Labor Secretary on Amazon union vote: Workers ‘should be able to organize without any interference’
Thousands of Amazon (AMZN) warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama will begin casting their ballots next month in a second union vote, after a federal agency ruled that the company had illegally interfered with an election that took place last spring.
During the initial labor battle last year, President Joe Biden released a video defending the right of workers to unionize and made reference to "workers in Alabama" without mentioning Amazon, widely perceived as an allusion to the union drive at the tech giant.
In a new interview with Yahoo Finance, U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh voiced a similarly indirect but resolute defense of worker organizing in response to a question about the re-vote in Bessemer, calling on all employers to refrain from interference with union drives at their workplaces.
"There's going to be another vote there, so there'll be an opportunity for the employees to see if they want to unionize," Walsh, the former Democratic mayor of Boston and ex-head of a union called the Boston Building Trades Council, said of the Amazon warehouse in Alabama.
"Certainly the president's feeling and my feeling is everyone has the right to organize, and that they should be able to organize without any interference," Walsh adds.
"I think that that's for any company in America," he tells Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer.
Some 3,000 of about 6,000 eligible workers voted by mail in February and March of last year on whether to unionize with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, or RWDSU. The effort was roundly defeated by a margin of 2 to 1.
On the day the votes were tallied, in early April, RWDSU said it planned to file official objections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming that Amazon interfered with its workers' right to vote in a free and fair election. Those allegations centered on a collection box placed by Amazon on the warehouse premises, which the union said gave indication to workers that Amazon was tracking how they would vote.
In November, the labor board’s regional director for the Atlanta region sided with the union over its objection to the collection box, acknowledging that Amazon's maneuver undermined the credibility of the election results.
Barbara Agrait, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement cited by The New York Times that Amazon’s “employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join.”
Walsh, the first former union leader to serve as Labor Secretary in nearly 45 years, acknowledged that he supports unions but said his job requires him to represent union and non-union workers alike.
"It's no secret: I'm a union guy," he says. "I have a union book in my pocket."
"But I represent all workers in America," he adds. "So I represent those workers that are covered by collective bargaining and they belong to a union, and I represent those workers that don't belong to a union."
"I don't represent another one differently than the other one," he says.
Walsh, whose parents immigrated from Ireland in the 1950s, said he learned the importance of unions from his father, a laborer and union member.
"That union gave my family the opportunity from the time he came off the plane and Ireland, when he joined the union," Walsh says. "To the day that he passed away, and my mother still has that same pension my father had."
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