Friday, June 17, 2022

It Turns Out That... Promising Special Treatment, Or "Favors" -- If An Employee Will Vote "No" On A Union... Violates Federal Labor Law. Unsurprising.


As we've previously reported, Amazon is trying (Tangerine like, that -- minus the violence, I guess) to deny that JFK8 workers voted 2-to-1 FOR the union.

Like that orange "big lie" itself, it will never be the case that Amazon execs are able to knock out over twice as many "yes" votes as there were no votes.

And down in baking-hot Phoenix, the ALJ heard yesterday that a consultant for the company misrepresented himself as an "auditor" (i.e., a threat of firing if information supplied by an employee was shown to be false) -- and told workers (falsely, it turns out) that he would personally get all the concerns expressed "into Mr. Bezos' hands" -- but only if they voted "no" on the union.

This all was in addition to direct threats to union organizers, and the able ALJ is hearing that despite all these shenanigans, twice as many people voted for a union than voted against one at JFK8. Here is all of the latest, from Bloomberg originally, but Sen. Gillibrand and Sen. Sanders publicly called yesterday for Amazon to drop its "baseless" opposition, and admit that it lost -- fair and square -- and begin negotiating a fair and balanced collective bargaining agreement:

. . .An Amazon.com Inc. worker says a consultant hired to defeat a union campaign at a company warehouse in New York promised to take her workplace concerns to Jeff Bezos -- a potential violation of US labor law.

During a National Labor Relations Board hearing Thursday, Natalie Monarrez testified that she had a 45-minute conversation in May 2021 with Bradley Moss, a labor consultant who she said introduced himself as an Amazon auditor. Moss asked her to list her concerns and said his boss “had direct ties to Jeff Bezos and would be relaying all of my concerns and issues” to the Amazon founder, Monarrez said. . . [she also said it was the first time anyone at Amazon asked her about working conditions, in her five years at the company].

“Unless a company has a pre-existing practice of soliciting grievances, beginning to do so during a union organizing campaign and promising to fix the grievances is coercive, in that it tells employees that they don’t need a union to address their issues,” former NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman, who led the agency under President Barack Obama, said in an email last week. . . .


It really hadn't struck us until just now how much Mr. Bezos' move (via his hand-picked execs) at JFK8 is like. . . Tangerine's delusions. Time to face reality. Get on with it. Recognize that you lost -- and start hammering out a fair contract. That will encourage other facilities to just vote to join -- so the strategy would be to sign a fair and balanced contract now.

It will only get worse from here, if union leaders perceive that Amazon is just scorching the Earth to delay this inevitable outcome.

Off -- to a busy day, in now less humid sunshine. . . smiling.

नमस्ते

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