The Employees at the new Staten Island fulfillment center are launching an campaign, they have announced their intention to unionize. The plan is to go through a partnership with the retail, wholesale and department store union, the employees said they are aiming to address the numerous issues which include safety concerns, lengthy unpaid security checks and unreasonable hourly quotes and insufficient breaks.

The unionization effort comes in the wake of Amazon’s recent HQ2 announcement, which will see it invest $2.5 billion in a major new campus in Queens, New York, over the next 15 years. Reports that the company received more than $2 billion in tax breaks have generated concern from local communities and lawmakers. Sentiment the union hopes to you use to its advantage.

In a recent leak of a so called Anti- Union training video from the company which is used to train employees at fulfillment centers encourages managers to look out for signs of organizing activities such as distributing petitions and fliers or showing an

“unusual interest in policies, benefits, employee lists, or other company information.”

The video draws the line at managers doing anything illegal, it encourages them to express personal opinions against unions. The emergence of this training video drew harsh criticism from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who sent a letter to Amazon saying that raising the minimum wage of its employees to $15 an hour doesn’t, “give you [Amazon] a free pass to engage in potentially illegal anti-union behavior.” Back in October, Amazon raised the minimum wage of all its 250,000 US workers to $15 an hour.

president Stuart Appelbaum said that in light of the tax incentives attached to the Queens campus, these alleged “union-busting activities” need to stop.

Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center just opened its doors this fall, unions in the US retail space are still relatively uncommon with just 5 percent of retail employees holding membership.