Amazon is trying to postpone the union vote in Bessemer, Alabama, appealing a decision by the United States labor council that allows 6,000 warehouse workers to vote by mail in the union. The company advocates that the election be in person, according to documents filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday.
Amazon’s argument is that voting by mail decreases voter turnout. He says the NLRB analyzed the incorrect COVID-19 infection data when determining how to vote, using the positivity rate in Jefferson County, where the warehouse is located, instead of the positivity rate in the warehouse itself.
Workers in Bessemer are expected to vote if they unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union as of February 8. Ballots must be mailed by March 29, and vote counting must take place on March 30. It will be the first US tech giant union election since 2014, according to Reuters.
In December, the National Labor Relations Board rejected an earlier attempt by the technology giant to postpone a hearing on the union effort.
In a filing on January 21, Amazon said that if the acting regional director had examined the latest data from COVID-19, she would have seen that the county’s infection rate was decreasing. “If a manual election is inadequate here, it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which a Regional Director would allow manual elections until COVID-19 is eradicated,” wrote the company.
The NLRB had previously reported that Jefferson County’s infection rate was over 17% in early January and noted that new cases were increasing. Now, Amazon is arguing that not only was this data wrong, but NLRB should be using data from its warehouse. The rate of positivity there, according to Amazon, is much lower. “Frankly, it’s hard to believe that when three medical experts essentially agree that the conditions in [the warehouse] are safer than in another geographic area, a reasonable fact finder would ignore this consensus to focus on that other geographic area when making a security-related determination, ”he wrote.
The NLRB may become even less favorable to Amazon with the election of Joe Biden, who has already made aggressive moves to change the council’s position in relation to unions. On Wednesday, President Biden sacked Peter Robb, general counsel for the NLRB and a former opponent of labor groups.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.