Amazon and Trump's NLRB: So Happy Together!

Last edited Tue Apr 21, 2026, 08:28 PM - Edit history (1)

Today on TAP: Trump’s appointee as the Board’s general counsel stops an NLRB trial likely to find the company guilty.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/21/amazon-trumps-nlrb-so-happy-together/


An Amazon Prime driver makes a delivery outside an apartment building in Pittsburgh, March 10, 2025. Credit: Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo

It’s been an instructive couple of weeks for those of us who hunger for news of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, his trillion-dollar toy. In California, news came of an antitrust lawsuit filed by the state against the company that alleges Amazon pressured Levi’s and Hanes to get the entire pants industry to raise its prices on Amazon’s platform. Here in Washington, Amazon’s pledge to build a “second headquarters” across the Potomac in Crystal City, for which Virginia is subsidizing the company with a cool $750 million, continues to fall behind its targets. Having pledged to create 25,000 new jobs in its D.C.-adjacent HQ by 2038, Amazon failed to meet the agreed-upon schedule of creating 1,600 such jobs last year, with the number of its D.C.-adjacent employees actually falling by 73 instead. By now, that schedule had Amazon reaching 46 percent of its 25,000 newbies last year; instead, it’s created a bare 29 percent.

Why Amazon ever needed a three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollars subsidy for its D.C. HQ remains a mystery, particularly since Jeff Bezos personally has enough money to buy all of Northern Virginia. He clearly has enough money to buy Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, though I’m not alleging that he did. By virtue of Trump’s appointment of an Amazon-friendly general counsel, any such purchase would be superfluous.

Until earlier this month, Board attorneys were prosecuting (to all appearances, successfully) Amazon for sundering its contract with one of the many hundreds of companies that make Amazon’s last-mile deliveries, in Amazon trucks whose drivers wear Amazon uniforms and guide themselves in every particular by Amazon’s rule book. The NLRB had charged Amazon under the joint-employer rule established by the Trump-dominated NLRB during his first term as president, which determined that when a company actually controls the independent contractors that fulfill the company’s work, that company—in this case, Amazon—is to be considered a joint employer and, in this case, legally liable for laying off the delivery company’s drivers because they had voted to join the Teamsters.

Last September, I sat in an NLRB hearing room in Los Angeles where Board attorneys were prosecuting Amazon for breaking its contract with Battle-Tested Strategies, a company based in the L.A. exurb of Palmdale, founded and run by Air Force veteran Johnathon Ervin. When the company’s 84 drivers voted to join the Teamsters, Ervin bargained a contract with them that raised their wages. With that, Amazon severed its contract with the company, lest it be found to be a joint employer that thereby had a contract with, horror of horrors, a union. Ervin was on the stand the day I was there, answering questions about Amazon’s status as controlling employer in all but name. As I then wrote in the Prospect, the NLRB attorney.........................

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