NEW YORK — Backed by the grassroots labor group that secured the first-ever union victory of an Amazon warehouse in the U.S., workers of another warehouse filed a petition on Tuesday for an election in upstate New York in the hopes of a similar outcome.
A spokesperson for the National Labor Relations Board said the petition was filed for the warehouse known as ALB1, located in the town of Schodack, roughly 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Albany.
To qualify for a union election, the NLRB requires signatures from 30% of eligible voters at a specific facility. Whether or not workers have reached that threshold will likely be hashed out in the coming weeks.
Paul Flaningan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company has roughly 1,000 warehouse workers at the Schodack location. But in the filing, the Amazon Labor Union, the nascent union backing the workers, said there would be roughly 400 employees in the bargaining unit.
Heather Goodall, a warehouse worker and a former insurance agent who’s leading the organizing effort, said in an interview earlier this month that workers had enough support to file for a union petition, but were choosing to delay in order to pick up even more signatures. On Tuesday, she said the group’s attorneys were not ready to release information on the number of signatures collected to the public.
The NLRB must now verify if the workers who signed the petition are qualified to seek an election. If the agency approves, it will sort out dates and times for an election between the company and the Amazon Labor Union, which pulled off a union win on Staten Island, New York in April.
The union, composed of former and current warehouse workers, began backing organizing efforts in upstate New York after it was approached by Goodall, who joined Amazon in February to scope out the company’s working conditions. She quickly began talking to her co-workers about organizing and launched the union campaign in May along with a group of other workers.
Soon after, Goodall said she met with the Teamsters and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, which also took on Amaz