A union that attempted to organize Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, has accused the online retail giant of illegally meddling in the union vote and is now trying to have the election results invalidated via a petition.
The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) said in a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that 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.
This unionization effort grabbed national attention because those at the Bessemer warehouse are the first Amazon employees to unionize. Democrats, along with some Republicans, used the effort to attack Amazon as having too much power.
As the Washington Free Beacon notes:
The company hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and observe union organizers, it says. And according to the union, Amazon 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 work hours.
“Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees,” said RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum. In response, an Amazon spokesperson said, “Rather than accepting these employees’ choice, the union seems determined to continue misrepresenting the facts in order to drive its own agenda.”
The RWDSU further argued, “The objections constitute conduct which prevented a free and uncoerced exercise of choice by the employees, undermining the board’s efforts to provide ‘a laboratory in which an experiment may be conducted, under conditions as nearly as ideal as possible, to determine the uninhibited desires of the employees.”
In a statement, Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox countered, “The fact is that less than 16% of employees at BHM1 voted to join a union. Rather than accepting these employees’ choice, the union seems determined to continue misrepresenting the facts in order to drive its own agenda. We look forward to the next steps in the legal process.”
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Amazon has grounds to consider itself “untouchable.” It is among the top five companies in the world by revenue, drawing in $386 billion in 2020 alone. Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, has become the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $197 billion, thanks to his creation.
The corporation’s market dominance gives it a perfect platform for pushing its socialist ideology onto consumers. And there’s no doubt that Bezos and Amazon lean left. As The New American reported earlier this month, Bezos took to a company blog to endorse President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, which proposes a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure and jobs investment package over eight years — a plan that Biden says would be paid for by raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, ending the Trump-era tax cuts.
Moreover, Amazon retains the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to vet charities under its AmazonSmile charity portal. Initiated in 2013, the program allows buyers to designate 0.5 percent of the sale price of eligible purchased items to go to the charity of his choice — but only if that charity is approved by the SPLC.
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.
Other Chinese companies that have participated in the conference are Tencent and ByteDance, which own the controversial apps WeChat and TikTok. As expected, many high-level CCP officials have also attended.
