Amazon signs employment contract and gives workers the power to organize


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NEW YORK >> Under pressure to improve workers’ rights, Amazon reached an agreement with the National Labor Relations Board that would allow its employees to organize themselves freely – and without retaliation.

According to the settlement, online giant Amazon said it would email its warehouse workers – former and current – who were on duty from March 22nd until now to inform them of their organizing rights. The comparison provides that the 750,000 Amazon employees in the US have more space to organize themselves within the buildings. For example, Amazon has promised not to discipline workers or call the police if they are engaged in union activities in external non-work areas during their non-working hours.

Under the terms of the settlement, the employment office can more easily sue Amazon – without lengthy administrative hearings – if it finds that the online company has failed to comply with its agreement.

“Whether a company has 10 or a million employees, it has to adhere to the National Labor Relations Act,” NLRB chief Jennifer Abruzzo said in a statement. “This settlement agreement represents a critical commitment by Amazon to millions of its workers in the United States that it will not prejudice their right to act collectively to improve their jobs through union formation or other collective action.”

She added that “working people should know that the National Labor Relations Board will vigorously seek to ensure Amazon’s compliance with the settlement and continue to defend the labor rights of all workers.”

Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. was not immediately available for comment.

Kent Wong, director of the UCLA labor center, called the settlement “unprecedented” and said it represented a fundamental shift in attitudes at Amazon, which is known for taking violent measures against union activity in its warehouses.

“Amazon has consistently taken a strong anti-union stance,” said Wong. “This opens up new possibilities for unionization there, as with other companies.”

Wong noted that the deal comes as Amazon, the country’s second largest private employer after Walmart, is on a hiring frenzy while facing organizational efforts at warehouses in Alabama and New York.

In November, the Working Committee ordered a new election of unions for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, based on objections to the first vote in April. The move was a blow to Amazon, which for about a year fought aggressively for the Bessemer warehouse workers to reject the union, which they ultimately did by a wide margin. The board has not yet set the date for the second election, and it has not yet been decided whether it will be held in person or by post.

The campaign is led by the retail, wholesale and department store unions.

Meanwhile, Amazon Labor Union, an independent group that represents workers in New York’s Staten Island neighborhood, resubmitted its petition for a union election on Wednesday. The workers’ group withdrew its first petition to vote on union formation in mid-November after falling short of the fair number of workers who had agreed to support it. Former Amazon employee Christian Smalls organizes the operation in Staten Island without the help of a national sponsor.

The organizing campaign is also happening in a moment of reckoning in Corporate America as the pandemic and the resulting labor shortage have given employees more leverage in the struggle for better working conditions and pay. Workers have struck strikes at Kellogg’s U.S. grain mills and Deere & Co., while workers at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York recently voted to unionize, a first in the coffee chain’s 50-year history.

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