Amazon workers reject union bid in upstate New York

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By HALELUYA HADERO and ALEXANDRA OLSON

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon workers in upstate New York overwhelmingly rejected a union bid on Tuesday, handing a second defeat to the labor group that’s been attempting to drag the company to the negotiating table since its historic win earlier this year.

Warehouse workers near Albany cast 406 votes out of the 612 ballots counted — or about 66% — against the Amazon Labor Union, giving the company enough support to push back the fledgling group composed of former and current Amazon workers.

According to the National Labor Relations Board, which is responsible for overseeing the election, 206 workers — or 33.6% — voted in favor of joining the union. The agency said 949 employees were eligible to vote, and the 31 additional ballots that were challenged by either Amazon or the union were not enough to sway the outcome.

The facility is located in the town of Schodack, near one of the most unionized metro areas in the country, according to Unionstats.com. It’s what’s known as a non-sort center, a warehouse where employees pack more bulky items such as rugs, patio furniture or outdoor equipment.



Amazon workers and supporters march during a rally in Castleton-On-Hudson, about 15 miles south of Albany, N.Y., Monday, Oct. 10, 2022. The startup union that clinched a historic labor victory at Amazon earlier this year is slated to face the company yet again, aiming to rack up more wins that could force the reluctant retail behemoth to the negotiating table. (Rachel Phua via AP)


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/amazon-workers-reject-union-bid-albany-c21986e6475b057b7cc23d39d0e80d88

[Aristus]

1. They were either intimidated into voting against, or else they're just too stupid to

vote for their own workplace safety, well-being, health, and morale.

[SouthernDem4ever]

4. Amazon will behave a little better

for a little while. Then we'll see what the workers truly lost.

[ancianita]

9. It doesn't have to, it's that big.

See Reply #8.

[brooklynite]

17. they're just too stupid"

An inspiring message.....

[MichMan]

2. Not very close

Nearly 2:1 against

[EarthFirst]

3. Junior Amazon executives did their part...

Intimidated organizing in a manner that was advantageous to the boardroom…

[Evolve Dammit]

5. poor choice or intimidation?

[ancianita]

8. Fear of being fired, which is built into company policy.

Jeff Bezos, in Stone’s telling, is deeply involved in all aspects of HR, both in the corporate offices and in the warehouses. He embraced a reimbursement and promotion system called “stack ranking,” in which midlevel managers ranked their employees and fired the lowest-ranked ones. Managers had quotas of how many people they needed to fire and were expected to rank them to get there. After a front-page story in the Times about how the company culture pitted workers against one another [called a 'tournament system'] the practice was ended.

But the philosophy—force people to fight for scraps, kick out the lowest performers—keeps reappearing in different parts of the company. When Amazon was relying on contractors to deliver packages, it developed an app called “Rabbit” that tracked the delivery. The Rabbit team watched drivers, Stone writes, “skip meals, rush through stop signs, and tape their phones to their pant legs so they could easily glance down at the screens, all to meet the challenging delivery deadlines.” Those who didn’t meet them were fired. When Amazon decided it wanted to build a new headquarters, it announced a tournament to determine the location—getting competitive data on 238 different cities for free in the process.

According to Stone, a tech reporter at Bloomberg News, Bezos was furious when Amazon’s head of operations tried to get the company to incorporate the “Lean” approach from Toyota, in which workers developed trust and relationships with their managers with the goal of long-term employment. When the HR deputy from the same department presented a paper called “Respect for People,” Stone reports, “Bezos hated it... Instead of a stable workforce, he wanted warehouse workers to stay for a maximum of three years, unless they got a new job internally. He severely limited raises after three years.

For the warehouse workers, the company sets extraordinary demands: it bans talking, tracks everything, fires workers who fail to meet their quotas, and expects that conditions are bad enough that workers will quit. Pre-pandemic, the Times reported, “the turnover among its work force was roughly 150 percent a year.”

“You spend 10 hours on foot, there’s no windows in the place, and you’re not allowed to talk to people—there’s no interactions allowed,” one worker told Vox for a story on the growing number of 911 calls from Amazon warehouses. “I got a sense in no time at all that they work people to death, or until they get too tired to keep working.”

“It’s one of the big reasons people want to unionize,” Chris Smalls, the leader of the Amazon Labor Union, which organized a Staten Island warehouse this year, told The Washington Post last December. “Who wants to be surveilled all day? It’s not prison. It’s work.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/08/18/the-boss-will-see-you-now-zephyr-teachout/

[Evolve Dammit]

10. Fucking slavery. It is changing workplaces and where are the freedumb fighters on this? They

will accept almost anything. Wouldn't a mass walk-out and consumer boycott be a beautiful thing?

[ancianita]

11. Of course. And all global monopolies are more or less like Amazon. That's where US jurisdiction

on labor laws falls short.

It's not just that enforcement of corporate regulation is lax, it is. But it's also that new regulations must be codified to apply to our global companies. If Biden can call home the U.S semiconductor personnel in China to create downward pressure on the global semiconductor business, Congress can do the same to Amazon.

It shouldn't be left up to workers only to negotiate contracts for a living wage and humane working conditions.

[Evolve Dammit]

12. Agreed. Is Liz Warren's Consumer Protection Bureau still active? Haven't heard a peep for years.

[ancianita]

13. Maybe it's been busy. In spite of the attempts by tear-down Republicans to kill it.

There is also the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is Warren's proposed agency.

Since the CFPB database was established in 2011, more than 730,000 complaints have been published.[10] CFPB supporters include the Consumers Union claim that it is a "vital tool that can help consumers make informed decisions".[10] CFPB detractors argue that the CFPB database is a "gotcha game" and that there is already a database maintained by the Federal Trade Commission although that information is not available to the public.[10]

On January 4, 2012, Barack Obama issued a recess appointment to install Cordray as director through the end of 2013. This was a highly controversial move as the Senate was still holding pro forma sessions, and the possibility existed that the appointment could be challenged in court.[23] This type of recess appointment was unanimously ruled unconstitutional in NLRB v. Noel Canning.[24]

On July 16, 2013, the Senate confirmed Cordray as director in a 66–34 vote.[25] Cordray resigned in late 2017 to run for governor of Ohio.

The Financial CHOICE Act, proposed by the House Financial Services Committee's Jeb Hensarling, to repeal the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, passed the House on June 8, 2017. Also in June 2017, the Senate was crafting its own reform bill.[26][27]

Testimony in US Congressional hearings of 2017 have elicited concerns that the wholesale publication of consumer complaints is both misleading and injurious to the consumer market. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) said at one such congressional hearing, "Is the purpose of the database just to name and shame companies? Or should they have a disclaimer on there that says it's a fact-free zone, or this is fake news? That's really what I see happening here." Bill Himpler, executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, a trade group representing banks and other lenders responded "Something needs to be done." "Once the damage is done to a company, it's hard to get your reputation back.[10]

Mick Mulvaney, as acting director of the CFPB, removed all 25 members of the agency's Consumer Advisory Board on June 5, 2018, after eleven of them held a press conference on June 3 in which they criticized him.[28]

On February 13, 2021, President Joe Biden formally submitted to the Senate the nomination of Rohit Chopra to serve as director of the CFPB.[29] His nomination was approved on September 30, 2021, by a 50-48 vote.[30]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_Bureau

Rethugs keep hammering away using the corporate script their owner/donors assign them.

[Evolve Dammit]

15. Needed more than ever. Cabinet level if I was in charge

[Evolve Dammit]

16. And I neglected to thank you for that valuable info

[turbinetree]

6. So did a muti-billion year company have group sessions with the employees....

or did they forget how much the CEO makes in comparison to their salary....58:1 in 2021............

The CEO-to-worker pay ratio is 58:1 at Amazon, which is lower than Walmart, CVS, and others.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-salary-pay-median-worker-compensation-compared-jeff-bezos-2021-4

[nattyice]

7. It's upstate New York. No surprise, unfortunately

[melm00se]

14. For a union to get to a successful vote

workers need to be unhappy with their job and work environment.

If the majority of the workers are happy, there is almost zero chance a union vote will get passed.