The first hurdle has now been taken.
New York. In New York, employees of the online giant Amazon have taken the first formal step towards forming a union: They joined forces to form the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and submitted over 2000 signatures for a vote to the agency responsible for labor rights, said ALU- Chairman Christian Smalls. ALU attorney Eric Milner stated that the minimum of 30 percent of the votes had been reached.
ALU collected the votes in an Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island district. According to lawyer Milner, the NLRB has scheduled a hearing on November 15th. Amazon already has a duty to inform employees about the required vote. An Amazon spokeswoman said the group doubts that a sufficient number of legitimate signatures had been collected to justify the election of an employee representative.
The next step in forming a union is to vote in the company, where more than half of the employees would have to vote for it. This was not the case in April at an Amazon logistics center in the US state of Alabama.
“This is New York. This is a union town and we’re going to prove it, ”said Smalls. He was fired from Amazon a few months ago and is suing against this as well as against the conditions for protection against the corona pandemic in the company.
Amazon has come under fire in the United States for the working conditions of its 950,000 employees. Trade unions as well as politicians criticize the fact that employees are exposed to high work pressure and permanent control. The online giant has benefited massively from the lockdowns in the corona crisis. It employs around 1.3 million people worldwide; In 2020, an additional 500,000 people were hired.
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