A federal labor official on Wednesday rejected Amazon’s attempt to overturn a union victory at a Staten Island warehouse, removing a major obstacle to contract negotiations between the union and the company.
The official, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, felt there was a lack of evidence to support Amazon’s claim of election improprieties and that its objections to the election should be overruled.
The decision was widely anticipated after a hearing officer recommended in September that the company’s objections be overruled. Amazon, which claimed the election was unfair because of inappropriate behavior from both the labor council and the union, said in a statement it knew the regional director was unlikely to speak out against the agency.
The company said it plans to appeal the decision to the Washington labor board. “As we have said from the outset, we do not believe this election process was fair, legitimate, or representative of the majority of what our team wants,” the statement said.
The Amazon Labor Union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an interview at The New York Times DealBook conference in late November, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy indicated that the company would not drop its challenges, calling the battle “far from over.”
“That has a real chance of ending up in federal courts,” Mr. Jassy said.
The NLRB’s regional director found that the evidence presented by Amazon failed to show that the board or union acted improperly or that their actions changed the outcome of the election.
For example, Amazon had accused the labor council of failing to monitor the presence of members of the news media near the voting area. But the regional director felt that “the press was meeting peacefully and not engaging in voter harassment” and that administration officials “were not responsible for instructing the press not to talk to voters or leave employer property.”
Workers at the warehouse, known as JFK8, voted to join the independent Amazon Labor Union in an election with results announced in April. More than 8,000 workers were eligible to participate, and the union won by about 10 percentage points.
Weeks later, the union lost a vote to represent workers at a smaller Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, LDJ5, and lost another vote in October at a warehouse near Albany, NY.
The decision on Wednesday came after another unfavorable ruling for Amazon related to activity at JFK8. In mid-November, a New York federal judge issued a court order requiring the company to “cease” firing employees for exercising their labor rights. The judge also ordered company officials to read her order to employees at the warehouse.
The case that resulted in the federal judge’s order dates back to the early days of the pandemic, when an Amazon employee protested security conditions outside JFK8 and was later fired.
The judge’s ruling essentially notified Amazon that it could not fire employees for participating in protected activities, such as protesting safety conditions or union organizing. Amazon officials repeatedly read the judge’s order to JFK8 employees in the first week of December.
