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Amazon Unlawfully Confiscated Union Literature, NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) Finds

posted by martyb on Thursday August 05 2021, @01:44AM   

upstart writes:

Amazon Unlawfully Confiscated Union Literature, NLRB Finds:

Amazon illegally prohibited an employee from giving workers pro-union literature, confiscated that literature, and gave workers the impression that their organizing activity was being surveilled at the company's Staten Island fulfillment center in New York, according to National Labor Relations Board charges and other documentation reviewed by Motherboard.

An NLRB investigation found that Amazon illegally prohibited Connor Spence, a Staten Island employee involved in union organizing, from distributing pro-union literature in a break room on May 16—and then confiscated the literature—also in violation of U.S. labor law, according to evidence provided by the NLRB to the union’s attorney. 

Connor Spence, a 25-year-old warehouse worker in Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, who filed the unfair labor practice charge, told Motherboard that on May 16, he was in the break room distributing leaflets about unions and copies of a notice that Amazon had to post in a Queens warehouse for violating workers’ union rights, when an Amazon security guard approached him and told him he did not have permission to distribute the leaflets.

“He took the union literature away and wouldn’t give it back,” Spence told Motherboard. “I filed the charge so that there’s accountability in place that prevents them from doing this in the future.”

Following the defeat of a high-profile union drive at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama this April, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island have been busy organizing their own independent union, known as Amazon Labor Union.

[...] The finding comes on the same day as an NLRB officer in Alabama released a report recommending the rerun of a union election in an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. The Bessemer campaign marked the highest profile effort to date to unionize an Amazon warehouse in the United States, and inspired groups of Amazon workers around the country to take steps toward unionizing. The NLRB’s report on the Bessemer election found that Amazon illegally discouraged labor organizing, in part by pushing post office officials to install a mailbox outside the warehouse where workers were urged to drop their mail-in ballots, which an NLRB officer wrote “destroyed the laboratory conditions and justifies a second election.”

Also at The Washington Post, c|net, and Ars Technica.

Previously:
Amazon Workers in Bessemer, Alabama Have Voted Not to Form a Union.

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Original Submission

• wswsws wswsws (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @02:33AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @02:33AM (#1163339)

  ICFI/SEP/IWA-RFC: National Labor Relations Board calls for union revote at Alabama Amazon facility [wsws.org]

  While Amazon management campaigned against the RWDSU, the union was completely incapable of gaining any substantial support from workers.... The RWDSU officials did not advance any demands on corporate management to improve workers’ conditions. On top of this, the long record of betrayals by the RWDSU in the poultry plants in Alabama and Georgia, and by the United Steelworkers, the United Mine Workers and other unions in the economically depressed Birmingham area has left workers completely alienated from the corporatist trade unions....

  [The RWDSU] in fact had bipartisan support from some of the United States’ most powerful establishment figures and corporate entities. The RWDSU conducted a months-long promotional campaign that was publicly supported by Biden and Republican Senator Marco Rubio [wsws.org] of Florida, among many others. In early March, the Democratic president recorded [wsws.org] a video in which he declared the vote in Alabama “vitally important.”...

  Workers in Bessemer rejected the RWDSU even though there is widespread opposition to the notoriously exploitative [wsws.org] corporate giant. Workers at the warehouse spoke out to the World Socialist Web Site about the difficult conditions [wsws.org] at the warehouse, with workers passing out on the property due to exhaustion.

  The workers in Bessemer were justifiably suspicious of the RWDSU, which refused [wsws.org] to name a single condition that it planned to improve. Even after a worker collapsed [wsws.org] at the BHM1 facility and later died, the RWDSU issued no statements or demands, even after being contacted by WSWS reporters about the death....

  A worker at Amazon’s BWI2 facility in Baltimore and part of the Baltimore Amazon Workers Rank-and-File Committee [wsws.org] expressed contempt for the RWDSU’s efforts to rerun an election. He said the RWDSU was using a “deceptive tactic” to “control workers” at the company. The worker referenced an episode during the Volvo strike in which Amazon executives flew down to the NRV facility [wsws.org], which produces its delivery trucks, in order to bring the struggle to an end.

  A recent statement [wsws.org] by the Baltimore Amazon Workers Rank-and-File Committee declares: What happens at Volvo affects what can happen at Amazon warehouses… The working class must respond with equal and opposite force against efforts to confine its struggles to one workplace. The bosses want to contain these struggles locally? Then we must break them out into the world sphere.

  Workers Struggles: The Americas [wsws.org] - This week in history: August 2-8 [wsws.org]

  Starting Score:	0		points
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• Re:wswsws (Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday August 05 2021, @05:31AM

  by ChrisMaple (6964) on Thursday August 05 2021, @05:31AM (#1163376)

  The working class must respond with equal and opposite force against efforts to confine its struggles to one workplace. The bosses want...

  The rantings of a childish mind.

  Parent

• Re:wswsws (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 05 2021, @03:16PM

  by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday August 05 2021, @03:16PM (#1163522) Journal

  Or.... they didn't get any support because the most powerful company on the planet was illegally hampering their unionization efforts?

  Parent