Amazon has defeated the historic union effort at its BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. According to CNBC, about 1700 of the more than 3000 employees who participated in the election voted against trade union from Friday morning Associated Press later confirm the result. To participate in the contest, Amazon needs 1,608 ballots, or about 50 percent of the vote, to prevent the warehouse from uniting.
But the saga is far from over. To begin with, both Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which wants to represent the approximately 5,800 employees at BHM1, challenged approximately 500 ballot papers. According to CNBC, Amazon has disputed about 300 of them, mainly based on suitability. The National Labor Relations Council (NLRB) will not release the official version of the disputed ballots until all the votes have been counted. The disputed ballot papers could play a decisive role in the result, as the election would come if the vote came closer as the NLRB continued the counting process.
There are likely to be legal challenges as well. RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum on Thursday called on the NLRB to investigate allegations that Amazon put pressure on the US Postal Service to install a mailbox outside BHM1. “Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to set its own employees on fire. We will not leave the lies, fraud and illegal activities of Amazon undisputed. Therefore, we are filing formal complaints against all the serious and blatant “Illegal actions taken by Amazon during the union vote,” he said in a statement.
Amazon has refuted all claims it wanted to unfairly influence the vote. “It’s easy to predict that the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated our employees, but that’s not true,” the company said in a blog post published after the contest by the Associated Press. “Our employees received far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers and media than they heard from us. And Amazon did not win – our employees made the choice to vote against a union.”
Less than one percent of Amazon’s more than 950,000 employees work at BHM1, but the union has attracted national attention, with celebrities, politicians and even President Joe Biden supporting the workers. At one point, even Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, got involved when it stopped the company’s anti-union ads in Alabama.