A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge ruled Wednesday that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated federal labor laws for making comments emphasizing some downsides of unionization in select media appearances in 2022.
In the ruling, Judge Brian Gee identified statements made by Jassy on CNBC’s television program “Squawk Box,” and during two summits organized by Bloomberg News and The New York Times, all of which included comments that touched on unionization efforts at the tech titan.
The April 2022 “Squawk Box” interview saw Jassy posit that unionization would make employees less empowered.
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“First, at a place like Amazon that empowers employees, if they see something they can do better for customers or for themselves, they can go meet in a room, decide how [to] change it and change it,” Gee said. “That type of empowerment doesn’t happen when you have unions. It’s much more bureaucratic, it’s much slower.”
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Jassy’s comments at both the Bloomberg Technology Summit in June that year, and at The New York Times DealBook Summit in November, also alluded to bureaucracy.
“If you see something on the line that you think could be better for your team or you or your customers, you can’t just go to your manager and say, ‘Let’s change it,’” Jassy said at the Bloomberg event. “There’s a whole process and bureaucracy which you have to go through to be able to do that.”
At DealBook, he lamented how Amazon employees “don’t have to go through a union. It’s not bureaucratic, it’s not slow. We think that that’s pretty empowering and a great way to work.”
In the CNBC and Bloomberg interviews, Jassy did specify that employees do get to make the choice of whether they want to join a union.
“Employees could have reasonably understood Jassy to be saying that, without a union, they would be more empowered and could achieve improvements at work faster and with less bureaucracy—two assertions unsupported by objective fact—and thus be better off,” Gee wrote. “I thus conclude that Jassy’s words relied on coercion to dissuade employees from supporting unions.”
The NLRB filed the complaint against Amazon and Jassy in October 2022.
“We strongly disagree that any part of these comments were inappropriate and intend to appeal,” said Amazon spokesperson Mary Kate Paradis in a statement. “The decision reflects poorly on the state of free speech rights today, and we remain optimistic that we will be able to continue to engage in a reasonable discussion on these issues where all perspectives have an opportunity to be heard.”
Despite the ruling, Jassy himself will not be penalized for the comments. The agency lacks the authority to hold executives personally liable for violations, impose penalties for unfair labor practices or make companies pay punitive damages.
Judge Gee ordered Amazon to post a notice of employee rights at all its U.S. facilities nationwide, email the notice and post it on the employer’s intranet.
According to the ruling, such a notice would read, in part, that Amazon “will not threaten you by saying that you would be less empowered if you unionized, that you would find it harder to get things done quickly since unions are slower and more bureaucratic, and that you would be better off without a union.”
The judge recommends Amazon be ordered to “cease and desist” from making such comments in the future.
Rulings by NLRB judges can be appealed to labor board members in Washington, D.C., and from there into federal court. Parties have 28 days from Wednesday to file exceptions with the board. If parties don’t appeal, the judge’s order will be adopted.
Jassy’s slate of comments came after Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, N.Y. voted to unionize in April 2022, which marked the first successful unionization effort ever for employees at the e-commerce giant.
Amazon has continued to contest the Staten Island unionization vote and still hasn’t recognized the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), leaving the organized employees without a contract. The NLRB has previously said it found merit to the charges that Amazon violated labor laws by refusing to bargain with the ALU.
The NLRB is also currently hosting a hearing with Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to determine whether employees at a Bessemer, Ala. warehouse will be able to vote for unionization for a third time.
Over in the U.K., warehouse workers in Coventry, England won the right to hold a unionization vote last month. The timing of that ballot will be known in the coming weeks.
