By Mark Satinoff
In a lopsided loss, Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) failed to secure a majority in a union vote held February 10-15 in Garner, North Carolina. The vote was 2,447 against to 829 for joining the union. About 76% of the approximately 4,300 workers eligible to vote cast ballots.
The vote capped a three-year effort by CAUSE, which has been organizing at Amazon’s RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, a town of 35,000 outside of Raleigh, since its founding in January 2022.
CAUSE describes itself as a “grassroots, independent, worker-led effort run by and for RDU1 workers” [emphasis in the original in the union’s website]. It has no affiliation with any established trade union. It runs on volunteer labor and a bare-bones budget. This group of workers waged an uphill battle against a behemoth.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, executive chairman, and largest shareholder, is either the second or third richest person in the world (depending on the close of the stock market on any given day). His company, valued at more than $2 trillion, has 1,445 warehouses, delivery stations, and air cargo centers and employs about 1.5 million full- and part-time workers across the United States.
This marks the fourth union vote at an Amazon warehouse that workers have lost in as many years (the previous three were Amazon’s BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer, AL; LDJ5 in Staten Island, NY; and ALB1 in Albany, NY).
JFK8 in Staten Island, New York, remains the first and only Amazon warehouse in the United States where workers voted to unionize. Even at JFK8, however, three years after a majority voted for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), workers have yet to succeed in forcing Amazon to negotiate a contract or even recognize the union.
“The election results today are a result of Amazon’s willingness to break the law and use its enormous wealth to try and break our movement,” said a statement by the CAUSE leadership following the vote. “We will continue organizing. This is only the beginning.”
Amazon’s union-busting campaign
“In the weeks leading up to the vote Amazon threw its full weight and power into its union-busting arsenal of intimidation and lies,” Mary Hill, known affectionately by many workers as Ma Mary, told World-Outlook in a phone interview. Hill is a co-founder and vice president of CAUSE. “Amazon flew in union busters from all over the country, at least 30 of them. They were all over the place, like roaches. They get paid $3,000/day plus expenses.”
Hill described some of the lies spread by management.
“At ‘captive audience’ meetings workers were threatened with loss of their already meager benefits if the union won,” the CAUSE leader said. CAUSE refuted this lie in a flyer.
The union’s demands included increasing wages to $30 an hour — a 62% raise — as well as establishing paid sick leave and increasing break times from 30 minutes to an hour.
“In a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, managers told Latino workers that CAUSE only cared about Black workers,” Hill continued. “Immigrants, who make up a quarter or more of the workforce, were told by management that CAUSE said to workers they could be deported if they voted no.”
Hill’s statement is backed up by a brief clip in which an Amazon manager is captured on video saying during a “captive audience” meeting, “I’ve also heard CAUSE telling people that if you vote no you can be deported.”
These lies were aimed at painting CAUSE as being in collusion with hated immigration agents while presenting the company as the “good guy.” Management used such falsehoods to divide immigrants from other workers and to turn workers away from voting for the union.
Coming on the heels of the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president — whose administration has intensified immigration raids, arrests, and deportations — such scare tactics by Amazon were likely a weighty factor in the union loss.
The Chronicle, the daily student newspaper of Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina, obtained literature distributed by Amazon claiming that “unions run their businesses with your money” and that none of the benefits CAUSE advocated for would be guaranteed in negotiations. The documents also charged that CAUSE would “trad[e] something important to you for something they want, like deducting dues from your paycheck.”
In January, workers in one of Amazon’s facilities in Quebec voted to unionize. In response, Amazon announced it is shuttering all seven of its warehouses in the Canadian province, and laying off approximately 4,500 workers, including warehouse and delivery employees. This was an unmistakable message to RDU1 workers that they could have the same fate.
“You need to understand, a lot of workers think that Amazon is the best job around here,” Hill emphasized. “For many this is the first job they’ve ever had and it’s the most money they’ve ever made. The next choice is Walmart and they’re not paying what Amazon pays. After that it’s McDonalds, Burger King, or one of the stores at the mall. A lot of people drive 1 to 1-1/2 hours for this job.”
Starting pay at RDU1 is $18.50 an hour today. “Last October, Amazon gave us $1.50 an hour,” Hill explained. “They called it a pay raise. But after taxes and the increase in the cost of insurance we might have seen 45 cents. That’s not a raise. That’s a slap in the face, an insult.”
North Carolina is a “right-to-work” state — where workers are not obligated to join a union or pay union dues even if a majority approves union representation. The state has a unionization rate of 2.4%, the country’s lowest.
Hill explained that most young people have never been in a union and don’t know anyone who has. Amazon managers played on this fact by implying that workers who choose not to pay union dues will not receive union benefits. A flyer Amazon posted in and around RDU1 bathrooms claimed, “Who will CAUSE really care about? CAUSE represents its paying members. We care about giving every individual a voice.”
‘Older workers were more favorable to the union’
“We have failed our children,” said Hill. “Young Black men growing up today don’t know their history. If it hadn’t been for the Rosa Parks, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, our forerunners, who drew a line in the sand, who fought — some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice because a lot of them lost their lives — we would not have what we have today. Young people don’t see that, they don’t know that.”
CAUSE had a harder time winning young workers to its organizing efforts.
“The older workers were, on the whole, more favorable to the union than the young ones,” Hill noted. “A lot of them have moved here from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts because the cost of living is so much lower. They’re familiar with unions. Many have been union members.”
The huge turnover in the workforce — 150% at Amazon, the highest rate in the industry — was another major obstacle CAUSE did not manage to overcome.
“People you’ve convinced to vote for the union may not even be working here the next week,” said Hill.
During the weeks leading up to the election, Amazon erected a half-mile fence around the facility to keep out union supporters. Union activists have been singled out for harassment and key organizers have been fired, including CAUSE co-founder and president Rev. Ryan Brown. “Vote No” banners were plastered on every wall and run on a continuous loop on video monitors. Even the bathroom stalls were adorned with anti-union signs, called “inSTALLments.”
CAUSE kept its literature in a box high up on a shelf in the break room. “One day when we went to get it down to hand out to the workers it wasn’t there,” Hill said. “We couldn’t find it anywhere.” The mystery of its whereabouts was revealed when “a young lady who works for a contractor whose job it is to clean the plant told me, ‘I didn’t throw y’all stuff away like I was instructed to do by the senior ops lady.’”
CAUSE’s headquarters and organizing center consisted of a large tent set up across the street from the warehouse. During shift change, workers would stop by to grab a slice of pizza, a tee shirt, or to ask questions about the union.
“I had just stepped away from the tent to use the bathroom when one of the senior operations managers rushed over and grabbed our banner and signs,” Hill recounted. “He tried to hide them under his vest with the intent to throw them out. I chased him down and confronted him. He said, ‘They’re not approved.’ I told him, ‘CAUSE doesn’t need your approval.’ I got him to back down and give them back to me.”
‘Shocked’ by size of loss
Hill said she was “shocked” by the size of the loss in the union vote. She had expected it to be a lot closer, she added.
The 829 workers who voted for the union were less than the number of workers who signed union authorization cards CAUSE submitted to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on December 23. The NLRB requires a threshold of 30% of employed workers signing such cards to trigger an election to choose or reject union representation. This translates to a minimum of 1,290 valid union authorization cards needed in this case. (According to an article in the February 13 issue of The Nation, by the time it filed its petition for an election with the NLRB, CAUSE had collected union authorization cards from about 42% of those eligible to vote, or approximately 1806 workers.)
This indicates that CAUSE underestimated the extent to which the company’s vote “no” campaign was successful in peeling workers away from supporting unionization.
One sign of this reality was registered in a pro-union rally CAUSE held on February 8, the Saturday before voting began. Of the approximately 150 people who attended Hill said the majority were community supporters, not Amazon workers.
“Fear was the biggest factor keeping workers away,” Hill stated. “Fear’s only good for two things. It will either immobilize you — you’ll be stuck — or it’ll scare your butt into taking action.”
Members of the North Carolina Association of Educators came out to show their union’s support. The ALU sent 11 workers from JFK8 to Garner for three days to help out. Sultana Hossain, the ALU’s recording secretary, addressed the February 8 rally. Chris Smalls, the former president of the ALU, was a featured speaker and closed the event.
CAUSE is in the process of assessing what happened and why, drawing the lessons from an unexpectedly lopsided defeat, and coming up with a strategy to move forward, Hill said.
In a message to RDU1 workers after the vote, CAUSE said: “Over the last three years we have experienced disgusting union busting. It did not stop us then; it will not stop us now. Now is the time for us to regroup. We’ve built relationships and bonds with our coworkers. We will continue to do that.”
CAUSE has its work cut out for it. The 829 workers who voted “yes” would need to be integrated into the union and trained as organizers and leaders as part of a way forward.
Hill concluded with this statement: “A coworker came up to me yesterday and said ‘Why are you still wearing your union vest? I thought you lost the vote.’ I said, brother, you ever watch a football game? You might lose that first quarter, but you have three more quarters to go. We lost this round. That’s all. It’s a long way from being over.”
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Categories: Labor Movement / Trade Unions