In the majority of cases, a mailbox is exactly that: a mailbox. However, a mailbox built earlier this year, at an Amazon factory in Bessemer, Alabama, threatens to upend the whole procedure — or at the very least becoming a center for the union, if it fails the vote. On Thursday afternoon, the public poll started.
The Washington Post reported just hours before the public counting stated that Amazon had encouraged the US Postal Service to instal the mailbox ahead of the ballot, an election that could lead to the first Amazon union in the United States.
The emails, which were between USPS workers, are partly censored and were accessed by the Freedom of Information Act by the union supporting the election. The union has requested that the National Labor Relations Board investigate the situation.
Last month, Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox told CNN Business that “the USPS recently created a mailbox onsite for the comfort of our workers.”
“Our employees will vote on their way to and from work or use this mailbox for any other mailing needs since it is enclosed in a tent, making it comfortable, secure, and private. The statement added, “Only USPS can collect outgoing mail from this box or place incoming mail into it,” added Knox.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which is organising the Bessemer workforce, has previously expressed reservations about the mailbox, claiming that Amazon had encouraged workers to use it to mail ballots via text messages. The mailbox, according to labour analysts, is one tool, that the union might use to contest the election if it fails.
The NLRB received 3,215 votes, according to the union. The votes were overwhelmingly in Amazon’s favour when the NLRB stopped counting votes for the evening, with 1,101 voting against the union and 463 voting in favour. Nearly 6,000 warehouse staff at the one-year-old Bessemer plant were able to vote in this race. The tally will begin again on Friday morning.
“Our mechanism is flawed, and Amazon took full advantage of it,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the RWDSU, said in a statement shortly before the vote ended for the day. “We will be calling for the labour board to keep Amazon responsible for its unethical and egregious actions during the process,” stated Knox.
But make no mistake: “this is still a critical time for working people, and their voices will be heard,” the statement said.
“We said from the outset that we needed all workers to vote and offered several different ways to try to make it quick,” Amazon’s Knox said in a statement on Thursday. “At any point, the RWDSU opposed them and pressed for a mail-only referendum, which the NLRB’s own statistics proved would limit turnout. Just the USPS had access to this mailbox, which was a convenient, safe, and totally optional way to make it easy for employees to vote, no more and no less.”
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has declined to comment on the case.
The vote has a lot riding on it for Amazon and its employees. A strong union push in Bessemer could inspire similar campaigns in Amazon’s warehouses around the country, potentially transforming how the business operates for many of its 950,000 US-based workers. While some Amazon employees in Europe are unionised, this is the biggest attempt to unionise Amazon employees in the United States to date. A small union referendum was held in a factory in Delaware in 2014, but employees rejected representation.
