Amazon is trying to delay a union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, and appeals to a U.S. Labor Council to get 6,000 warehouse workers to vote per union. According to documents submitted to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday, the company claims the election is being held in person.
Amazon’s argument is that the entries will reduce the election. It says the NLRB looked at the incorrect COVID-19 infection data when determining the mood, using the positivity rate in Jefferson County, where the warehouse is located, rather than the positivity rate at the warehouse itself.
Workers in Bessemer will vote on February 8 on the association with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Ballot papers must be posted by March 29, and the number of votes must take place on March 30. According to the technology giant, the first union election in the United States since 2014 Reuters.
In December, the National Labor Relations Council rejected an earlier attempt by the technology giant to postpone a hearing on the union effort.
In a submission on January 21, Amazon said if the acting regional director had looked at more recent COVID-19 data, she would have seen the infection rate in the country decline. “If a manual election here is improper, it is difficult to imagine what circumstances a regional director would allow manual elections until COVID-19 was eradicated,” the company wrote.
The NLRB previously reported that Jefferson County’s infection rate was more than 17 percent in early January, noting that new cases are on the rise. Now Amazon claims that this data was not only incorrect, but that the NLRB should have used data from its warehouse instead. The positivity rate there, according to Amazon, is much lower. ‘Honestly, it contradicts the belief that when three medical experts essentially agree that the conditions on [the warehouse] is safer than in another geographic area, a reasonable fact seeker will ignore that consensus to concentrate on that other geographic area to make a safety-related determination, ”he wrote.
The NLRB may become even less favorable to Amazon with the election of Joe Biden, who has already taken aggressive steps to shift the position of the board to unions. On Wednesday, President Biden fired Peter Robb, general counsel of the NLRB and a longtime opponent of working groups.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment The edge.