Amazon union vote count ends in Alabama and Staten Island
Amazon held a lead in anti-union votes in Bessemer, Alabama as vote counting ended today, while the company fell behind union organizers by more than 300 votes in one second and the vote count is still ongoing in Staten Island. Labor experts expected Amazon to emerge victorious from both efforts.
The Bessemer vote is a ‘re-election’ held after the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s landslide victory over efforts by the retail, wholesale and department store union to organize employees warehouse there last year. No group of Amazon workers in the United States has ever successfully organized. Bessemer’s vote last year was the first attempt since 2014, and the Staten Island election is the second. A third election at a second warehouse on Staten Island is due next month.
When the NLRB finished counting the ballots Thursday afternoon in Alabama, warehouse workers had voted 993 “no” to 875 “yes” for unionization. But 416 ballots were not included in the tally because union organizers or Amazon challenged their validity, and the difference between the votes already counted is high enough that those ballots could influence the union’s election. The NLRB will have to rule on each contested ballot to see if it can be counted, so the final election result may not be known for weeks. More than 6,000 workers were eligible to vote and about 40% of them participated.
RWDSU will need to win most of the contested ballots to recover from today’s more than 100-vote deficit. If Amazon continues to prevail, the union could also file unfair labor practice charges against Amazon’s conduct during the election, in addition to charges it has already filed in recent months and are awaiting judgment. of the NLRB. Similar charges filed after last year’s election succeeded in persuading the NLRB to reject the results and call for re-election. “It could go on for a while” before a result is known, Chelsea Connor, RWDSU’s director of communications, told Protocol ahead of the vote.
“What we do know is that this is just the beginning and we will continue to fight,” RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum told a news conference after the vote count. “Workers here showed what is possible. They helped spark a movement. Their first vote last year opened the door for greater organization at Amazon and elsewhere across the country.”
On Staten Island, labor efforts at the two warehouses are led by an independent union called the Amazon Labor Union, not a national group like the RWDSU. When vote counting was halted Thursday afternoon and was due to resume Friday morning, the Amazon Labor Union held a lead of more than 350 votes over Amazon.
Amazon did not immediately respond to request for comment. The company has said in the past that it believes its workers do not want a union in either location and that it offers wages and benefits that make the company an attractive place to work. “Our employees have the choice whether or not to join a union. They always have. As a company, we don’t believe unions are the best answer for our employees,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement to the protocol ahead of the vote.
