Amazon workers at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse go on strike to demand that the facility close and clean up after an employee tested positive for coronavirus on March 30, 2020 in New York.
Angela Weiss | AFP | beautiful pictures
Amazon According to a labor group behind the effort, workers at a second warehouse on New York’s Staten Island have filed a petition to form a union.
Workers at one of the company’s Staten Island facilities, called LDJ5, are seeking to be represented by the Amazon Labor Federation, a labor group that includes current and former Amazon employees. Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee who is the leader of the group, said the ALU on Wednesday submitted an electronic form to form a union with the National Labor Relations Board.
ALU is also in the process of hosting another Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, called JFK8 and located less than a mile from LDJ5. ALU is forced to redo union petition in December after the NLRB found it had not gathered enough employee signatures to force an election. Last week, the NLRB said the group had enough grounds to move forward with an election and a hearing is scheduled for February 16.
In filings with the NLRB, Amazon said it still suspects that the ALU has gathered enough signatures to force an election at JFK8.
The petition comes as Amazon is facing a state of union activity between its warehouse and delivery workers. Other retailers, including Starbucks, are seeing an increase in organizational efforts.
On Friday, workers at one of Amazon’s Alabama warehouses will have a chance to vote once again whether to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Alliance. NLRB allow a second election in Bessemer, Alabama, the site after the agency determined Amazon improperly interfered with the vote, the original vote taking place last spring.
Major unions have been trying to arrange Amazon workers for years, to no avail. RWDSU, United Food & Commercial worker Union and International Brotherhood of Teamsters all approached Amazon workers in recent years about their organizational preferences.
