Amazon Effort to Thwart Alabama Union Drive Suffers Early Defeat at Labor Board

Labor News

December 4, 2020 Labor, News

Reprinted from The Washington Post by Jay Greene on December 2, 2020.

The National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday rejected Amazon’s bid to delay a hearing on the union drive of Alabama workers into January, as the e-commerce giant signals its willingness to vigorously battle employees trying to organize.

Bessemer warehouse workers notified the NLRB last week that they want to hold an election to create a bargaining unit that would cover 1,500 full-time and part-time workers, represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). The agency had scheduled a December 11 hearing to determine, among other items, whether to call a union election.

But Amazon failed to persuade the agency to delay the hearing by at least a month. The union opposed rescheduling the hearing at all. The NLRB decided to push the hearing back a week to Dec. 18 without offering an explanation. …

Washington Post 12/2