Bloomberg reported Jan. 22 that Amazon.com Inc. is asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to consider allowing warehouse employees to vote in person, as the union at the company’s Alabama warehouse is up for election again.
Last November, a group of Amazon employees at the Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse filed paperwork for an election to decide whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The National Labor Relations Board, which oversees the union vote, said earlier this month that the vote will be conducted by mail over the next two months because it is standard practice to ensure employee safety during an Epidemic.
Amazon.com has formally requested a delay in the vote so the National Labor Relations Board can reconsider its previous ruling. In a filing released Thursday (Jan. 21), Amazon objected to the National Labor Relations Board’s decision to conduct a mail-in ballot. Amazon.com argued that the security of the Bessemer warehouse should not be equated with the surrounding Jefferson County and other areas in Alabama where positive testing rates for the Wuhan virus rose to more than 20 percent this month.
The world’s largest online retailer also said mail-in ballots increase the risk of fraud and coercion of employees and depress turnout because as many as 29 percent of the more than 5,800 employees eligible to vote in Bessemer warehouses do not use mail-in ballots, and there are many filling errors in mail-in ballots.
Amazon.com proposed setting up a hot tent in the warehouse’s parking lot for voting and using software to keep social distance. The National Labor Relations Board, however, argued that in-person voting under such conditions would be dangerous and that using Amazon’s “substantial resources” would lead employees to believe that the government employees managing the voting were not taking advantage of Amazon.
The acting regional director of the National Labor Relations Board wrote in his decision: “The most important considerations in my decision were the safety of all election participants and the right of all voters to vote. After weighing the two, I believe the benefits of conducting a mail-in ballot outweigh the disadvantages.”
Chinese scholar He Qinglian tweeted, “The left’s true attitude toward mail-in ballots is now in its original form. The left’s promotion of mail-in ballots and its partnership with postal unions to take advantage of the steady stream of mail-in ballots is the main reason why Biden got 84 million votes. Now, the Alabama chapter of the Amazon union, where the epidemic is heavy, is asking employees to vote in person because mail-in ballots are prone to fraud. The left’s union elections demand election security, while the election of a country’s president is deliberately cheated.”
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