Dive Brief:
- Amazon repeatedly violated the National Labor Relations Act when supervisors and loss prevention personnel prohibited off-duty employees from engaging in union-organizing and other protected activity in warehouse parking lots in Chicago, St. Louis and New York state, an administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board held July 23.
- The incidents involved similar actions by Amazon’s agents, according to the ALJ’s findings in Amazon.com Services LLC and Duzinkas. For example, in one incident, two off-duty Amazon employees were in the parking lot of a Chicago-area warehouse handing out petitions seeking to raise Amazon’s base minimum wage. A loss prevention agent asked what they were doing and told them he would call the police if they didn’t leave. The police did arrive, and they left, according to the findings.
- In ruling against Amazon, the ALJ explained that NLRB has long held employers may not bar off-duty employees from outside nonworking areas, including parking lots. Amazon violated Section 8(a)1 of the NLRA when it tried to do this to keep off-duty employees from engaging in protected activity, the judge held. Amazon also violated Section 8(a)1 when it called the police to further bar protected activity, the ALJ said.
Dive Insight:
Section 8(a)1 of the NLRA prohibits employers from interfering with or restraining employees from exercising the statute’s core rights, spelled out in Section 7 of the act.
These core rights — considered “protected activity” and often referred to as “Section 7 rights” — include the right to organize and “engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”
The issues here arose in 2022 and 2023, during a heated union campaign to organize Amazon warehouse workers at multiple facilities. The ALJ found Amazon’s actions in telling off-duty employees to leave the parking lots while they were trying to garner union support from co-workers and campaign for better working conditions and pay interfered with their Section 7 rights and violated Section 8(a)1.
One incident took place outside Amazon’s St. Peters, Missouri, warehouse, according to the ALJ’s findings. An off-duty employee active in an organizing committee stationed himself in the parking lot to get co-workers to sign a petition demanding improvements to warehouse safety.
As the off-duty employee was putting flyers on vehicles near the facility entrance, a security officer from a third-party vendor wearing an Amazon badge approached him, the ALJ found. The officer told the off-duty employee he wasn’t allowed to distribute the flyers in the parking lot and that if the officer went inside to get the police and loss prevention, they would tell him the same thing. The employee immediately left.
The ALJ ruled that the officer was acting as an agent for Amazon and his statements were unlawful. This was because pursuant to an established NLRB holding, “the distribution by off-duty employees of union literature in company parking lots is clearly protected by Section 7 of the Act, absent a showing that any work performed there is integral to business operations,” the ALJ noted, quoting NLRB.
The case also offers a tip on employer no-solicitation policies. Amazon’s policy started out valid by stating that solicitation by employees was prohibited on company property during working time, the ALJ said.
But the policy ultimately violated the NLRA because it failed to make clear to a reasonable employee “that solicitation is permitted in work areas during non-working time,” the judge held.