NC Newsline - Voting opened at 4 a.m. Monday morning in an election that will determine whether workers in Garner form the first Amazon warehouse union in the South after nearly three years of organizing.
Workers will have until Saturday Feb. 15 at noon to cast either a “Yes” vote in favor or a “No” vote against the formation of a union that would represent roughly 4,300 workers at Garner’s RDU1 Amazon fulfillment center, encompassing full-time, part-time, flex, and seasonal warehouse associates. This vote comes after years of campaigning by the Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, a movement founded by warehouse workers Rev. Ryan Brown and “Ma” Mary Hill in 2022.
If more than 50% of voters cast “Yes” ballots, the workers will form a union with the right to bargain for a contract with the shipping giant. Priorities stated by CAUSE include higher wages ($30 an hour for Tier 1 and Tier 2 warehouse associates), scheduling consistency, more paid time off, a one-hour paid lunch, accommodations for injured or disabled workers, and equal treatment of workers across sex, race, and national origin.
Eileen Hards, a spokesperson for Amazon, said the company “already offers what many unions are requesting,” including “competitive pay” and benefits such as health care, pre-paid college tuition, and a 401k retirement plan with a company match.
“We’ve always said that we want our employees to have their voices heard, and we hope and expect this process allows for that. We believe our employees favor opportunities to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team,” Hards said.
Should the CAUSE vote succeed, the Garner facility would become just the second unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S., after the JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island formed the Amazon Labor Union in 2022. Labor activist Christian Smalls, who led that effort, joined the organizers hoping to follow his example at a Garner rally that drew more than 100 Saturday.
“You can’t tell me that this company can’t be unionized, because it’s already unionized,” Smalls said to cheers. “Win, lose, or draw next week, you guys already got y’all’s union. This union ain’t going nowhere, right?”
‘An existential threat’
At an information session held in a Duke University classroom on Thursday Feb. 6, Brown said he believes Amazon is “an existential threat to every single person that’s in this room.”
“We feel that this empire has grown so large that it has crept into every nook and industry,” Brown told the room full of students. “There was a lot of human suffering that takes place at Amazon.”
Brown said he was inspired to organize the unionization movement because of his experiences working at the warehouse during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said that despite his wife being at severe risk for COVID-19 due to her severe asthma, he was asked to work in an area of the warehouse that workers had identified as a “COVID hotspot.” According to Brown, his supervisor told him he had no choice — and when Brown reported this to the general manager, he was told that nothing could be done about it.
“My soul was so troubled,” Brown said. “And I prayed. And the one word that I received was ‘organize.’”
While he had no experience with labor activism, Brown had the experience of organizing a church in Waco, North Carolina — “a town that has more cows than people,” he said — growing its congregation from just 25 to more than four times that number before he left. He joined with Hill — known to the organizers as “Ma Mary,” who coined the group’s name — to launch CAUSE in January 2022, and in the years that followed, they set about the work of building a union.
According to Orin Starn, an anthropology professor at Duke who worked at the RDU1 warehouse as part of his research, workers face daunting quotas and are given little rest at the facility. He said he was told he must pack 180 boxes each hour — a pace of three per minute — for a shift that lasts 10-and-a-half hours on average, with just two thirty-minute breaks, one of them unpaid. During “peak season” — the period around the holidays — that increases to 11-and-a-half hours, for 60 hours a week.
Trekking across the facility — a four-story complex with more than 2 million square feet — is an arduous task in itself. Italo Medelius, who works at the warehouse shipping dock, said when workers tracked their movement using Apple Fitness, they found they’d walked nearly 25 miles in a single workday.
For their work, associates receive wages starting at $18.50 an hour up to a cap of $23.80. According to Amazon spokesperson Marc Heintzman, the company increases hourly wages annually. That initial wage is more than double North Carolina’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, but more than $5 less than the living wage for a single adult in Wake County, according to North Carolina Budget & Tax Center. For an adult supporting a spouse and child, a living wage would need to be $41.40 or more — nearly 74% higher than where associate pay caps.
Previously, the starting wage at RDU1 was $16 an hour before Amazon rolled out a $1.50 raise in September as the union undertook its card authorization campaign. “A whole $1.50,” Hill said. “That’s a slap in the face.”
‘David vs. Goliath’
In January, CAUSE organizers learned the card campaign was a success — more than 30% of workers signed union cards, setting the stage for the election in February. What has followed is a campaign effort that union organizers have likened to the Biblical contest between David and Goliath.
Starn said the workers face an election system that is “systematically unfair for unions” — one that requires workers to cast their ballots in the warehouse itself, allowing Amazon to control the flow of information that workers receive immediately before voting. “This election is a home game for Amazon,” Starn said.
According to Medelius, televisions in the break room that previously played movies and shows are now displaying “anti-union propaganda” — informational videos from Amazon making the case that a union is not in their best interests. The company has also invited speakers to make that argument to workers at warehouse-wide meetings and brought in Spanish-speaking company representatives to specifically lobby workers for whom Spanish is their first or only language.
Hards, the Amazon spokesperson, wrote in an emailed statement that “meetings like this are held by many companies and have been legal for over 70 years.”
“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union,” she wrote. “We believe that both decisions should be equally protected which is why we talk openly, candidly and respectfully about these topics, actively sharing facts with employees so they can use that information to make an informed decision.”
Organizers alleged that the company has repeatedly erected obstacles to the “Yes” campaign, including increased security measures around the facility in response to the union drive and retaliatory terminations of workers affiliated with CAUSE. Brown, the movement’s president and co-founder, was himself terminated in the middle of the union card campaign in December — according to the company, he was “terminated for repeated misconduct,” including “a history of using derogatory and racist language.”
According to the Raleigh News & Observer, the company accused Brown of calling a manager an “Uncle Tom.” Throughout the union drive, organizers have likened Amazon’s role in their lives to slavery, calling it the “new plantation” and characterizing management as “overseers.”
Starn was terminated in January for allegedly consuming alcohol in the warehouse parking lot, according the News & Observer — which he described as a “celebratory toast” at the end of the workday, the newspaper reported.
Union organizers said the company is policing workers affiliated with the union for violations that would not otherwise be enforced. “The one third rail is unionizing — that will get you fired in a flash,” Starn said. He noted that the parking area “smells like a dispensary” because despite Amazon’s strict written drug policy, marijuana consumption on the premises is rarely punished.
With some CAUSE activists now being former workers or non-workers otherwise involved in labor organizing, the company has sought to have those not currently employed who campaign on the property charged with trespassing. On Dec. 6, three volunteers who set up a table to distribute food and collect union cards were arrested, according to Indy Week.
After CAUSE set up a tent on public property outside the premises, the warehouse erected a mile-long barricade to block physical access except for designated entry points marked by security booths. Medelius said additional metal detectors have also been erected inside the warehouse and the windows of the break room have been blacked out — tactics he said are aimed at “instilling fear into people.” During the pro-union rally across the road Saturday, at least four Garner Police vehicles patrolled the parking area, in addition to private security cars.
Hards, the Amazon spokesperson, said measures like the barrier are a response to real security concerns held by workers.
“The safety of our team continues to be our top priority,” Hards wrote in an emailed statement. “Over the past few weeks, we’ve had several incidents where individuals have trespassed and refused to leave our property, which is why we’ve added additional security measures to the site.”
‘A lifetime fight’
Speaking to the crowd of more than 100 across from the warehouse Saturday, Smalls, the founder of New York’s Amazon Labor Union, told workers that the fight was only just beginning regardless of this week’s outcome.
“Next week, whatever the results are, it doesn’t even matter. Because the only way we’re going to get Amazon to listen to us is we’re gonna have to go on strike,” Smalls said. “This is just the beginning, because Staten Island won three years ago, and guess what, when y’all win next week, y’all are going to be in the same boat as we are.”
Smalls, who said he has been “dealing with this company for over a decade” and opened up three warehouses in his time at Amazon, was himself fired after leading a walkout in 2020, two years before the Staten Island union campaign ultimately realized success. After that effort prevailed with 55% of workers in favor, Amazon sought to contest the results, alleging that workers had been coerced into voting in favor of the union — though the National Labor Relations Board denied its appeal, a decision that was itself paused by the federal courts.
In November, Amazon argued that the NLRB is itself unconstitutional — a position that comes at a turbulent time for labor rights in the U.S. After back-to-back years in which the United Auto Workers union has grown its influence, achieving a successful strike against the “Big Three” automakers and expanding its ranks into new facilities, President Donald Trump took office offering a mixed outlook for organized labor.
On one hand, Trump invited Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention and named Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a backer of the pro-union PRO Act, as his nominee for Labor Secretary. On the other, one of his chief advisers is Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who has been a vocal critic of unions and whose company, SpaceX, joined Amazon to challenge the NLRB’s constitutionality. Since returning to office, Trump has terminated the general counsel and chair of the NLRB, both of whom were appointed by President Joe Biden.
Brown said he saw himself in Smalls’ work and was inspired by him in his fight for better labor conditions at Amazon. “He taught us how to take down Goliath,” Brown said Saturday. “He’s been misunderstood, and some of the same experiences that he’s had, I’ve had.”
Smalls said he had received messages of “solidarity with RDU1” from Amazon workers in Canada, India, and France. The world, he said, is watching what happens at the Garner warehouse. As evidenced by speakers from union movements all across the South — including a Kentucky group seeking to follow in RDU1’s footsteps — so too are workers across the U.S.
“Amazon will never ever, ever be able to take away what y’all have built, and this is once again, a lifetime fight,” Smalls said. “There’s no cavalry coming for y’all.”
To cheers, Hill shouted, “We’re the cavalry!”
This report has been updated with corrected information provided after publication by Amazon regarding the hourly wages paid to workers.
