National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Crystal Carey proposed a settlement on Sunday that would unwind a major case against the e-commerce behemoth Amazon—a company that Carey represented when she worked in the private sector for corporate clients.
Carey, whom President Donald Trump nominated after firing the Biden-era NLRB general counsel last year, sent her proposed settlement terms to the judge overseeing the labor agency’s case against Amazon, which originated in the final year of the Biden administration. According to Bloomberg, Carey proposed that Amazon provide two weeks’ worth of pay to dozens of drivers who were previously employed by Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS), formerly one of Amazon’s delivery service partners (DSPs).
Amazon, in turn, would not be required to admit to unfair labor practices or be “found liable as a joint employer.” The Biden-era NLRB argued that Amazon was a joint employer of the BTS delivery drivers and thus required to recognize and collectively bargain with their union—something Amazon has refused to do.
Bloomberg noted that, if decided against Amazon, the case Carey wants to settle “could have led for the first time to an agency judge, the NLRB members in Washington, and, eventually, federal appeals court judges ruling that Amazon was the joint employer of drivers for one of its delivery service partners.”
“Amazon contracts with thousands of such partners to manage hundreds of thousands of delivery workers,” Bloomberg observed.
Before Trump nominated her to replace labor champion Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel of the NLRB, Carey was a partner at Morgan Lewis, one of the biggest management-side law firms in the country. The Economic Policy Institute noted following Carey’s Senate confirmation last year that Morgan Lewis “represents corporations known for violating workers’ rights, including Amazon, SpaceX, Apple, and Tesla.”
“Morgan Lewis is also pursuing the legal challenge that the NLRB is unconstitutional, despite several former NLRB members being employed at the firm,” EPI noted. (Amazon has also argued in court that the labor board is unconstitutional.)
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and the company’s founder, mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, attended the inauguration ceremony alongside other big-name tech executives.
Despite her ties to Amazon via her tenure at Morgan Lewis, Carey argued that she was not required to recuse herself from the case she’s working to settle. According to Bloomberg, Carey said in an interview that “because a year had passed since she herself represented Amazon and because Morgan Lewis wasn’t representing the company in the [ongoing joint employer] case, she didn’t need to recuse herself.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.