Interview with Union Co-Founder Mary Hill

“We are not robots. We deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. And we deserve to be paid a living wage.”

— Mary Hill, co-founder and vice president of Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (C.A.U.S.E.)

By Mark Satinoff

Workers at Amazon’s massive RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, have taken the next step in their nearly three-year effort to win union recognition. On Labor Day, C.A.U.S.E. started collecting signatures on union representation cards that will then be submitted to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), petitioning for an election.

C.A.U.S.E. describes itself as a “grassroots, independent, worker-led effort run by and for RDU1 workers” [emphasis in the original].

If successful, this would be the second Amazon fulfillment center to unionize.^[1]

World-Outlook recently interviewed Mary Hill via video to learn more about this important fight.

 “I was born in 1954. I grew up in Sibley, Louisiana, about 30 miles east of Shreveport — the ‘dirty south,’” said Hill. “I remember seeing the signs that said, ‘Colored Only.’ I remember the cotton fields, the burning churches, the burning crosses, and the hanging trees. And I remember me and my mom having to go around the back to get the day-old chicken feet, hog maws, and chitlins that the white people didn’t want. Now you can buy them in any store in the country.”

Hill said her life experience has given her the strength to stand up for herself and her co-workers. “It made me stronger. It made me a fighter,” she stated.

“When Amazon first announced plans to build a warehouse in Garner that was welcome news,” Hill explained. “People were happy to get a job making $15/hour because their main competitor, Walmart, started you out at $12/hour. A lot of people left Walmart and came to Amazon, which was good for this area. It gave the economy a boost.”

RDU1 is 2 million-square-feet and 4 stories high. The workforce is estimated at 4,000 to 5,000.

“The rank and file is predominantly people of color,” Hill said in describing the composition of the work force.  “And when I say people of color, I don’t only mean Black. We’ve got Haitians, Jamaicans, people from Africa, Honduras, and Guatemala. So, a lot of immigrants. I’d say maybe 20% are of the Caucasian race, and quite a few young people. Upper management doesn’t reflect the diversity in the workforce. There are no Blacks, no Latinos, and not a lot of women. Management is white and mainly male.”

Hill’s first job at Amazon was working at the RDU5 sort center in Durham, which entailed a 30-mile commute. She was only offered shifts of 2- to 3-hours at a time. “Sometimes I’d go to work they’d say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have no work,’ and I’d have to turn around and come back home. I worked two part time jobs to make ends meet.”

She considered herself lucky when RDU1 opened in August 2020 and she was offered a full-time job. She started that November in the Pack Singles department.

Hill described in detail the complex ballet involved as an item wends its way via robots and conveyor belts through the Decant, Stow, and Pick departments, until it reaches her workstation. She pulls it off the assembly line and packs it, ready for delivery to the customer. She is expected to handle, on average, 180 items each hour.

How C.A.U.S.E. began

C.A.U.S.E. was founded in January 2022, spawned by conditions inside RDU1 during the COVID pandemic.

“They wanted us to go into the hotspots” Hill explained, referring to areas with a high chance of contracting COVID due to a large proportion of workers diagnosed with the virus.

“And we knew where they were, because we talk to each other; we’re co-workers, right? This is during the time when they put up the plastic partitions between the lines. Almost every day the ambulances were being called, sometimes twice a day. Somebody done passed out, somebody this, somebody that.

“There was a time during which Amazon was doing COVID testing,” Hill continued. “And if you tested positive you could take up to 5 days off with pay. You didn’t have to worry about missing your paycheck.”

But that changed. “Eventually they stopped doing the COVID testing,” she said, “they stopped offering the time off.”

“A lot of workers had COVID,” Hill continued. Workers wanted to know if they were being exposed to the virus at work.

“To be clear we weren’t asking for their names or personal identifying information,” Hill said. “Just let me know if it was somebody I work closely with so I can get tested and do what I need to do for my safety.”

But Amazon would not provide that basic information.

“They kept trying to send Reverend Ryan [Rev. Ryan Brown, now president of C.A.U.S.E.] into departments that were known hot spots,” Hill continued.

“If you remember we were told if you’re a senior citizen or if you have underlying health conditions, you’re more susceptible. But Amazon wasn’t hearing it. Reverend Ryan kept telling them, ‘Look, I have a senior, my grandmother. I can’t go into that area.’ They told him he didn’t have a choice. Told me the same thing. He got tired of them standing over him and telling him he didn’t have a choice. So, he went home and prayed for guidance, and his prayers were answered with one word — ‘Organize.’ So that’s just what he did. Reverend Ryan had the idea, and I came up with the name. And that’s the origin of C.A.U.S.E.”

As a sign of respect and affection Mary Hill is known as “Ma Mary” among her coworkers.

“I’ve always been the one to stick up for the underdog,” she said. “I’m always trying to make sure that my co-workers are treated fairly and that they’re okay. And whereas a lot of them don’t have a voice or don’t know what to do or what to say or how to handle any particular situation, they come to me. It’s like I’m everybody’s mom.”

Hill had experience working a union-organized job before getting hired at Amazon.

“I used to live in Denver, Colorado,” Hill told me. “I worked for a company called Mesa Fiberglass. Mesa Fiberglass already had a union in place when I started working there. I got to sit on the union negotiation committee, where it came down to every benefit — your breaks, your insurance, whatever benefits employees had — got to sit across the bargaining table from the powers that be.

“The union’s the only power and voice that workers have. I learned that at an early age. But I never organized from the ground up like we’re doing. This is my very first experience. The same goes for Rev Ryan. He had never done anything like this before.”

‘C.A.U.S.E. not separate from Amazon workers, we are Amazon workers’

C.A.U.S.E. describes itself as a “movement of Amazon workers coming together to demand better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions.”

It emphasizes, “C.A.U.S.E. is not separate from Amazon workers, we are Amazon workers, coming together to fight against the conditions we have to work under, and defining the conditions we want to work in.”

Regular elections are held for president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer. The union’s leaders are unpaid worker-volunteers. The union’s organizational structure consists of six committees; detailed descriptions of each can be found on the C.A.U.S.E. website.

The union publishes a monthly newsletter in English and Spanish called “Voices of Empowerment.” An audio version is also available so workers can listen to it while on the job.

Hill started at $15/hr. After three years her pay capped out at $19.40/hr. Last month Amazon announced it was giving its hourly warehouse workers and drivers raises of $1.50/hr.

“This is directly in response to the growing pressure by Amazon workers organizing across the country,” Hill said.  “And they threw in a free Prime account as well. What a joke! We work for the richest sucker in the world,” she said, referring to Amazon’s Executive Chair Jeff Bezos.

“I just read online Amazon is a $2 trillion company,” she continued, referring to the company’s market capitalization.

Amazon reported $30.4 billion in profits in 2023.

“We’re not asking for much,” said Hill. “We’re demanding $30/hr. Everything in my life has gone up — my rent, my electric bill, my water bill, my gas bill, my car insurance. What hasn’t gone up, Mark?” she asked me. “My paycheck. We demand a living wage.”^[2]

“We’re demanding sick pay,” Hill continued. “We don’t even get sick pay. You can get sick pay working at Burger King.”

Other C.A.U.S.E. bargaining demands include more paid time off; a one-hour paid lunch break, an end to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, language or anything else; transparency about work rates; and fairness in promotions.

“Last summer Amazon changed our break time,” said Hill. “They didn’t take into consideration that you have people that are diabetic, people that have to take medications when they eat at a certain time. They didn’t think about any of that. They didn’t even ask any of us what we thought about it. They just decided this is what they wanted it to be. That’s treating us like we’re fungible, like we’re not humans, like we don’t matter.

“We’re asking to be treated with dignity and respect in our workplace and to have our voices heard. We do the labor. What is so unreasonable about us wanting to have a voice in what goes on in changes that affects our work life? We spend more time there than we do with our families. Why are they fighting us so hard on this? Having a union is the only power, the only voice, that rank-and-file workers like myself have,” Hill said.

As Hill implied in a post on X by the Southern Workers Assembly, workers can harness union power to press their demands. “Without us, nothing moves,” Hill said. “Without workers these companies don’t make any money. Is Bezos gonna get out of his corporate jet and comfy bed and come down here to do what we are doing? Hell no.”

C.A.U.S.E. is independent

C.A.U.S.E. is open to support from the rest of the labor movement but is determined that its rank-and-file members make all the decisions about their future.

“Until you have walked in that building, scanned your badge, and worked a ten-and-a-half or eleven hours shift you can’t tell me anything about what it’s like to be an Amazon worker,” said Hill.

“You’re just an outsider looking in. Now, maybe you can tell me about your experience organizing with the steel workers or the oil riggers, but until you’ve actually worked those long hours, standing, reaching, pulling, bending, stooping, dealing with all the things that go on internally in Amazon, you can’t tell me anything about that, because we as workers have first-hand experience. So then if you’ve got an agenda or some motivation to get me under your umbrella — no,” Hill insisted.

“We want this to be and remain about the workers. We’ll accept help from anybody but don’t try to colonize us. We want to maintain our independence because we think that people that work in a facility know it better, make the best leaders, make the best organizers, and make the best activists.”

That doesn’t preclude affiliation with an existing union.

“In my opinion,” Hill said, “if there was a way we could join the Teamsters and keep our autonomy it might be something we’d look at, because there’s power in numbers. I don’t have a crystal ball, but who’s to say what could happen three months from now, six months from now? I don’t know.”

C.A.U.S.E. welcomes all who are willing to support its campaigns. Leaders of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) in New York have traveled to Garner to help out and show solidarity.

“I’ve learned that you can never have too many allies,” Hill added.

C.A.U.S.E. has a Community Committee that organizes volunteers from the community and college students to help with petitioning,^[3] phone banking, and leafleting.

On “Cyber Monday” last year hundreds of workers from several states, led and organized by the Teamsters, descended on RDU1 to stand in solidarity with Amazon delivery drivers who were on strike in Palmdale, California. As a result of this action, for about two hours trucks did not enter RDU1.

“Reverend Ryan, myself, and other C.A.U.S.E. members were working at the time, but we fully supported it,” said Hill. “Ten police cars came, and they told the people that they couldn’t be there. But we trained our volunteers, and they knew they had the right to be on the sidewalk. It’s public property. So, they were prepared. They knew what to expect and weren’t scared. We tell them this before they ever go out flyering — what to look for, what to expect, what to say. And we don’t send them out without sending an experienced person with them.”

C.A.U.S.E. has also received support from Black Workers for Justice, the North Carolina Justice League, and the Union of Southern Service Workers.

Complex challenges

The logistics of organizing a fulfillment center are complex. “There are 4 floors and multiple shifts and work schedules,” Hill explained.

“You’ve got RT [Reduced Time] shift, flex, part time, weekend, night shift, day shift, front half [Sunday-Wednesday], and back half [Wednesday-Saturday]. All these moving parts, people coming, people going. We had to take that into consideration. We had to get key people in key places. We had to get all the pieces in place, build a foundation. It’s going amazingly well,” said Hill.

Turnover in employment at the warehouse presents a big challenge. Workers who sign a union authorization card will have their signatures disqualified if they are no longer working at RDU1 when the cards are submitted to the NLRB.

A 2021 New York Times investigation of Amazon nationally found 150% annual hourly employee turnover.

According to an internal Amazon memo that was leaked to Recode, at this rate of “churn” Amazon could run out of prospective workers for its U.S. warehouses. The October 3 Seattle Times reported that Amazon is planning to hire 250,000 full, part-time, and seasonal workers for the 2024 holiday season. It will face competition from better-paying employers.

“UPS is opening up right across the street, right in Amazon’s front door,” said Hill. “They pay better than Amazon and have better benefits, such as sick days, because they have a union.”

‘Scamazon’

“We know all about Amazon’s scare tactics and their sneaky underhandedness,” Hill explained. “Without the benefit of a union Amazon will continue to be the controlling slavedriver.”

As Hill points out in an Instagram post by C.A.U.S.E., “‘Scamazon’ that we call em. It’s a new plantation. We’re just not picking cotton or tobacco. We’re picking packages.”

In our interview, Hill referred to the union organizing experience of Amazon workers at JFK8, the company’s giant warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

“We studied and watched JFK8 very closely because they were the very first, so they didn’t have a playbook, flying by the seat of their pants. We’ve looked at their mistakes and learned from them, which was to our advantage,” she said.

“When they fired Chris [Smalls],^[4] I don’t think they planned on it turning out the way it did. They made him into a martyr. That really worked in ALU’s favor, in our opinion. And I think that’s one of the things that they don’t want to happen with C.A.U.S.E.. Reverend Ryan and I started this thing two-and-a-half years ago and we’re still here when we’ve been visible from the very start,” Hill continued.

But in other respects, said Hill, “Amazon’s using the same union-busting playbook here that they did at JFK8. We’ve been waiting for it. We were wondering when it was going to start. We knew it was coming. They sent in the union busters. We’ve had the captive audience meetings. They’ve got it up on the monitors when you walk in the building: ‘You don’t have to say yes to a union, you can vote no.’ And they tell these lies like ‘A union is an outside organization. They’re going to sell your information. They’re going to come to your house.’”

Hill said the highly paid union busters that Amazon sends into the warehouse dress like workers and try to act like workers. But “for those of us that been working at Amazon all these years, if you’re not one of us it don’t take us that long to sniff you out. You don’t fit in. You don’t look the same. You don’t even walk and talk the same. We train each other and tell each other what to look for, how to spot them.

“If this person walks up and starts asking you questions, say ‘Excuse me, who are you? I don’t know you.’ You don’t have to talk to them. Don’t be fooled. Don’t fall for their trickery. You don’t have to say anything to them people. You have to train people what to look for, what to say, what not to say, and most times with them, less said, the better.”

Organizing in the South

Organizing in the South has its own unique challenges. North Carolina is a right-to-work state and at 2.7% has the 2^nd lowest percent of union members of any state in the country. Its neighbor, South Carolina, takes first place.

“A lot of the people here have been here all their lives,” Hill noted. “They’ve never been in a union. They don’t know about unions unless they have an uncle, or grandfather, or somebody that was in a union, and they heard him talk about it within the home.

“When I was a little girl, I grew up hearing about unions because the old Kansas City Southern passenger train ran right through my hometown of Sibley, Louisiana. A lot of my neighbors worked on the railroad. The train tracks are still there,” she explained.

“I’ve had some young people, when you mention it to them, they be like, ‘A what, Miss Mary? A union, what’s that?’ And sometimes we can get so complacent with the crumbs, that we get conditioned in our thinking that that’s okay, that’s enough, and that we shouldn’t ask for more.

“So, what we found is that we have to educate and patiently explain. ‘Okay, you’re getting by — barely, but there’s something better, you could have more.’

“We get people to start dreaming a little. We give them an alternative. And then they might say, ‘That never occurred to me,’ or ‘Can I ask for that?’ or ‘Am I entitled to that?’, or ‘Could I maybe have that?’ Sometimes they never had anything else different to look at.”

Hill said that some workers were fearful of signing a union card because they were afraid that Amazon would find out and retaliate.

“Others thought what we were doing was illegal. They said, ’You can’t do that. You’re breaking the law.’ So, we printed out what our rights are under the NLRB. We started handing it out, because we have regular flyerings. We started having interest meetings.

“We had a fish fry in my backyard, invited all the workers. ‘Come out. Tell us your questions and concerns. Get a free dinner. Let’s sit down and talk, be cordial, and get to know each other. Sign your card while you’re here, bring your kids.’ You know, it’s about us being a work family, building those bonds.

“Rev. Ryan always told us this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We had to learn how to start a conversation. You don’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey, Mark, we want a union. Do you want a union? You want to help us?’ That’s not how you do it.

“Like I said, neither of us had ever done this before so we would practice with each other, and we learned along the way that it’s about building a rapport with the people that we work with every single day. We talk about what each other’s kids are doing in school, we know what school they go to. It’s about building trust.

“The petition we started back in 2022 was a segway into doing just that — talking to people. We’d ask them ‘What aggravates you about working here? How do you feel about how they changed our breaks?’ We learned to do 30% of the talking and 70% of the listening. While I’m listening to you, I’m learning something that I can agitate on. That might be breaks, might be when manager disrespects and talks down to you. It was a learning process.

“As leaders, we try to stay humble. We’re not arrogant. We’re workers too. And I feel that’s one of the most important things because ego will kill you every time. We all make mistakes. What’s important is that you learn from those mistakes.”

‘Time to test the waters’

After two-and-one-half years of methodically organizing, Hill said “it was time for us to test the waters. We’ve had interest meetings and we’ve gotten a structure together. We’ve got an organizing committee, a steering committee, and we’ve got what we think is the support of enough employees.”

More than 1,000 workers have already joined C.A.U.S.E. “We said let’s see if all that work that we’ve done previously… if we’ve gotten something right. So, let’s start the card signing.”

C.A.U.S.E. has a time frame in mind as to when they plan to file with the NLRB, seeking a representation election, but the date has not yet been set.

“We’ve learned that when you rush and move fast, you forget something, or something messes up. If we don’t meet our deadline, so be it. We’re not going to risk everything that we’ve worked so hard and planned for.”

At least 30% of the employees in the bargaining unit need to sign union authorization cards in order for the NLRB to trigger an election.

“But 30% of how many? That’s the problem,” Hill pointed out.

“Amazon is not required to disclose that number to the union until we turn in the cards. We know that Amazon and the Labor Board will laugh us out of the state if we showed up with just 30%. We have sense enough to know that given the high turnover rate 30% is not going to cut it. We need at least 40%, 50%.

“We know they’re going to challenge every dadgum name we’ve got on there, which is why we do phone banking. A lot of people that signed our petition aren’t here anymore. Some were fired. Others will go over to UPS when it opens up. And then there’s the other Amazons that workers have transferred to — RDU2 in Smithfield and DRT4 in Fayetteville. So even if they signed a card those names will no longer be valid. There are so many moving pieces that we have to factor in.”

Despite the challenges Hill remains upbeat.

“I’m just an eternal optimist, but I think there’s a good chance we’ll win,” she said.

“One thing I’ve learned too, Mark, if you work in Amazon long enough, you may not see a need for a union today. But stick around. Your number just hasn’t come up yet. Amazon is infamous for doing something that’s going to piss you off, or you feel you are done unjustly or treated unfairly, and you’re going to think about something some organizer has said to you. Amazon’s been doing it ever since I have been employed there.”

Hill concluded our interview with this insight.

“Who do you think built this country? When all these roads were dirt roads who do you think built the highways, built the railways? The immigrants, the slaves, the prisoners. This country belongs to everybody, Mark, not just one particular, powerful, egotistical, greedy group. It belongs to all of us.”

NOTES

[1] In 2022 workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, chose the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) as their union in an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. Although the ALU’s victory was certified by the NLRB, Amazon has refused to recognize the union. The ALU recently affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and is continuing a fight for a contract with Amazon.

[2] The Living Wage Calculator, developed by Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier and Dr. Tracey Farrigan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows that a living wage for one adult, living with one child, in Wake County, North Carolina, where RDU1 is located, is $42.76/hr.

[3] In this case, petitioning is different from collecting signatures on union authorization cards. As World-Outlook explained in a 2002 interview with C.A.U.S.E. leader Destiny Blackwell, “C.A.U.S.E. is circulating a petition making seven demands on Amazon management. It uses this as a tool to engage workers in conversation, answer questions, educate, and recruit new members. It is also a way to measure its growing support. To date 400 workers have signed the petition. C.A.U.S.E. follows up with a phone call to everyone who signs. ‘One of the jobs of the recruitment committee is to bring in people who have shown support and get them to circulate the petition too. That’s part of developing our coworkers into organizers as well,’ said Blackwell.”

[4] Amazon fired Chris Smalls in March 2020 after he led a walkout at the company’s giant JFK8 warehouse to protest unsafe working conditions during the COVID pandemic. Smalls helped lead the subsequent union organizing efforts that resulted in ALU’s victory in winning union representation for JFK8 workers in March 2022 and became ALU’s first president. In ALU’s elections this year, Connor Spence was elected ALU’s president.

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