The election will allow approximately 6,000 employees at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama, facility to vote by ballot from February 8, according to a decision by the National Labor Relations Board published on Friday.
Union pressure comes at a time when working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses are under intensive scrutiny during the pandemic. The company hired hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide to meet the increased demand. Several warehouse workers have talked about security issues since the pandemic began.
Although some Amazon workers are unionized in Europe, the company has so far rejected unions in the United States. A union election was held in 2014 at a Delaware warehouse, but it resulted in the workers’ total rejection.
The potential unionization at Bessemer took months to work out. The facility’s workers filed a notice in the NLRB for the first time in November about holding an election.
“Having a union on Amazon would give us the right to collectively negotiate our working conditions, including items such as safety standards, training, breaks, wages, benefits and other important issues that would make our workplace better,” says a support site to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer workers.
Amazon did not immediately respond to CNN Business’s request for comment.
During a series of hearings in late December with the NLRB, Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) agreed on who would be allowed to vote. The list includes a variety of hourly, full-time, part-time and seasonal service associates.
The NLRB wrote that it believes that conducting the election by post, as opposed to personally as Amazon prefers, is “the safest and most appropriate method” given “the extraordinary circumstances presented by the Covid-19 pandemic”.