By Jeffrey Dastin
(Reuters) – The outcome of Amazon.com Inc’s fourth union election this year is expected as early as Tuesday, when U.S. labor board officials begin counting ballots that workers in an upstate New York warehouse submitted over the past week.
At ALB1, the retailer’s fulfillment center in Castleton-on-Hudson, hundreds of employees had the chance to decide whether to join the Amazon Labor Union. Led by former Amazon employee Christian Smalls, the ALU by April won a majority vote to form the retailer’s first-ever U.S. union, in the New York City borough of Staten Island.
It then lost an attempt to unionize a second facility in New York hardly a month later. The longer-established Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union also was unable to organize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama this year, though that result is not yet final.
The ALU is now heading in to the fourth Amazon union vote count this year after tackling various challenges. It faced some internal dissent and is awaiting certification of its initial Staten Island win, pending a U.S. labor board director’s review of objections by Amazon. It cannot collectively bargain until then.
Unionizing Amazon has long been a goal for the U.S. labor movement seeking to represent staff at America’s second-largest private employer after Walmart Inc and aiming to stem practices some workers have criticized, such as productivity tracking. A second victory would give the ALU momentum to organize still more facilities.
A loss would revive skepticism about whether the ALU can rally workers whose employer has famously discouraged unionization. In the past year Amazon disparaged unions in bathroom signage as well as in workshops it required thousands of employees to attend.
Amazon recently raised its U.S. average starting pay for front-line staff as well, to more than $19 per hour from over $18; industrywide, median pay in the warehousing and storage sector was $18.38 as of May 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The ALU is nonetheless riding a tide of increased union interest among workforces in corporate America after years of decline, bolstered by the pro-labor administration of U.S. President Joe Biden. Just this month, it petitioned to hold a union vote in an Amazon warehouse in Southern California, and it backed a staff protest of work conditions in Staten Island following a fire; Amazon suspended some workers afterward.
A simple majority of valid ballots submitted by Amazon workers will determine if the upstate-New York facility unionizes. It was not clear as of early Tuesday how many had voted.
The count is expected to commence at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT).
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in Palo Alto, Calif.; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
