Union Vote at Amazon Warehouse in Alabama Is Overturned by Regional Labor Office | Hacker News Reader

Union Vote at Amazon Warehouse in Alabama Is Overturned by Regional Labor Office

nytimes.com

>In her decision Monday, the labor board’s regional director for the Atlanta region agreed, writing that Amazon “gave a strong impression that it controlled the process” by arranging the installation of the box. “This dangerous and improper message to employees destroys trust in the board’s processes and in the credibility of the election results,” the director, Lisa Y. Henderson, concluded.

In particular, this is a valid concern. In anything to do with workers organizing, Management etc Al reaching out and doing something like that is definitely a bit sus. Maybe not enough to convince me in isolation, but combined with

>Ms. Henderson also found that Amazon had improperly “polled” employees — that is, it attempted to determine how they would vote — by notifying workers at mandatory meetings that they could take “vote no” items such as pins that were laid out in full view of human resources officials.

this clinches it for me. process is there for a reason, and in a company where data mining is possible, and things like facial recognition have been a controversial sell in the past, I can see the Big Brother is watching effect playing a potentially bigger role in shifting around how people voted.

To be frank, the best move is to just let things go organically without interference. If it was an accurate vote, going from 70% to <51% against is highly unlikely. If it does happen to swing that much, serious questions need to be asked about some of the "soft" practices involved with employee monitoring I think may be worth reassessing.

Duplicate with a different source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29393916

As this piece says, redoing an election where 70% of workers voted against a union, because Amazon installed a mailbox, is absurd.

Corrupt NLRB Puts Unions over Workers https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/corrupt-nlrb-puts-uni...

Your contention is that the only complaint against Amazon's behavior in the union vote was that Amazon installed a mailbox?

Their source is National Review, which is a bastion of mid-to-high-effort, low-quality, bad faith arguments. Point of fact they left out the vote no propaganda handed out at mandatory meetings.

Reason Magazine also thinks the NLRB's redo is absurd. The political left is selective in its outrage over not respecting election results.

https://reason.com/2021/11/30/nlrb-overturns-amazon-workers-... NLRB Overturns Amazon Workers' Decision Not To Unionize, Orders New Election If providing campaign buttons were grounds for disqualifying the results, would any election in modern American history be valid?

"The results of April's election suggest that it was the RWDSU's own failures rather than intimidation from Amazon that swung the outcome. About half of the Bessemer warehouse's roughly 5,800 workers voted, and only 738 voted for unionization. That's about 13 percent.

In Bessemer, Amazon's campaign argued that workers were earning at least $15 per hour plus benefits, and that paying union dues would consume part of their paychecks. Those are reasonable reasons to vote against unionization! And that probably has more to do with the outcome in Bessemer than paper-thin conspiracy theories about campaign buttons and mailboxes."

Reason Magazine is named ironically, FWIW.

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