Bad start in Alabama, still possible in New York: the counting of votes on unionization in two American Amazon warehouses began Thursday, but the final results are not yet known.
If the “yes” wins in one of the two logistics sites, it would be a first in the United States for the e-commerce giant since the company was founded in 1994.
In Staten Island, a New York City neighborhood where JFK8 warehouse workers voted in person, the “yes” vote led with 1,518 ballots to the “no” vote of 1,154. The count will be “completed tomorrow,” said an official.
The mere fact that a vote took place “is already historic,” Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the small group of current and former Amazon employees who put several months to collect the signatures of at least 30% of the employees of the warehouse in order to be able to organize a vote.
Quickly out of the building between two rounds of ballot counts, he said he was “not surprised” that the “yes” is leading so far.
In Bessemer (Alabama), on the other hand, the national union of distribution that employees wanted to join seemed set for a possible second disputed defeat, following that of a year ago, which occurred at the end of a very media campaign followed until at the top of the state.
Thursday evening, the “no” led with 993 ballots, once morest 875 “yes”, but there remained 416 so-called “disputed” ballots, which will decide the result. In the coming weeks, a hearing must decide whether these bulletins should be opened and taken into account or not. Then there might be other legal remedies.
In all, 2,284 people voted, out of 6,153 eligible employees.
This second vote had been ordered by the United States Labor Rights Agency (NLRB), which found that Amazon had broken the rules during the first attempt last year in Bessemer.
The RWDSU union had indeed accused the group of “intimidation and interference”, and the NLRB had ruled that several objections were admissible.
Amazon, one of the largest employers in the United States and a multinational that earned more than $30 billion in 2021, has so far managed to fend off attempts by workers to consolidate in the country.
In Bessemer as in Staten Island, the employees were summoned to several mandatory meetings in the run-up to the ballot to present to them the disadvantages of a union.
Officially, the company says it respects its workers’ rights to unionize but prefers to have a direct relationship with its employees.
She did not react immediately to a request from AFP.
