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New York (AFP) – The American agency in charge of labor law (NLRB) has given the green light to the organization of a vote on the possible creation of a union in a second Amazon warehouse located on Staten Island in New York.
“The NLRB has approved our request,” the organization called the Amazon Labor Union said on its Twitter account on Wednesday evening.
The union has proven that it has collected the signatures of at least 30% of the site’s employees, a necessary condition for the organization of a vote, a spokeswoman for the NLRB confirmed to AFP on Thursday.
The union and Amazon must now agree on the conditions of the ballot in the warehouse called LDJ5 and comprising around 1,500 employees, otherwise the agency will decide.
“We look forward to making the voices of our employees heard,” responded an Amazon spokeswoman. “Our goal remains to work directly with our team to make Amazon a great place to work,” she added, however.
The e-commerce giant is therefore now facing three unionization attempts.
Employees of the JFK8 warehouse located in the Staten Island district, very close to the LDJ5 warehouse, must vote in person from March 25 to 30 on whether or not to create a union on the site.
Further south, in Alabama, a postal vote is also underway among employees of the Bessemer warehouse. They have the opportunity to revote after a failed first attempt last year after the NLRB found Amazon broke the rules.
Several groups of employees have succeeded in recent months in convincing their colleagues to join an organization to represent them.
After the creation in December of a union in two Starbucks cafes in Buffalo in northern New York State, a first in establishments directly managed by the group in the United States, a third cafe unionized at the end of February in Arizona and cases have been filed at more than 100 other facilities.
Employees of a New York store of the outdoor chain REI, which has about 170 establishments in the country, also voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to join the RWDSU union, representing workers in the distribution sector.
These successes have often been led by young employees who are more favorable than their elders to trade unions, which have been in decline for several decades in the country. The rate of unionized employees in the private sector fell further there in 2021, to 6.1%.
© 2022 AFP
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