#Amazon workers in Alabama will vote by mail in new union election

A federal labor board said that Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, will vote by mail next month in a rerun election to decide whether to unionize.

The National Labor Relations Board said Tuesday that the ballots will be mailed out Feb. 4 and must be returned before the counting starts on March 28.

The move comes roughly a month and a half after the board ordered a new union election for Amazon workers based on objections by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to the first vote that took place in April.

The move was a blow to Amazon, which spent about a year aggressively campaigning for warehouse workers in Bessemer to reject the union, which they ultimately did by a wide margin.

In a 20-page decision, the regional director for the NLRB, Lisa Henderson, focused much attention on Amazon’s installation of a US Postal Service mailbox at the main employee entrance, which may have created the false impression that the company was the one conducting the election process. Henderson also rejected Amazon’s argument that it was making voting easier and was trying to encourage as high a turnout as possible.