In a courtroom far from the warehouse floors where Amazon’s labor battles usually unfold, a federal judge in Brooklyn has tossed a temporary blockade in front of New York’s newest labor law experiment—halting it just as it was gearing up to run.
The law, crafted to let the state’s Public Employment Relations Board step into private-sector disputes while the federal labor body sat hamstrung by a membership shortfall, has been stopped in its tracks. The judge’s reasoning: federal labor law still calls the shots, even when the federal referees are short-staffed.
The ruling leans heavily on an old Supreme Court compass from 1959, one that points clearly toward federal supremacy. Congress, the judge noted, knew the national labor board might go understaffed at times—and designed the system to weather those dry spells without states stepping in to fill the vacuum.
Without the injunction, the court warned, Amazon could be dragged into a confusing tangle of clashing decisions from state and federal labor bodies. That risk alone was enough to justify freezing the New York law in place while the larger legal battle continues.
The dispute traces back to the firing of Brima Sylla, a union vice president at Amazon’s lone unionized U.S. warehouse in Staten Island. New York’s labor board had planned to hear the case, jumping ahead of a federal system still limping through a mountain of unresolved union disputes. Dozens of contested union elections are stuck in that same federal bottleneck, waiting for the national board to regain a full roster.
Meanwhile, appointments to restore that quorum are moving through Washington, setting the stage for a revived federal labor apparatus with a Republican majority.
For now, New York’s attempt to plug the federal gap is on pause. And Amazon—never shy about testing the edges of labor law—walks away with an early win, even as the deeper fight over who gets to referee its labor battles is only beginning.
