(Bloomberg) — Workers at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in Southern California have filed paperwork to hold an election on whether to join the Amazon Labor Union, the latest organizing drive at one of the retail giant’s facilities.
(Bloomberg) — Workers at an Amazon.com Inc.
warehouse in Southern California have filed paperwork to hold an election on whether to join the Amazon Labor Union, the latest organizing drive at one of the retail giant’s facilities.
Workers at the ONT8 fulfillment center in Moreno Valley, California, are seeking to hold an election and affiliate with the upstart ALU, National Labor Relations Board spokesperson Kayla Blado said in an email.
The proposed bargaining unit has 800 employees, and the labor board is waiting for additional paperwork to verify they’ve received signed cards from at least 30% of them, Blado said.
The facility is one of several operated by Amazon in California’s Inland Empire, home base for activists who have long criticized the company and asked it to do more for workers there.
The region east of Los Angeles serves as a critical logistics hub for the company, which relies heavily on goods imported at the nearby ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
ONT8 opened in 2014 and is an inbound cross dock, according to MWPVL International Inc., a consulting firm that closely tracks Amazon’s network.
Such facilities receive goods from manufacturers and break them down, before sending the products to other Amazon warehouses that store and package them for shipment.
“While we haven’t received an official copy of the petition yet, we remain skeptical that there are a sufficient number of legitimate signatures for an election,” Amazon spokesperson Paul Flaningan said in an emailed statement.
Amazon says there are more than 2,300 employees at the facility.
The ALU in April won an election at a warehouse employing about 8,000 workers in New York City’s Staten Island — an outcome Amazon is seeking to overturn.
The group lost a second vote at a much smaller Staten Island facility the next month, but has since sought to back Amazon workers beyond New York City.
An ALU-affiliated group of workers at a warehouse in Schodack, New York, near Albany, begins voting on whether to join the union on Wednesday.
Vote counting at the facility, called ALB1, is set to begin Oct. 18.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, meanwhile, is seeking to represent workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.
Federal officials determined that Amazon’s conduct during a vote there last year made a fair election impossible, and a rerun election remains too close to call.
(Updated with Amazon statement in the fifth paragraph.)
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