A judge has ruled that Amazon must reinstate a former warehouse employee who was fired in the early days the pandemicsaying the company “illegally” fired the worker who led a protest calling for Amazon to do more to protect employees from COVID-19.
The dispute between Gerald Bryson, who worked at an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island district, has been going on since June 2020, when Bryson filed a complaint of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board. alleging that Amazon retaliated against him.
Later that year, the NLRB said it found merit in Bryson’s complaint that Amazon had illegally fired him for organizing in the workplace. Amazon did not accept the findings and the federal board filed a formal complaint against the company, prompting a lengthy administrative lawsuit.
On Monday, Administrative Law Judge Benjamin Green said Amazon had to re-offer Bryson his job, as well as lost wages and profits from his “discriminatory dismissal.” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said in a statement that the company will appeal the ruling.
Yana Paskova / The Washington Post via Getty Images
“We do not fully agree with this decision and we are surprised that the NLRB wants any employer to take Mr. Bryson’s behavior,” Nantel said. “Mr Bryson was fired for harassing school, cursing and defaming a co-worker over a megaphone in front of the workplace. We do not tolerate such behavior in our workplace and intend to appeal to the NLRB “.
Bryson first took part in a March 2020 protest over working conditions led by Chris Smalls, another employee of the warehouse who was fired by the online retail giant that runs Amazon. Labor Union, the nascent group that he won the union election earlier this month at the Amazon facility where both men worked.
After Smalls was fired, Bryson led another protest in April 2020 in front of the warehouse. While out of work during the protest, Bryson had an argument with another worker. He was later fired for violating Amazon’s vulgar language policy.
Court documents report the altercation between Bryson and an employee. A detailed record of their dispute by the NLRB showed that both Bryson and the woman used blasphemy during a heated exchange that lasted several minutes. The agency’s report shows that the woman started the exchange and twice tried to provoke a physical altercation with Bryson, which she did not enter. The woman received a “first warning.”
The woman also told Bryson, who is black, to “go back to the Bronx,” which the judge said Bryson could interpret as “racial,” because she’s African-American and might wonder why. , apart from his race, someone would. ” We assume he’s from the Bronx. ”
Bryson testified that he informed an Amazon manager who spoke with him about the incident on that comment. The manager has denied that Bryson made any reference to a racial comment. But the judge sided with Bryson’s account, saying it was unlikely that he “would not convey such a prominent comment to which he had a strong reaction.”
The judge said in his ruling that Amazon rushed to trial and conducted a “biased investigation” into the argument designed to blame only Bryson for this incident, adding that the company wanted to fire Bryson for their “protected concerted activity rather than fairly assessing” what happened.
In his investigation into the altercation, Greene said Amazon “preferred not to get information from someone who was protesting with Bryson even though that person was probably in the best position to explain what happened.”
Instead, he said that several witnesses to the incident presented by the company were accidentally “unilateral”, adding that he considered it unlikely that statements would be made “unless such reports were requested”.
The NLRB had also pushed for Bryson’s reinstatement in a federal lawsuit filed last month, using a provision in the National Labor Relations Act that allows him to apply for temporary relief in federal court while a case goes through the process. administrative law. Amazon has used the case as one of its objections to the results of the Staten Island election, accusing the agency of polluting the vote by pursuing Bryson’s reinstatement before the election.
- In:
- Amazon
Add Comment