Amazon is ‘joint employer’ of some contracted delivery drivers, labor group says
A group of Amazon delivery drivers hold a labor strike at the DAX7 Amazon Sortation Center in South Gate. The police became involved due to the hold up of Amazon vehicles.
Zoe Cranfill | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
Amazon should be considered a “joint employer” of some of its contracted delivery drivers, a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board said Wednesday.
The NLRB was reviewing two unfair labor practice charges filed in January, concerning Amazon’s treatment of some drivers at an Atlanta warehouse, known as DAT6. While Amazon has long hired third-party drivers to handle its swelling number of deliveries, the NLRB’s regional director found that Amazon jointly employed drivers at the site who worked for a contractor called MJB Logistics.
Amazon has fought to avoid being designated as a joint employer of its sprawling network of contracted delivery companies. Lawmakers and labor groups, including the Teamsters union, have disputed the company’s characterization, saying drivers wear Amazon-branded uniforms, drive Amazon-branded vans and have their schedules and performance expectations set by the company.
The NLRB’s determination could compel Amazon to bargain with employees seeking to unionize. The announcement comes after an NLRB official made a similar ruling last month, finding that Amazon is a joint employer of some subcontracted drivers at its facility in Palmdale, California.
Over the past year, the Teamsters has stepped up its efforts to organize Amazon delivery and warehouse workers. The union launched an Amazon division in 2021 to support and fund workers at the company in their organizing efforts. Since then, it’s led a number of strikes at Amazon delivery facilities, while a labor group at an Amazon warehouse on New York’s Staten Island opted to affiliate with the Teamsters in June.
In April 2023, drivers who worked for Battle Tested Strategies said their contract was canceled by Amazon after they voted to unionize with the Teamsters. Amazon denied the claim, saying it ended the contract prior to the union push.
In its determination Wednesday, the NLRB also found merit to charges that Amazon threatened drivers in Atlanta with closing their site if they unionized, illegally made coercive statements and gave the impression of surveillance at the facility.
The NLRB’s determinations in Atlanta and Palmdale aren’t board decisions, Kayla Blado, a spokesperson for the group, said in an email. Rather, they’re the first step in the agency’s general counsel litigating the allegations laid out in an unfair labor practice charge. If the parties don’t settle, a hearing will be scheduled with an NLRB judge. Either party can appeal that judge’s decision to the NLRB board, and it can be further appealed in federal court.
Amazon declined to comment.
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is on the launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites, which are expected to eventually rival Elon Musk’s Starlink system, at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 9, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
Amazon on Monday launched the first batch of its Kuiper internet satellites into space after an earlier attempt was scrubbed due to inclement weather.
A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites lifted off from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida shortly after 7 p.m. eastern, according to a livestream.
“We had a nice smooth countdown, beautiful weather, beautiful liftoff, and Atlas V is on its way to orbit to take those 27 Kuiper satellites, put them on their way and really start this new era in internet connectivity,” Caleb Weiss, a systems engineer at ULA, said on the livestream following the launch.
The satellites are expected to separate from the rocket roughly 280 miles above Earth’s surface, at which point Amazon will look to confirm the satellites can independently maneuver and communicate with its employees on the ground.
Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit, called Project Kuiper. The service will compete directly with Elon Musk’s Starlink, which currently dominates the market and has 8,000 satellites in orbit.
The first Kuiper mission kicks off what will need to become a steady cadence of launches in order for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. The agency expects the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.
Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy dozens of satellites at a time. In addition to ULA, its launch partners include Musk’s SpaceX (parent company of Starlink), European company Arianespace and Jeff Bezos’ space exploration startup Blue Origin.
Amazon is spending as much as $10 billion to build the Kuiper network. It hopes to begin commercial service for consumers, enterprises and government later this year.
In his shareholder letter earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Kuiper will require upfront investment at first, but eventually the company expects it to be “a meaningful operating income and ROIC business for us.” ROIC stands for return on invested capital.
Investors will be listening for any commentary around further capex spend on Kuiper when Amazon reports first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.
Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at a number of Community Health Systems hospitals, causing the facilities to temporarily return to paper-based patient records.
CHS told CNBC that the outage involving Oracle Health, the company’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affected “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” Trade publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported that 45 hospitals were hit.
The outage began on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database, a CHS spokesperson said in a statement. The outage was resolved on Monday, and was not related to a cyberattack or other security incident.
CHS is based in Tennessee and includes 72 hospitals in 14 states, according to the medical system’s website.
“Despite this being a major outage, our hospitals were able to maintain services with no material impact,” the spokesperson said. “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high-quality, safe care for patients.”
Oracle stock this year
Oracle didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses. It’s crucial software within the U.S. health-care system, and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care. Oracle acquired EHR vendor Cerner in 2022 for $28.3 billion, becoming the second-biggest player in the market, behind Epic Systems.
Now that Oracle’s systems are back online, CHS said that the impacted hospitals are working to “re-establish full functionality and return to normal operations and procedures.”
Oracle’s CHS error comes weeks after the company’s federal electronic health record experienced a nationwide outage. Oracle has struggled with a thorny, years-long EHR rollout with the Department of Veterans Affairs, marred by patient safety concerns. The agency launched a strategic review of Cerner in 2021, before Oracle’s acquisition, and it temporarily paused deployment of the software in 2023.
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