Amazon: If Workers Want a Union So Bad, They Can Attend a Superspreader Event
swodinsky
Shoshana Wodinsky
Yesterday 6:00PM
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Illustration for article titled Amazon: If Workers Want a Union So Bad, They
Can Attend a Superspreader Event
Photo: Ina Fassbender (Getty Images)
Amazon has a message for its workers: if you want to unionize so badly, you’
ll need to risk catching the coronavirus to do it.
That’s according to an appeal the e-commerce giant filed with the National
Labor Relations Board on Thursday arguing against the board’s decision to
give Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse workers the next two months to vote on
their potential unionization by mail. Instead, Amazon asked to postpone the
vote so the Board can take time to “reconsider” its decision and possibly
allow the online retailer to force an in-person vote despite the obvious
health hazards.
Just to recap how we got here: in November, a group of 5,700 workers in Amazon
’s Bessemer, Alabama filed a petition with the NLRB for permission to hold a
vote on whether workers would like to be recognized by the Retail, Wholesale,
and Department Store Union. As you might expect, Amazon wasn’t pleased with
the whole idea, but that didn’t stop the board from giving those workers a
green light earlier this month. While these sorts of votes are usually held
in person, the ongoing pandemic pushed the move to start a mail-in voting
campaign in February.
I think we can agree that’s the best move. Alabama kicked off 2021 with an
explosion of new coronavirus cases across the state that saw more than 4,000
new cases a day added during its peak. While the pace has cooled down to an
average of roughly 2,600 per day, that’s still 2,600 cases per day. People
are still dying. In Jefferson County—where the Bessemer warehouse is based—
there’s still an average of nearly 400 new cases and 10 new deaths per day.
And data compiled by the New York Times predicts that the daily death count
could continue to climb, even as cases drop.
But as the company pointed out, the covid-19 case numbers that the board
referenced in its decision to move to mail-in votes were numbers from
Jefferson County as a whole. Instead, Amazon insisted they only count cases
from within the warehouses themselves. The NLRB’s argument that Amazon’s
workers could, say, inadvertently catch the virus on one of their many, many
commutes is just an attempt to “cherry-pick whatever statistics make a
manual election look riskier,” the company said.
Amazon added that the risks that come with a mail-in ballot—voter fraud,
potential coercion, and restrictions on “employers’ free speech rights”
and the company’s ability to communicate its views with the voting base—
far outweighed these supposedly inane concerns.
“[The Board] deemed a mail-ballot-only election the ‘safest’ approach, not
based on the record, but based on speculation and conjecture,” Amazon said,
conveniently forgetting its own record with handling its workers’ safety
since the start of the pandemic.
Here’s a refresher: in October, Amazon reported that over 19,800 of its
frontline Amazon and Whole Foods workers had either tested or were presumed
to be covid-positive. The company was sued this past summer when one of those
workers brought the virus home and ended up giving her cousin a fatal case.
In October, the company was hit with another suit alleging that the 2020
Prime Day rush caused Amazon to abandon its own safety precautions. The OSHA
database for coronavirus complaints still sees a steady trickle of grievances
lobbed at Amazon every month.
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-if-workers-want-a-union-so-bad-they-can
-attend-1846112003
https://reurl.cc/KxAR0n
心得:
Amazon 員工要組工會 要郵寄投票決定
Amazon官方試圖阻止
認為郵寄投票可能會有舞弊等情況
奇怪，我記得Amazon老闆之前好像認為郵寄投票沒問題?