Amazon workers have now overwhelmingly defeated an attempt to unionize workers at an Alabama warehouse:
POLITICO – Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama voted overwhelmingly against unionizing as the final ballots were counted Friday, marking the defeat of a high-profile drive to establish the first union at the e-commerce giant and testing the pro-union politics of President Joe Biden, who implicitly sided with the organizing effort.
The vote was 1,798-738 against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Nearly 6,000 workers at the fulfillment center in Bessemer, a Birmingham suburb, were eligible and roughly more than half cast ballots.
The union is angry and will petition the NLRB to reject the results of the vote completely:
The union says it plans to challenge the results of the election and ask the National Labor Relations Board to consider setting the vote aside, alleging Amazon “created an atmosphere” that interfered “with the employees’ freedom of choice.”
“We demand a comprehensive investigation over Amazon’s behavior in corrupting this election,” the union said in a statement.
But Amazon claims they didn’t intimidate anyone. Rather it was the other way around…
Amazon battled the organizing effort but denied any interference or wrongdoing in the election.
“It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true,” the company wrote in a blog post following the vote tally. “Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us.”
Among other things, the company has also touted its $15 hourly minimum wage to argue a union wasn’t needed.
I’m glad Amazon workers chose to do the right thing and reject the union. I only support unionizing in extreme jobs, in which the safety of workers is paramount to their jobs, like with police officers. But certainly not in this instance.