Amazon labor group refiles union petition in Staten Island

Amazon.com workers seeking to unionize four facilities in New York City said they now have enough signatures to call for a vote.

The labor group filed a petition Wednesday to hold a union election after failing to collect the necessary signatures in the fall. To mark the occasion, workers organized a planned demonstration in front of a giant Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, one of the four locations in the borough covered by the petition.

The United States experienced a strong labor movement this year. Starbucks employees in Buffalo voted to unionize this month, becoming the first to do so in the company’s 50-year history. The coffee chain now faces a unionization push in its hometown of Seattle.

Amazon, founded by the world’s second-richest man, has long been a prime target of organized labor. The company defeated a high-profile effort in Bessemer, Ala., in April, but a federal labor official ordered Amazon to face a second election there.

A leader of the group in Staten Island is Chris Smalls, who worked at Amazon for more than four years. Amazon fired him in 2020 for what the company said was a violation of safety guidelines; Smalls said he was protesting Amazon’s inadequate COVID-19 policies. The dispute is part of an ongoing court battle between the company and New York’s attorney general.

Earlier this year, the labor group said it collected about 2,000 signatures from workers at the four Staten Island facilities where Amazon stows products and packages them for shipment to customers. The locations employ about 5,500 workers and serve as a hub to New York City.

Under federal rules, organizers must win the backing of at least 30% of employees. The group thought it had met that goal when it submitted its initial petition in October. But it withdrew the paperwork last month because, a lawyer for the group said, some of the people who had signed union cards were no longer working there.

In an unrelated action, Amazon.com’s online services business suffered at least its third outage in the last month, knocking a number of websites offline, but service was restored by Wednesday morning.

Users of Amazon Web Services began reporting network connectivity problems at its U.S.-East-Region 1 facility in Northern Virginia about 7:35 a.m. Philadelphia time Wednesday, and technicians began addressing the problem in less than an hour. Normal service was restored before 10 a.m., according to Amazon’s service health dashboard.

Users reported problems accessing websites such as Walt Disney Co.’s Hulu video streaming service, cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase Global Inc. and investment manager Fidelity Investments, according to Downdetector.

Amazon had one of the worst outages in its history on Dec. 7, affecting Netflix Inc., robot vacuums and even ticket sales for Adele’s upcoming tour. Amazon attributed that episode to “unexpected behavior” of its automated processes.