Amazon workers at a warehouse in the New York City borough of Staten Island became the Seattle-based web giant’s first unionized US workers after winning a historic vote on Friday.
The vote came out to 2,654 votes in favor 2,131 against unionization, according to National Labor Relations Board officials.
The Amazon Labor Union’s victory came despite the group not being affiliated with any larger union coalition such as the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which is supporting Amazon union efforts in Bessemer, Alabama.
Instead, the organizing group has remained entirely independent since it was formed last year.
About 8,300 people work at the Staten Island warehouse, which is called JFK8. Less than 5,000 voted in the union election.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the result.
The union’s victory comes after years of knock-down, drag-out fighting between Amazon and activists.
In Staten Island, Amazon held mandatory anti-union meetings with employees at JFK8 — and blanketed them with letters and online ads urging them to vote against the effort.
“When you know, you vote NO,” one of Amazon’s Facebook and Instagram ads read.
Amazon also hired Global Strategy Group, a Democratic party-aligned public relations firm with close ties to disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to blast employees with anti-union messages, CNBC reported on Thursday.
And when the Amazon Labor Union’s leader, ex-Amazon employee Chris Smalls, came to a JFK8 break room in February to give food to employees, Amazon called the cops and had him arrested for trespassing, Reuters reported.
Another Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, LDJ5, is set to hold a union election starting on April 25.
On Thursday, labor officials said that a separate union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama would likely be decided in the coming days by 416 challenged ballots. After the initial count was finished on Thursday, 993 votes had been cast against union representation and 875 for unionization.
Since the margin that the Bessemer union lost by is not greater than the number of challenged ballots, the final decision is set to hinge on the challenged ballots.
This year’s Bessemer election appears to be a much closer fight than last year’s vote, in which labor activists lost by a two-to-one margin. Federal labor officials ordered a new election after they found that Amazon had interfered with the election process.
Amazon is not the only major US corporation to face a labor push in recent months. More than 160 Starbucks locations across the country have filed petitions to organize, according to NLRB data — and nine stores have successfully voted to unionize since December.