations over working conditions. In recent years, Amazon’s workplace has come under scrutiny for its high turnover rates and work-related injuries. Christian Smalls, who was fired by Amazon at the start of the pandemic and is now president of the ALU, called the JFK8 victory a “catalyst for a revolution with Amazon workers, just like Starbucks’ union efforts” in an interview with CNN last month. “We want to have the same domino effect.” After Monday’s result, Smalls tweeted: “Despite today’s result, I am proud of the LDJ5 worker / organizers, they had a harder challenge after our victory in JFK8.”
He added that ALU “will continue to organize, like all of you”
Amazon has repeatedly said in statements that its “employees have always had a choice whether to join a union or not”, while spending millions on anti-union consultants last year alone and campaigning against union unions. Amazon said it was “disappointed” with the results of JFK8 and raised a number of objections to the previous vote on the Staten Island unions, calling for overcoming; an NLRB hearing on the issue is scheduled for later this month. (Last month’s vote count in a separate re-election at a Bessemer, Alabama facility organized by an established union was too close to be announced. The NLRB expects to hold a hearing on the issue, but is not yet scheduled.)
“All the problems are the same. Of course, there are differences between the buildings, but we need a union in JFK8. We need an alliance in LDJ5. We need a union in all of Amazon’s warehouses around the world, “said ALU cashier and LDJ5 employee Madeleine Wesley at a union rally ahead of the LDJ5 election. “This is only the beginning.”
As ALU organizers focused on gathering support for the JFK8 election vote, Amazon was announcing its position on uniting LDJ5 workers, several workers told CNN Business last week before the election. After the JFK8 result, ALU’s attention turned to LDJ5.
Justin Medina, a JFK8 warehouse worker and ALU organizer, told CNN Business last week that due to the smaller size of the LDJ5, Amazon’s efforts may have been more effective. “It’s much more intense,” Medina said.
LDJ5 employee Andrew Perez told CNN Business last week that he had been involved in mandatory meetings in recent weeks, at which company representatives offered their position on unions, including union dues. Perez then said he expected the election results to be close.
In recent weeks, there have been a number of new developments and attention paid to Amazon’s attitude towards and connection with its warehouse workforce.
Amazon revealed in a paperwork last month that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch will lead a racial justice audit of her hourly staff in the United States to “assess all sorts of different racial impacts” on her policies and practices. The move comes as Amazon faces pressure from shareholders to undergo a racial capital audit in a proposal to be put to a vote at the company’s annual meeting later this month. Meanwhile, NLRB chief adviser Jennifer Abruzzo has issued a note challenging one of the ways employers, like Amazon, seek to fight unions – through so-called captive audience meetings or mandatory meetings in which companies express their anti- union position. Although currently legally permissible, Abruzzo called on the agency to review the legality of the mandatory presence of such meetings. Earlier, Amazon declined to comment on Abruzzo’s note.
And in a victory for the ALU, an NLRB administrative law judge found that Amazon had violated labor laws by firing a JFK8 employee named Gerald Bryson, who is the organizer of the ALU. Bryson, like Smalls, was fired by Amazon in March 2020 after protesting against pandemic-related workplace safety measures. While Amazon refused to retaliate against Bryson, the judge ordered Bryson to be reinstated and paid his lost wages. (In a statement, Amazon spokesman Kelly Nantel said that “we strongly disagree with the NLRB judge’s decision” and that he plans to appeal.)
Over the weekend, Amazon informed workers that it was ending its Covid-19 paid leave policy and would no longer notify workers of positive incidents at its facilities unless required by law.
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