Amazon: there will be no second union in New York

It is a failure for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). On the back of a resounding first victory in early April, the company’s first union did not succeed in its bet: the employees of an Amazon sorting center in New York voted 62% against the arrival of the organization on their site. According to a count broadcast online, 618 employees voted “no” to the question of whether they wanted to be represented by ALU, against 380 who voted “yes”. About 1,633 employees in total were called upon to vote last week, during a ballot spread from April 25 to 29. 998 expressed themselves, which represents a participation rate of 61%.

ALU created a surprise in early April by becoming the company’s first union in the United States, in the JFK8 warehouse in the Staten Island district of New York. Second largest employer in the United States after the distribution giant Walmart, Amazon had until then succeeded in repelling the desires of employees wishing to regroup in the country since its creation in 1994. In the wake of its first success, ALU aroused the craze, its members claiming to have been contacted by representatives of warehouses all over the country. The organization hoped to score another victory at the LDJ5 sorting center located across the street.

Policy support

US President Joe Biden himself made a strong plea in favor of unions in early April, declaring during his speech: “By the way, Amazon, we’re coming…”Two stars of the Democratic left, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also come to support the movement in front of the LDJ5 sorting center on the eve of the start of the ballot. The company for its part filed an appeal against the result of the vote at JFK8, considering in particular that members of the ALU had “intimidated” the employees and accusing the New York branch of the agency responsible for supervising the ballot , NLRB, to be biased.

An NLRB official from another branch where the case was relocated, in Phoenix, agreed to hold a hearing on the group objections on May 23, saying they could “be grounds for annulment of the election “. Motivated by the attitude of their company during the pandemic, in particular on health protections, and more recently by inflation, several groups of employees in different companies are currently trying to organize themselves. At Starbucks in particular, in the wake of a first symbolic victory in December, employees of more than 250 cafes have submitted a file for the organization of a vote and more than forty have so far voted for the creation of a union within their establishment.

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