According to a new settlement with the National Labor Regulations Board, Amazon workers in the United States, who number 750,000, will now be able to organize freely without risking any retaliation from Amazon.
Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, said in a statement: “Whether a company has 10 employees or a million employees, it must abide by the National Labor Relations Act”.
The settlement agreement is a very important promise from Amazon its workers across the United States. Amazon will not stop them from organizing to improve their workplace by forming a union or taking other collective action. She said that “working people should know that the National Labor Relations Board will vigorously seek to ensure Amazon’s compliance with the settlement and continue to defend the labor rights of all workers.”
According to Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, Amazon “has been very consistent in holding a strong anti-union position”.
Wong also said that the settlement comes at the same time as Amazon is looking to hire people all over the country. In November, a new election for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, was ordered by the labor board due to objections over the vote over unionizing that took place in April last year. To Amazon, the move was bad news. The company had spent a lot of time and money trying to get Bessemer warehouse workers to reject the union, and by a wide margin, they did.
While that was going on, the Amazon Labor Union, an independent group that represents workers in New York City’s Staten Island neighborhood, resubmitted its petition for a union vote on Wednesday. During the middle of November, a group of workers withdrew their first petition for a union vote because they didn’t have enough people who supported it. Christian Smalls, a former employee of Amazon, is in charge of the effort in Staten Island.
