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Amazon is trying to delay a union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, by appealing a US labor relations board decision allowing 6,000 warehouse workers to vote by mail on unionization. The company is advocating for the election to be held in person, according to documents filed Thursday with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Amazon’s argument is that postal voting lowers the turnout. He says the NLRB looked at the bad COVID-19 infection data to determine how to organize the vote, using the positivity rate in Jefferson County, where the warehouse is located, rather than the positivity rate in the warehouse. ‘warehouse itself.
Bessemer workers are expected to vote on whether to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores Union from February 8. The ballots must be mailed by March 29 and the count must take place on March 30. It will be the tech giant’s first union election in the United States since 2014, according to Reuters.
In December, the National Labor Relations Board rejected an earlier attempt by the tech giant to delay a hearing over the union effort.
In a Jan.21 filing, Amazon said if the acting regional manager had looked at more recent data on COVID-19, she would have seen the county’s infection rate decline. “If a manual election is inappropriate here, it’s hard to imagine circumstances under which a regional director would allow manual elections until COVID-19 is eradicated,” the company wrote.
The NLRB previously reported that Jefferson County’s infection rate was over 17% in early January and noted that new cases were on the rise. Now Amazon is arguing that not only was this data wrong, but the NLRB should use data from its warehouse instead. The positivity rate there, according to Amazon, is much lower. “Frankly, that doesn’t mean that when three medical experts basically agree that the conditions [the warehouse] are safer than in another geographic area, a reasonable investigator would ignore this consensus and focus on that other geographic area to make a security-related decision, ”he wrote.
The NLRB could become even less supportive of Amazon with the election of Joe Biden, who has already taken aggressive steps to shift the board’s position to the unions. President Biden on Wednesday sacked Peter Robb, general counsel for the NLRB and longtime opponent of labor groups.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The edge.
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