This week, the 4,700 Amazon workers who work at the sprawling RDU1 Fulfillment Center in Garner, North Carolina, will decide whether to unionize. For weeks, CAUSE members have had a tent set up outside of the warehouse to talk to workers, hand out food, and prepare for their election.
Though several other warehouses and 20 contracted Amazon driver companies (Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs) are technically unionized via a 2023 NLRB ruling called Cemex, only one warehouse has won a union through election so far — JFK8, the Fulfillment Center on Staten Island, in 2022. RDU1 would be the second.
An Independent Union Effort
Like the JFK8 Amazon Labor Union in its beginnings (and until June 2024, when they affiliated with the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters union), the workers at RDU1 are running an independent union campaign.
Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment (CAUSE), like ALU, arose out of the havoc of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Amazon warehouses, especially massive ones like RDU1 and JFK8, became hotspots for the virus to spread. Workers who kept the economy running and provided life-saving services during COVID were widely recognized as essential. But for these workers, this recognition created a contradiction with the conditions of their work — Amazon workers saw their co-workers die as the company continued to pay them poverty wages and failed to protect their health and safety.
The astounding victory of ALU on Staten Island rippled through the world, inspiring new workers to mobilize their coworkers and try to take on corporate giants. As one of the founders of CAUSE, Reverend Ryan Brown, said, “the inspiration from Smalls and ALU was that you can actually do it. You can actually beat these guys. You can actually win.”
Organizing Amazon in the South
In 2024, North Carolina had the lowest union density in the country — only 2.4% of all workers in the state are unionized. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, meaning that employees of unionized workplaces are not required to join the union or pay agency fees if they choose not to join. North Carolina is also one of the few states in which public sector unions are illegal, further contributing to low union rates. Because of low union density, many workers are not familiar with unions and there is significant distrust of organized labor. This makes North Carolina an especially difficult state in which to organize. CAUSE’s success could inspire Amazon worker organizing across the South, like the UAW win did at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee last April.
Low union rates and high levels of precarity, which make it difficult to organize, is characteristic of states across the South, where the processes of class exploitation and racial oppression have been historically interwoven since the time of slavery. As such, confrontations with capitalism in the South bear a special significance in their challenge to the racialized nature of U.S. capitalism, and should be understood in the context of the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. In 2021, for example, Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama unsuccessfully ran a union campaign sparked by the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020.
The workers at RDU1 are also explicitly connecting their union campaign to the legacy of Black struggle in the South. “I grew up in the Jim Crow South,” said CAUSE co-founder Mary Hill. “I know what it’s like to be treated and looked at like you’re dirt.” Amazon workers across the country often compare their conditions to slavery: a majority of Amazon’s workforce is people of color, and the work is physically greuling, under-paid, and often accompanied by blatant disrespect and dehumanizing treatment from management. For workers from North Carolina, these comparisons are profound.
The workers at RDU1 are not only demanding $30/hour pay, more paid time off, and an hour-long break, but also dignity and respect on the job. Workers have reported racism, discrimination, racialized disrespect, a lack of language translation, and even being called slurs by management. In 2020, Amazon told Reverend Brown he had no choice but to work in a high-risk COVID hotspot, to which he said: “only a slave doesn’t have a choice.”
Amazon’s Union-Busting Playbook
Amazon is deploying all of its union-busting tricks to defeat the RDU1 union. New managers, signs, and messaging on TVs around the warehouse regurgitate anti-union messaging. New technology that was installed in and around the building makes workers feel watched, and workers are flooded with anti-union messaging on the app that workers use to access their pay and schedule. Further, management is holding illegal captive audience meetings and trying to divide workers by race, an age-old corporate tactic and part of the legacy of Jim Crow. RDU1 management is appealing to Latino workers, and spreading lies to them about the union, their immigration status, and Black workers in an attempt to create discord within the union and turn Latino workers against Black workers. This is a microcosmic example of how capitalists use racism to protect their own corporate interests, a well-worn tool in the capitalist toolbox to prevent solidarity on class lines.
Amazon has already fired several union organizers in illegal retaliation for organizing, including union president Reverend Brown, and targeted organizers who were distributing food to workers.
A contingent of ALU-IBT Local 1 union members flew to North Carolina to support the RDU1 workers the weekend before the vote — and in response, Amazon flew down union-busters from Staten Island to target and harass these workers, using local police and the arrest of Sultana Hossain, an ALU union leader, to try to intimidate workers.
On the national level, the alliance between Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump is becoming more pronounced. Trump recently fired two NLRB members, leaving the Board with only two members and rendering it useless. Though the NLRB was an agency always designed to constrain labor’s power, its dismantling means that workers have lost even basic legal protections. Directly after Trump’s NLRB ouster, Amazon-owned Whole Foods asked the Board to overturn the union victory at a shop in Philadelphia. The company is using Trump’s degradation of the Board as justification for the union win being thrown out: since the Board doesn’t have the quorum to evaluate labor disputes now, they argue, they couldn’t possibly validate the vote of workers at Whole Foods to have a union. If CAUSE wins its election at RDU1, Amazon is sure to contest the win in a similar manner.
Nonetheless, workers should think beyond the confines of labor law in order to win their demands. It is clearer now than ever that only the militant unity of the workers, through taking collective action on the shop floor and building the power of the strike, can affect Amazon’s operations enough to win recognition and the fruits of worker power.
The historic vote began on Monday, February 10, and will run until Saturday, February 15.