NLRB PRELIMINARY FINDING REVIVES LABOR ORGANIZING AT AMAZON

A recommendation to nullify the election results of an Amazon union vote in Bessemer, Alabama is breathing new life into the labor movement.

The recommendation was issued Monday by a hearing officer for the National Labor Relations Board, who said that Amazon potentially interfered with the April election in which warehouse workers overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to unionize.

Labor experts say that it’s rare for a hearing officer to call for a new election but in the case of Amazon, there’s a good chance it will happen since the NLRB regional director usually sticks with the hearing officer’s guidance.

Moreover, the labor board’s standards in determining a new election favors the union, not Amazon. The board needs to only figure out whether the company “reasonably tended to interfere with the employees’ free and uncoerced choice in the election,” not whether it in fact coerced employees, according to the preliminary 61-page opinion filed by the hearing officer, Kerstin Meyers.

“They are looking at whether there has been conduct that interferes with employees’ free choice,” said William Gould, a law professor at Stanford Law School and the former chairman of the NRLB from 1994 to 1998. “The board does not want the workers to believe that the employer is in control of the process. It’s the government, the impartial third party, that is in control of the process, not the employer.”