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“When you add up the troubling actions and inactions, it will be clear that Region 29 altered the playing field in a way that the board should not condone,” Amazon lawyer Kurt Larkin said in his opening statement on Monday.Ī representative from Region 29, Lisa Weis, said the office “ran the election properly and fairly” in a statement during Monday’s hearing.Įric Milner, a lawyer representing the Amazon Labor Union, called the company’s objections to the election “a frivolous sideshow.” The company also argued that the NLRB office mishandled the election by treating anti-union workers unfairly, failing to deal with workers’ allegations in a timely manner and giving the impression of a bias by filing a lawsuit to reinstate a worker Amazon had previously fired. Lawyers for the union said the use of the word loitering, and implication that workers were afraid of Smalls, who is Black, had racial implications. One of the workers, Ashley Mercer, alleges that she was made to pick up cigarette butts in a parking lot, and the other, Jason Main, alleges he was fired in retaliation for union organizing. The union, Amazon argued, intimidated, coerced and surveilled employees as they voted, specifically citing the “loitering” of union president Chris Smalls outside the voting tent. In its opening statement, Amazon argued that both the union and the regional office of the NLRB that conducted the election acted in ways that unfairly turned the election in the union’s favor. Previously, Amazon had filed a motion requesting that the general public, including the media, should be barred from attending the hearing, but a labor board judge denied the motion last week. On Monday morning, lawyers representing Amazon argued that representatives from the NLRB’s Brooklyn office should be excluded from the proceedings entirely. National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo moved the proceedings after Amazon argued that the Brooklyn office was unfairly biased against the company and had mishandled the election there. Though the JFK8 warehouse is in Staten Island, Monday’s hearing is being overseen by the labor board’s regional Phoenix office. The labor board hearing in which Amazon plans to make its case for overturning the union victory in Staten Island began Monday. The allegations mentioned in this story are without merit, and we look forward to showing that through the appropriate process.” “Whether an employee supports a certain cause or group doesn’t factor into the difficult decision of whether or not to let someone go.
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“Like every company, we have basic expectations of employees at all levels of the organization when it comes to attendance and performance, safety, and personal conduct,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement. “They want to stop the organizing, and this is how they want to do it.”
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“They’re scared,” said Seth Goldstein, an attorney representing the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which pulled off the victory in Staten Island. It’s a sign that, even as lawmakers demand Amazon drop its objections to the union win in Staten Island, which it began arguing in a hearing on Monday, the nation’s second-largest private employer will continue to put up fierce opposition to any wave of union momentum. But he said that didn’t stop a low-level manager from confronting him later to ask, “ ‘How’s the revolution going?’ ”Įmployees at Amazon facilities around the country whose union hopes were buoyed by the labor victory at a warehouse in Staten Island in April say in labor board filings and interviews that the company has been calling police, firing workers and generally cracking down on labor organizing since that historic win.Īmazon has been accused of illegally firing workers in Chicago, New York and Ohio, calling the police on workers in Kentucky and New York, and retaliating against workers in New York and Pennsylvania, in what workers say is an escalation of long-running union-busting activities by the company. “We were completely within our rights to be there,” Litrell told the Washington Post. While the officers eventually determined that Litrell wasn’t on Amazon’s property and left, Litrell plans to add the incident to the illegal-intimidation charge he filed with the National Labor Relations Board in May. Matt Litrell, a 22-year-old Amazon employee, was distributing union fliers outside the warehouse where he works this month when the cops showed up.Īn Amazon manager had called the sheriff’s office in Campbellsville, Kentucky, that afternoon to report that protesters trying to start a union were trespassing on company property.