Amazon Workers At Albany File Petition For Union Election
Workers at an Amazon Inc. (AMZN) warehouse in upstate New York have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to form an union.
Employees at the warehouse, which is located in the town of Schodack, southeast of Albany, New York, are seeking to be represented by the Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots group of current and former Amazon workers, which successfully brought in unions at the company’s Staten Island warehouses, known as JFK8, earlier this year.
NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado confirmed that organizers at the warehouse, which is referred to as ALB1, filed a petition with the agency Tuesday for a proposed unit of 400 people. She added that the NLRB’s regional office in Buffalo is in the process of verifying that the group has obtained a showing of interest, which indicates it has met the required threshold for employee signatures.
Heather Goodall, an ALB1 warehouse worker who’s leading the organizing effort, said she and other organizers plan to hold a news conference on Wednesday to discuss the union campaign.
Goodall and other workers have been trying to organize their workplace for the past few months. Amazon has taken notice of this fact. Late last month, it began holding meetings at ALB1 discouraging employees from unionizing, including slideshow presentations that described unions as a “business that sell a service.”
The organizing effort in Albany marks the latest attempt to unionize an Amazon warehouse. The ALU, led by former employee Chris Smalls, in May failed to replicate its successful union campaign at another Staten Island warehouse, but it has still sought to gain traction elsewhere, including in Albany and a warehouse in Kentucky. Meanwhile, the results of an election at an Alabama facility were inconclusive.
The company has previously said it doesn’t believe unions are the right choice for its employees. Amazon is also working on getting the vote at its J&K warehouse, ensuring that ALU and NLRB acted in a way that tainted the results of the election.
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