Online retail giant Amazon (AMZN) has long had its share of issues with unions trying to step in and organize workers to collectively bargain with the company. And now, another such issue is about to rise in North Carolina, where, as a CNBC report noted, workers will vote in February on whether or not to go union. Investors largely shrugged this off, and shares were up fractionally in Wednesday afternoon’s trading.
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The Garner, North Carolina site will be casting union ballots starting February 10, and running all the way to February 15. Amazon was taking all this in stride, as representative Eileen Hards noted in a statement to CNBC: “We’ve always said that we want our employees to have their voices heard, and we hope and expect this process allows for that. We believe our employees favor opportunities to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team.”
The site, also known as RDU1, will be the second Amazon location to go union, should the vote pass. The first was the New York City warehouse, who joined the Amazon Labor Union in 2022 before ultimately voting to affiliate with the Teamsters. Meanwhile, several other attempts to establish unions have either been rejected by employees or are held up in court battles that CNBC notes are still ongoing.
So What is A “Petard” Again?
In what may be the single most ironic twist of the last, well, good long time anyway, Jeff Bezos’ newspaper, the Washington Post, rolled out an expose of conditions at Amazon, and the report was anything but complimentary. A Daily Beast report offered up a look at said report, and one particular item stood out: “Mandatory Extra Time,” a development that automatically expanded some Amazon employees’ schedules from four 10 hour shifts a week to five 11 hour shifts a week.
This stood in sharp, and unexpected, contrast to remarks from Amazon reps, who made it clear that employees cannot be asked to work over 60 hours in a week, 12 hours in one day, or six days consecutively. It also did not help that the report came out a few months after a Senate report in July that featured an injury rate that was “double the industry average” at Amazon. As we also recently noted, that also comes along with word from an Ohio warehouse that called for workers to remember to focus on basic hygiene.
Is Amazon a Good Long-Term Investment?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 46 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 46.87% rally in its share price over the past year, the average AMZN price target of $249.62 per share implies 12.13% upside potential.
