Eleven Pro-Union Workers at KCVG Given Illegal Final Written Warnings for Union Activity

On Saturday, November 18 and Sunday, November 19 Amazon gave eleven pro-union workers at Amazon’s largest air hub, KCVG, in Northern Kentucky final written warnings. Amazon is disciplining these workers for “insubordination” after workers refused to take down their table and easel in the employee parking garage.

All eleven workers will be appealing their final written warnings.

“They took my learning vest,” said Josh Crowell, who until November 18 worked as a Learning Ambassador at KCVG training new hires and one of the workers written up last weekend. “I’ve never been written up until now and receiving a write-up means you can’t be a Learning Ambassador. I think they just don’t want union supporters training new hires.”

Employers interfering with protected union activity, like setting up a table to talk to coworkers about a union, is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. Amazon has a well-documented history of illegal union busting, but their worst union busting to date should be expected at KCVG in the coming months given the importance of the facility to Amazon’s air freight operations.

Connor Spence, an Amazon worker at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island who played a leading role in Amazon Labor Union’s successful union drive in 2022 – the first and only to date at Amazon – went to Kentucky in early November to help KCVG workers’ effort.

“Amazon giving eleven workers final written warnings is a massive escalation,” Spence said. “We never saw anything like that at JFK8. Amazon is clearly scared of losing a second union election, and not just anywhere, but at their largest air hub.”

These illegal disciplinary actions by Amazon come in the wake of creative initiatives by Amazon Labor Union - KCVG. After Amazon’s third quarter financial filings showed they made $10 billion in profit, triple the previous quarter, workers displayed a six foot long blown up $10 billion check in the employee parking garage.

Pro-union workers at KCVG have set up tables outside of work to talk to coworkers nearly every day, often at multiple shift changes per day, since the launch of their union drive in March of this year. Over 1,000 workers have signed union cards.

Next to the table, workers displayed a homemade poster board on an easel reading, “Where Should the PROFITS Go? VOTE HERE!” The poster board listed several of the workers’ key demands: $30 an hour starting wage, free on-site childcare, professional translators, equipment repairs, double pay for flex (last-minute mandatory overtime).

Over 200 workers have placed stickers to register their vote in favor of one or more of these demands.

Workers refused to leave the employee parking garage and take down their table and easel, repeatedly citing to management their legal rights to talk to workers about unionizing under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.

Since March, management and Aviation Security conducted “badge challenges” to verify workers’ employee status once per tabling shift. From November 7th to November 19th, badge challenges were conducted every 30 minutes alongside threats of “discipline up to and including termination” for insubordination. Many of these interactions workers recorded on video to ensure their documentation. From September 7th-8th, workers were badge challenged twenty times in just eight hours of union activity.

To fight back against this blatantly illegal intimidation and show management they weren’t backing down, on November 9, more than twenty five workers marched into KCVG General Manager Karthik Bagavathi Pandian’s office to hand deliver an Unfair Labor Practice. A video from the action has been watched over 4 million times on Tik Tok, alongside several other recent videos on the union’s Tik Tok account obtaining a mass viewership as well.

Just one week later, on November 16, workers again marched into the ramp building demanding an end to discrimination against immigrants and non-English speakers in KCVG’s hiring practices.

The notice given to Marcio Rodriguez, a planeside worker on the ramp at KCVG, informing him of his final written warning read, “Management gave you the directive to remove the table, and you did not follow the directive. Willful failure to comply with this directive is insubordination. Insubordination will not be tolerated in the workplace.”

Travis Lavenski, legal counsel to ALU-KCVG, wrote a letter directed at KCVG management that workers are attaching to their appeals. “Because the complained-of activity was conducted in a non-working area during non-working time, Amazon cannot forbid these workers from engaging in this protected, concerted activity,” wrote Lavenski.

Lavenski’s letter continues explaining why Amazon’s claim that the workers’ table was a “safety concern” is unfounded, as well as citing a previous case at the Cincinnati airport over essentially the same issue called DHL Express, Inc. v. N.L.R.B., 813 F.3d 365 (D.C. Cir. 2016).

According to Lavenski’s letter, in this case:

“an employer tried to cite ‘safety concerns’ as a reason to forbid its employees from setting up to solicit Union support in a mixed-use hallway area where employees checked in with security to enter and exit work. The DC Circuit affirmed the NLRB’s holding that the employer’s purported safety concerns were not considerable enough to prevent the workers from engaging in protected, concerted activity because the facts illustrated that the Union did not block the flow of traffic in the hallway, there was no actual disruption to the ingress and egress zones, no employees were placed in any real danger, and the Union was not breaking any TSA guidelines.”

“We won’t let them intimidate us,” said Jordan Quinn, who works in the sortation building at KCVG. “We knew this level of union busting would begin at some point. Amazon hates nothing more than their workers coming together to advocate for what we need. We made this company $10 billion last quarter and we’re not going to be deterred from unionizing to win demands like a $30/hr starting wage, free on-site childcare, translation at work, and more.”

If the union drive at KCVG is successful, it would join the 8,000 worker JFK8 facility on Staten Island in New York, where workers voted to unionize in April of last year, despite a series of acts of illegal retaliation by Amazon at the facility. The corporation has since refused to come to the table to discuss with Amazon Labor Union representatives of the legally-recognized union, despite being legally required to do so.