North Carolina Amazon Workers Vote Against Unionizing After Aggressive Union-Busting

Mei W.

Amazon workers at the RDU1 warehouse in Garner, North Carolina voted February 14 against unionizing under Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE). Around 70% of the 4,700 workers at the warehouse participated in the union election, seeking endorsement for the union through the National Labor Relations Board, with 2,447 ballots against and 829 ballots in support.

CAUSE was founded by workers in January 2022 around the demands of a $30 starting hourly wage, increased paid sick leave, longer lunch breaks, and safer working conditions. Currently, the starting wage at RDU1 is $18.50 per hour, workers get one paid 30-minute lunch break each shift which are 10.5 hours on average, and managers demand hourly quotas of around 180 packed boxes per worker.

According to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Amazon workers get injured at a rate 70% higher than workers at non-Amazon warehouses, most of which are repetitive stress injuries. According to Wake County data, since the warehouse opened in August 2020, there had been 221 ambulance transports out of the warehouse just by the end of 2022, mainly due to workers fainting or losing consciousness from heat.

Last December, CAUSE filed for union election after collecting union authorization cards from 42% of workers. Amazon had since flooded the warehouse with anti-union materials and managers specializing in union-busting. According to workers on social media, managers frequently coerced Hispanic workers to attend anti-union meetings, where managers said that Black workers want a union because they are lazy, and a video on social media showed a manager slandering the union effort, telling workers, “I’ve heard CAUSE telling people that if you vote no, you can be deported.”

In December, Amazon fired several workers and police arrested two volunteers and a former worker while they were collecting union authorization cards. On February 9, a day before the start of the union election, an Amazon Labor Union organizer from the Staten Island warehouse was arrested while taking a call on a public sidewalk outside RDU1. According to CAUSE, managers also kicked out three workers who were operating the livestream of the results during the ballot count.

At the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, the Teamsters-led union there continues to turn to the NLRB to deal with the e-commerce monopoly’s interference in union elections. Last November, the board ordered a third election at the Bessemer warehouse, ruling that the second one in 2022 had been interfered with by Amazon, which the company appealed. While workers at the Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize in 2022, Amazon has yet to sit at the table with them despite the NLRB ruling the company’s refusal to bargain unlawful.

Recently, Trump’s gutting of the NLRB has left it without a quorum to issue national decisions, stalling the Bessemer election appeals as well as the first unionization effort at a Whole Foods grocery store, owned by Amazon. Relying mainly on the government bureaucracy to protect workers’ rights to organize has dragged out and deadlocked these unionization processes.

image: Rally in support of unionization across from the Garner Amazon facility on February 8, Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline

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