By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Amazon.com sued the New York State Public Employment Relations Board on Monday to block it from enforcing a new law that the online retailer considers an attempt to illegally regulate private sector labor relations.
In a complaint filed in Brooklyn federal court, Amazon accused New York of engineering an “unconstitutional power grab” by letting the regulator known as PERB usurp the National Labor Relations Board’s primary authority to address union organizing, collective bargaining and workplace disputes.
The New York law known as Senate Bill 8034A was signed on September 5 by Governor Kathy Hochul. She said it was needed to protect workers because of the lack of a quorum at the NLRB, where hundreds of cases have backed up since Republican President Donald Trump fired Democratic member Gwynne Wilcox in January.
Amazon said PERB has already taken advantage of the law, by filing a charge over the August 9 firing of Brima Sylla, an employee at its JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island and local union vice president, though the NLRB had begun its own review.
The state law “flips U.S. labor law on its head: it presumes PERB jurisdiction over every private-sector employer until the NLRB gets a court to hold otherwise,” Amazon said. “New York has created the collision of state and federal authority Congress sought to avoid.”
PERB did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who enforces state laws, did not immediately respond to a similar request.
Amazon had no immediate comment. The Seattle-based company had 1.56 million full- and part-time employees at year end.
Last month, NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cowen said federal law likely preempted measures that several states were considering because of the agency’s lack of a quorum and case backlog. He also said regional NLRB offices were still processing cases.
On September 12, the NLRB sued New York in the Albany federal court to block enforcement of the state law.
The case is Amazon.com Services LLC v New York State Public Employment Relations Board, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 25-05311.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Jamie Freed)
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