Tech

Amazon Labor Union Certified by U.S. Labor Officials

Amazon now has a legal obligation to bargain with the union, and can face serious penalties if it doesn't.
chris smalls, derrick palmer, and gerald bryson of the amazon labor union protest for organizing rights at jfk8
Image Credit: Getty Images

The Amazon Labor Union has officially been certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the union announced on Wednesday night. Amazon is now legally obligated to start bargaining a contract in good faith with the ALU, nine months after workers first won their union election at the company’s mammoth JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. 

“We're demanding that Amazon now, after certification, meet and bargain with us,” said Seth Goldstein, partner at Julien, Mirer, Singla, and Goldstein and lawyer for the ALU. “We're demanding bargaining, and if we need to, we're going to move to get a court order enforcing our bargaining rights. It's outrageous that they've been violating federal labor while they continue to do so.” 

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The certification comes after a 24-day-long hearing in August when both the company and the union presented arguments about the Staten Island warehouse election in April. An Amazon spokesperson said the company had presented hundreds of pages of evidence that the union had improperly influenced the election. On Sept. 1, the Hearing Officer Lisa Dunn issued a decision that Amazon’s objections to the election should be overruled entirely. The new certification, issued by a Regional Officer after reviewing the report of the hearing, agrees with the September decision. 

“We knew it was unlikely that the NLRB Regional Office would rule against itself, and intend to appeal,” said Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel. “As we’ve said since the beginning, we don’t believe this election process was fair, legitimate, or representative of the majority of what our team wants.” 

Amazon has until Jan. 25 to appeal, at which point the NLRB can either grant or deny its request to review the decision. An NLRB spokesperson said the agency had no comment on the decision.

“We were forced to go through a 24-day hearing that cost tens of thousands of dollars,” Goldstein said. “Amazon now has an obligation under the National Labor Relations Act to meet and bargain with us, and there are penalties for them not to bargain. If they refuse to bargain, they have to pay bargaining comp, they have to go to mandatory federal mediation. They have to issue reports on the progress of mediation.” 

“There are huge penalties—and remember, we're also under the national cease-and-desist order by the judge,” he continued, referring to a decision issued in November when a federal judge ordered the company to stop firing people for unionizing. “We're going to enforce that if they try to delay bargaining. We just found out that Derrick Palmer’s suspension has been extended to February 22. They're already playing games, and we're going to make sure that we go to court on that issue as well.” Palmer is the vice president of the ALU and was a critical figure in the early organizing of the union. 

Amazon has largely been unsupportive of unionization efforts. An NLRB filing showed that the company was reluctant to comply with a requirement in the federal judge’s order requiring it to be read aloud to JFK8 workers. After a failed union vote at ALB1, the company’s albany warehouse, the ALU alleged that Amazon had engaged in “coercive” conduct that had skewed the results of the election. Motherboard had previously obtained photos of third-party union-busting consultants inside ALB1, paid $3,200 daily by Amazon to interrupt workers on the warehouse floor and take them for one-on-one meetings. 

“After we won the election nine months ago, they've been gaming the whole thing, and at every point they’ve lost,” Goldstein said. “They lost after a 24-day hearing and a 144-page brief, they lost. They just lost this. They're going to appeal it to the board, but they have an obligation to bargain with us.”