Workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island borough refiled a petition on Wednesday to hold a unionization vote. This comes one month after workers withdrew their initial effort.
The Amazon Labor Union, the group of workers that is presently independent of any national union, previously failed to meet the 30-percent threshold of workers who must sign authorization cards required by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in order to formally create a union.
NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado confirmed that the agency has received the new petition and is analyzing whether there is a sufficient showing of interest among the 5,000-member proposed bargaining unit.
Amazon has taken a strongly anti-union stance. It defeated an attempt to unionize workers at a Bessemer, Alabama facility that was led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) last year. However, an NLRB official recently ruled that that election should be held again because Amazon intervened in the voting process.
A settlement reached between Amazon and the NLRB on Wednesday could help the efforts of the Staten Island workers to unionize. Under the agreement, Amazon promised to email current and former workers a notice of their rights to organize. It also agreed to allow workers more flexibility to organize in company facilities.
Additionally, the ecommerce giant will be required to post those same notices in its facilities, as well as update a rule that banned workers from being at or around warehouses within 15 minutes before or after their shifts.
The settlement was made in response to six cases in which Amazon workers accused the company of suppressing their ability to organize.
In the Bessemer facility case, RWDSU claimed Amazon told workers the warehouse would be closed if they unionized, and that the company disciplined employees for organizing. The petition named 23 total violations of labor law by Amazon.
According to the union, the company hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and observe union organizers and successfully lobbied local officials to change the duration of a traffic light outside the warehouse so organizers would have less time to talk to workers after hours.
The New American has reported on Amazon’s partnership with China’s communist regime to sell propaganda books in America and to suppress content Beijing doesn’t like.
Per TNA contributor Michael Tennant:
Although Amazon has been operating in China since 2004, it struggled to obtain Beijing’s approval to sell electronic books and Kindle devices there. To do so, the company chose to cooperate with China’s censorship agency, the National Press and Publication Administration (NPAA). A former Amazon executive told Reuters that “the company secured some, but not all, of the government approvals it needed to sell Kindle devices and e-books,” which “gave the government leverage over the retailer.”
Amazon finally satisfied the NPAA by creating its China Books project, which, through a partnership with a state-run bookseller, markets various Chinese books to U.S. customers. Those items range from the innocuous, such as cookbooks, to the blatantly pro-Beijing, such as books “extol[ling] life in Xinjiang, where United Nations experts have said China interned one million ethnic Uyghurs in a network of camps” and “portraying China’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic … in heroic terms,” writes Reuters.
Amazon and its founder/executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, have a notably left-leaning political bent.
Most Americans still remember how Amazon — which hosted the Twitter alternative Parler via its AWS (Amazon Web Services) hosting service — pulled the plug on the site earlier this year, taking it completely offline for a time. This came after Google and Apple announced that they would both be removing Parler from their app stores after many social-media companies banned President Trump permanently from their platforms.
Additionally, Amazon, along with other tech giants such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Apple, has participated in an annual conference held by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which leads the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) digital COVID-19 disinformation campaign.
Not only did Chinese president and CCP leader Xi Jinping speak at the 2020 conference, the event was attended by companies that have been identified by the U.S. Department of Defense as assisting the Chinese military for more than 20 years. These include Huawei, China Telecom, and China Electronics Technology Group.
