Amazon unlawfully disciplined pro-union Deltona worker, says labor board judge
The worker was reportedly known in his workplace for supporting unionization efforts.
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An administrative law judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled last month that the e-commerce giant Amazon violated federal labor law by unlawfully disciplining a worker at an Amazon facility in Deltona, Florida in 2022 who was well-known for supporting unionization efforts and had spoken up about unsafe working conditions.
Under the National Labor Relations Act, it’s unlawful for an employer to fire, discipline, or otherwise retaliate against an employee who takes action with others to improve their working conditions — regardless of whether they belong to a union or not.
According to a decision issued by administrative law judge Michael Ross, however, that’s exactly what Amazon did in their treatment of Anthony Mundorff, a former employee of Amazon’s MCO2 facility in Deltona, who has since transferred to an Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York.
It’s unclear in the judge’s decision whether Mundorff transferred to Amazon’s JFK8, the same facility where warehouse workers voted to form the very first Amazon union in the United States in 2022. I was unable to reach Mundorff for comment.
According to Ross’s decision, “Mundorff’s advocacy for the union and workplace health and safety was widely known throughout MCO2,” a 1.4 million square foot Amazon warehouse in Central Florida that employs roughly 1,000 to 1,200 people.
Mundorff testified that between 2021 and October 2023, he had been approached by multiple coworkers about health and safety issues at their warehouse, including high injury rates, laboring in extreme heat, and insufficient time for bathroom breaks during work hours.
Mundorff, a “vocal supporter of the Amazon Labor Union,” brought these concerns to various managers and supervisors, and in 2022, one of them dared him to call the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a federal workplace safety agency that Republicans have repeatedly attempted to abolish.
So, he did.
“Mundorff immediately went outside the facility, called OSHA, and spoke at length with an agency representative,” the NLRB decision reads. As a result of that initial contact, OSHA began a weeks-long federal investigation into complaints of workplace safety hazards at MCO2 in July 2022.
Months later, OSHA issued three “hazard letters” to Amazon, documenting issues inspectors identified at the warehouse, including workers’ exposure to “a high risk of serious musculoskeletal disorders” from Amazon’s work procedures, concerns about workers laboring in excessive heat, as well as under-staffing and other deficiencies with Amazon’s onsite first aid clinic, “AmCare.”
Unsafe working conditions aren’t unique to the Deltona facility, located about 30 miles northeast of Orlando. An investigation by a U.S. Senate committee last year found that Amazon warehouses “recorded over 30 percent more injuries than the warehousing industry average in 2023.” Amazon workers were also nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers in other warehouses, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee found.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who chairs the Senate HELP Committee, said in a statement. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business. That cannot continue.”
Sometime after initiating contact with OSHA, Mundorff reportedly suffered a shoulder injury that placed him on “light-work” duty. His job during this period involved assessing warehouse equipment and taking note of defective carts that workers used to transport merchandise around the facility.
Mundorff testified, however, that he eventually got frustrated that carts he was tagging as defective continued to remain in rotation, putting his coworkers’ safety at risk.
So, he began using a dry-erase marker to, in addition to tagging carts, sign them off with phrases such as “OSHA,” “Teamsters,” and “ALU [Amazon Labor Union” — a spiteful move he was later disciplined by management over by way of a “final warning.”
Although Amazon management claimed Mundorff’s writings were “graffiti,” and therefore justified discipline, NLRB judge Ross found that writing the phrases, along with other relevant information — such as the cart location — “was consistent with the facility’s practice.”
Furthermore, Ross noted that management only began its investigation into Mundorff’s “conduct” after he’d contacted OSHA to share concerns about unsafe working conditions.
Regarding the “graffiti,” Ross noted that Mundorff was issued a final warning by management solely on the ground that the inscriptions “did not serve a legitimate business purpose.” Amazon general manager Stephen Waller also admitted during testimony that he was “fully aware” of Mundorff’s pro-union position.
In his final ruling, Ross ordered that Amazon remove the disciplinary action from Mundorff’s record and to inform workers of their right under federal law to discuss wages, working conditions, and the like with coworkers, and to complain about such things to supervisors and managers.
The judge found that Amazon had also unlawfully restricted workers’ communications on Amazon’s internal communications platform, MyVoice.
Although no Amazon workers in Florida have yet publicly launched a formal effort to unionize — as far as I know — there has been a concerted effort by warehouse workers and Amazon delivery drivers to unionize elsewhere.
Workers at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center up in Staten Island, New York famously became the first group of Amazon workers in the U.S. to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union, a grassroots union launched by workers at the facility, in 2022.
The ALU has since affiliated with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters, and has quickly gotten to work organizing more of Amazon’s direct employees and delivery drivers employed by Amazon contractors, known as delivery service partners.
But the Teamsters aren’t the only union workers are looking to. In North Carolina, for instance, more than 4,000 Amazon workers at a 700,000 square foot warehouse in Garner are organizing as the independent Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE), and are scheduled to have their own union election next week. According to the Guardian, the organizing drive has been at least two years in the making.
Two worker organizers—union leader Mary Hill and Italo Medelius—joined the Alabama-based radio show, The Valley Labor Report, last month to outline the importance of their union drive — a notable feat in a state that has the lowest union density (percentage of workers represented by a union) in the country.
“I think the biggest thing, really … is this idea of dignity,” said Medelius. “I think a lot of us that work at Amazon — and it doesn’t have to be just in the South, it can be anywhere — they treat us like robots.”
Amazon has fought to keep unions out of their warehouses, and outside of their contracted delivery driver workforce, to the tune of millions of dollars — money that, ostensibly, could have been used to address some of workers’ concerns over wages, benefits, and unsafe working conditions.
The e-commerce behemoth, founded by billionaire and Trump ally Jeff Bezos, spent more than $14 million on union avoidance services in 2022 alone, and upwards of $3 million in 2023.
As I’ve reported for Orlando Weekly, several of these union avoidance consultants — or “union busters” — have come from Florida, including a former Teamsters official who was kicked out of his union under dubious circumstances, and reportedly, a former member of the Greater Orlando Chamber of Commerce who was spotted on-the-ground during an organizing campaign in Bessemer, Alabama in 2021.
Amazon is also involved in a lawsuit that aims to dismantle or otherwise kneecap the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act, fields unfair labor practice complaints, and conducts union elections. The company, echoing arguments by employers like Trader Joe’s, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Starbucks, has claimed the NLRB is unconstitutional.
Amazon, like Starbucks and SpaceX, has faced numerous complaints of breaking federal labor law — allegations they deny. “These companies are trying to get the [NLRA] overruled,” Seth Goldstein, a labor lawyer who has represented Trader Joe’s and Amazon workers, told The Washington Post. “And labor better wake up, because it’s coming.”