In 'Direct Attack' on Labor Movement, Amazon Backs Claim NLRB Is Unconstitutional
Joins Elon Musk's Space X and Trader Joe's in anti-union bid
JULIA CONLEY for Common Dreams
(Photo: Emaz/VIEW Press/Corbis via Getty Images)
Amid a recent surge in unionization and
other workers' rights victories, wealthy U.S. corporations have fired union
organizers, surveilled employees
as they voted on forming a collective bargaining unit, and closed store
locations to penalize labor leaders—but a court filing by Amazon on Thursday
suggested a new tactic as the e-commerce giant seeks to dismantle the federal
agency tasked with protecting employees.
Fighting accusations from prosecutors at
the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Amazon illegally retaliated
against warehouse workers who unionized, the company submitted a legal
filing arguing that the board itself is unconstitutional.
Amazon claimed it did not break the law by
limiting workers' access to the warehouse, which the NLRB said last year was a
transparent effort to quash union activity. In its filing, the company also
claimed "the structure of the NLRB violates the separation of powers"
by "impeding the executive power provided for in Article II of the United
States Constitution."
The company is the third corporation to
make such a claim in recent weeks.
In January, a lawyer for grocery chain Trader Joe's argued in an NLRB hearing over union-busting charges that the board, which was created nearly 90 years ago under the New Deal, is "unconstitutional"—"including but not limited to the structure and organization of the National Labor Relations Board and the agency's administrative law judges."
That claim came weeks after astronautics
company SpaceX, owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk—currently the second-richest person on
Earth—claimed the NLRB's
enforcement proceedings violate the company's right to a jury trial.
Amazon echoed that claim on Thursday.
Seth Goldstein, an attorney for Trader
Joe's United, which sued the grocer over illegal retaliation, said last month
that the company's argument suggested that workers "don't have the right
to organize at all."
"This is really dangerous,"
Goldstein told HuffPost.
"Are we really going back to 1920?"
On Thursday, he called Amazon's decision to
launch its own anti-NLRB legal argument "a direct attack on the American
labor movement and workers' rights."
Amazon's filing follows more than 250 NLRB
complaints against its labor practices in recent years. In 2022, employees at
the company's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York won what was called a
"David versus Goliath" victory, defeating Amazon's
multimillion-dollar anti-union effort by voting to form the Amazon Labor Union
(ALU).
"So now capital, unable to hold back
labor any longer, is arguing that the NLRB's very existence is
unconstitutional," said Cornell Law School professor Robert
Hockett.
Former New York Times labor
reporter Steven Greenhouse pointed out that the new anti-union efforts by
Amazon and SpaceX are being led by two of the richest men in the world—Musk and Amazon founder
and executive chairman Jeff Bezos.
"Billionaires," said Christian
Smalls, president of ALU and fired Amazon worker, "they gotta go!"
Corporate interests have previously worked
to dismantle regulatory agencies tasked with protecting working Americans, with
a trade association representing payday lenders taking its case against the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the U.S. Supreme Court last year. The
group has argued the CFPB's funding structure through the Federal Reserve is
unconstitutional.
Pawel Popiel, a researcher at the Annenberg
School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania, called Amazon's filing an
"incredibly troubling lobbying effort."
