The workers last week filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing the threats were designed to chill protected union speech at Amazon facilities.
Managers allegedly gave final warnings to about a dozen employees who had refused to remove the display, but the workers ultimately relented to avoid getting fired and to protect their union effort, according to interviews with three people involved as well as audio and video recordings the workers provided to Bloomberg Law in support of their account.
Kentucky and most other states allow one person to legally tape record a conversation without informing the other participants.
The allegations paint the portrait of a company barreling forward with union avoidance strategies despite run-ins with federal authorities at other facilities. The recordings of disciplinary meetings with managers offer a rare and candid look at Amazon’s latest anti-labor strategy 18 months after a warehouse on New York’s Staten Island, known as JFK 8, became the first in the nation to unionize.
“I was shocked,” said Marcio Rodriguez, one of the pro-union workers. “I had talked to some workers at JFK 8, and they never came down on them that hard.”
It’s not immediately clear whether Amazon ran afoul of the National Labor Relations Act, labor lawyers said.
Amazon said its actions had nothing to do with the unionization effort.
“These individuals repeatedly refused to follow our policies even after meeting with site managers more than ten times to address the violation and ensure the policies were understood,” company spokeswoman Mary Kate Paradis said in a statement Tuesday. “This has nothing to do with any cause or group they support. Like any employer, we take appropriate action when policies are continually disregarded.”
Organizing Ongoing
Workers are in the process of collecting cards to unionize the Amazon Air Hub, a $1.5 billion facility at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport that serves as a linchpin for the company’s next-day delivery efforts. Workers there load packages onto Amazon-branded planes that carry them to Seattle, San Antonio, Miami, and other far-off destinations.
Organizers have collected about 1,200 signed union cards so far, said Jordan Quinn, a volunteer for the union who was among those disciplined. The group plans to file for a union election eventually, he said, but isn’t there yet.
The clash with management began earlier this month when Quinn and other union supporters set up a table in an on-site parking garage. In front of the table hung an oversize $10 billion check representing Amazon’s profits in the third quarter of this year that read: Pay to the order of: “Our Billionaire Executives and union busters.”
To the right of the table was a poster propped up on an easel where workers could symbolically vote on how they would spend the excess profits. Most opted for $30-an-hour wages, according to a photo provided by the workers.
As soon as the display went up, Amazon managers became more aggressive with checking workers’ badges, said Josh Crowell, an employee involved in the effort. Security began checking their IDs as many as seven times a day, he said, calling the checks “intimidation tactics.”
The workers’ complaints gained traction on TikTok, where a video of the group confronting their general manager on Nov. 10 has received more than 275,000 likes.
Management ordered the workers to remove the table altogether, prompting a series of meetings with human resources. One HR official told Crowell that Amazon wouldn’t interfere with workers’ right to engage in union activity, according to an audio recording of the meeting.
But the same manager told Crowell that he and others had violated Amazon’s policy against unauthorized structures.
A dozen pro-union workers, including Crowell, Quinn, and Rodriguez, received final written warnings on Nov. 18 and Nov. 19. Management said they were being punished for insubordination and could be fired if they refused to take down the table again, according to an audio recording of one of the meetings. Managers said the issue wasn’t union speech, but the presence of an unauthorized structure.
Violation Unclear
Amazon has been found to have run afoul of federal labor law in the past. In 2021, the NLRB ordered a do-over election at the a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., after finding that the company’s meddling with ballot returns “made a free and fair election impossible.”
The workers’ allegations of union busting “are without merit and we look forward to showing that through the legal process,” Paradis, the Amazon spokeswoman, said in her statement. “Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union and we do not retaliate against employees for exercising their federally protected rights.”
Amazon’s orders to tear down the table may not have crossed the line even if the workers felt punished, said Jeffrey Hirsch, a labor law professor at the University of North Carolina.
The NLRA has long given employers the right to ban certain activities on their premises—such as handing out literature—as long as those actions aren’t applied asymmetrically to target union activity.
“These cases ultimately are boiling down to employees’ Section 7 rights versus employers’ property rights,” Hirsch said. “Sometimes, they go one way, sometimes they go another way.”
The labor board typically looks at whether the employer has evenly enforced its policy for all types of violations, said Sharon Block, a former NLRB member who directs Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy.
For example, she said, an employer couldn’t let Girl Scouts set up a table for cookie sales but ban a table for union leafleting.
In the meeting with Crowell, the HR official acknowledged that there recently had been Amazon “swag” tables set up on the property, but said they received prior approval from the company, according to the recording.
But an employer could also run afoul of the NLRA if it can’t demonstrate a legitimate reason for ordering a union table to be taken down, Block added.
“If there’s no reason you can’t set up a table for reasons that are unrelated to the union, that’s going to be a problem too,” she said.
The dispute could ultimately give NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo an opportunity to push for a more union-friendly standard for workplace displays, said Jerry Hunter, senior counsel at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP who served as general counsel from 1989 to 1993.
The agency’s current top lawyer has advocated for the board to overturn a series of pro-business rulings.
Abruzzo “would apply a much broader standard,” he said.
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