On Monday, July 10, a group of Amazon workers at JFK8, the company’s largest warehouse in Staten Island, filed a complaint in federal court. In April 2022, JFK8’s workers became the first at any Amazon facility in the United States to win a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election, voting to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). The complaint states that the ALU and current ALU president Chris Smalls “refuse to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.” They are asking a federal judge to schedule an election for ALU top’s officers by August 30, to be overseen by a neutral monitor.

The ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, the group behind the filing, consists of some forty active organizers at JFK8 and includes several leaders from the ALU’s early days: former ALU treasurer Connor Spence, former ALU organizing director Brett Daniels, and Brima Sylla, a key organizer in the lead-up to the NLRB election. The group began organizing in December 2022, after a contentious ALU meeting during which Smalls told members, “You got a problem with me? Deuces.”

In a statement published on Tuesday, the caucus notes that when workers first began organizing at JFK8, they chose to form an independent union — an arduous task that required them to organize in the eight-thousand-person warehouse without the resources they would have received had they worked with an established union — because “it offered rank-and-file workers a level of autonomy and control that was vital in engaging them through a vicious fight against one of the most anti-union companies in the world: Amazon.”