Amazon workers authorize strike at company’s first-ever unionized warehouse

(NEW YORK) — Thousands of Amazon workers at the company’s first-ever unionized warehouse voted to authorize a strike on Friday, claiming the tech giant has refused to recognize the union and negotiate a contract at the New York City facility.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union representing roughly 5,500 workers at the warehouse, said Amazon risks a strike if it does not begin negotiations by Sunday.

“Amazon is pushing its workers closer to the picket line by failing to show them the respect they have earned,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien told ABC News in a statement. “If these white-collar criminals want to keep breaking the law, they better get ready for a fight.”

A strike authorization vote affords union leadership the ability to declare a work stoppage if deemed appropriate. But the vote does not guarantee that a strike will take place.

The headline-grabbing union victory at the Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York, in 2022, accelerated an upsurge of labor organizing that took hold nationwide during the pandemic.

After the union victory, however, Amazon filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, seeking to overturn the outcome, including allegations that NLRB officials showed a favorable bias toward the workers and that union leaders bribed colleagues in an effort to win their support.

So far, those legal challenges by Amazon have failed to overturn the union win. Months after the victory, a hearing officer for the NLRB recommended that the vote should stand. Soon afterward, the NLRB officially certified the union representing workers at the facility, putting Amazon under a legal obligation to bargain in good faith. Amazon appealed the ruling.

Workers have alleged that the company’s legal challenge amounts to an illegal effort to delay contract negotiations.

Amazon did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. In a previous statement to ABC News, Amazon Spokesperson Eileen Hards said the company respects workers’ right to unionize but it contests the results of the election at the Staten Island warehouse, also known as JFK8.

“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union,” Hards said. “They always have.”

“We strongly disagree with the outcome, and as we showed throughout the JFK8 Objections Hearing with dozens of witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents, both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome of the election and we don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants,” she added.

Workers at the facility previously said a union contract should include minimum pay of $30 per hour and bolstered safety protections.

A delay is typical for a first union contract, but the passage of time in this case has extended beyond the norm.

The average length of time before a new union signs its first contract is 465 days, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis in 2022. Nearly 990 days have passed since Amazon workers in New York City voted to unionize the facility.

On Friday, the Teamsters said workers at a second facility in Queens had also voted to authorize a strike.

“Driving for Amazon is tough,” Luc Rene, a worker at the Queens facility, said in a statement. “What’s even tougher is fighting a mega-corporation that constantly breaks the law and games the system. But we won’t give up.”

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