Tangent: NLRB Hearing Officers Increasingly Willing To Label Amazon As A "Joint Employer" -- With Its Putative "Contractor" Drivers' Companies.

As many may recall, we try to check in at least once each month, with a story on Jeff Bezos' ongoing, and accelerating mistreatment of his employees' rights under the National Labor Relations Act. This is the October '24 post.

Previously, Amazon has taken a legalistic approach to avoid having to bargain over working conditions and wages, by supposedly hiring outside contractor firms to run the bulk of its delivery truck services. That gambit is increasingly falling apart, as Skokie, Illinois and Bakersfield, California -- among several other sites have seen orders entered that in fact, Amazon controls or influences policies for drivers, through the contract firms.

Indeed, Amazon terminated a contract with Battle Tested Strategies (in Palmdale, California and in Northern Illinois), when the drivers there voted to unionize -- with the Teamsters. It is pretty clear that that violates about a half-century of NLRB case law. Here's the story, from Reuters:

. . .Amazon has been accused by a U.S. labor board of illegally refusing to bargain with a union representing drivers employed by a contractor, the agency announced on Wednesday.

The complaint from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claims that Amazon is a so-called "joint employer" of drivers employed by the contractor, Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), and used a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities at a facility in Palmdale, California. . . .

The NLRB in a complaint issued on Monday said Amazon broke the law by terminating its contract with BTS after the drivers unionized, without first bargaining with the Teamsters.

The board had said in August that it had found merit to the union's claims that Amazon exerts control over BTS drivers and should be considered their employer under federal labor law. The NLRB at the time said it would issue a complaint unless Amazon settled the case. . . .

So-called "joint employer" status would require Amazon to sit down and bargain before changing the BTS contractors' terms. [And all that is before we excoriate Bezos, for being too much a coward to let his editorial staff at the Wa Po endorse Kamala.] Now you know. Do stay tuned -- as Amazon has filed papers to appeal or reconsider this trial level ruling. Onward, grinning. . . .

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