GARNER – Even as Amazon is closing a Durham warehouse and two other sites in North Carolina, an effort to unionize workers in a Garner distribution center continue, members of Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, tell WRAL TechWire.
The organization, which is abbreviated as “C.A.U.S.E.,” is seeking to unionize workers at the Amazon distribution center in Garner, which a spokesperson for the organization told WRAL TechWire is “relatively new, very diverse, and in a somewhat rural location.”
C.A.U.S.E. launched following conversations between two employees, Reverend Ryan Brown and Mary Hill, about why they and their colleagues had been instructed to work in a section of the Garner facility “where Amazon workers who were known to have active cases of COVID-19 were still working,” a spokesperson says.
The group’s steering committee responded to a series of questions from WRAL TechWire about their efforts.
That conversation led to further discussions, and eventually culminated in the formal creation of the organization in January. The vote to establish a union in a Staten Island, New York facility spurred C.A.U.S.E. organizers to increase organizing efforts, as highlighted in a video that plays on the C.A.U.S.E. website.
“Our fellow workers are facing hot, brutal working conditions on unrealistic quotas, with unreliable and unreasonable schedules, unsafe working conditions, and rampant discrimination,” the spokesperson said.
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But organizers say they’re fighting for more than just the welfare of Amazon workers, as the spokesperson noted that while today, the welfare of Amazon employees is important, organizers understand that “the future of the American labor movement” may be at stake, with their effort to unionize the Garner facility, and other workers efforts to unionize in other company facilities across the United States.
“The people working at Amazon have a right to a voice in how the facility is run,” a member of the organization’s steering committee told WRAL TechWire. “We want higher pay to survive rising costs, more [paid time off] and vacation time, and the way we are moving to get it is through forming a union with the power to negotiate contracts and demand change, not only ask for it.”
The steering committee member said that the facility would not be operational without workers. “The workers cannot live on what Amazon is offering,” they said. “Ultimately we want an NLRB-recognized union to guarantee contract negotiations.”
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According to organizers, they’re already in the process of “creating a solidarity union of fellow workers.” And, organizers told WRAL TechWire that they are “preparing for an election to represent our workers in a formal capacity” that could come in 2023.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the organization told WRAL TechWire that the company “has already engaged in suspected retaliation and intimidation against workers, including sending more managers to oversee workers and attempting to purge longer term employees in a bid to prevent workers from representing themselves.”
The spokesperson told WRAL TechWire that they’ve been in contact with the organizers of other unionization efforts, and leaders of other campaigns.
“We are expanding our presence in the warehouse and preparing for the coming struggle, while fighting back against the retaliations we have already seen,” said the spokesperson. “The key takeaways have been that this will be a vital, but difficult campaign, and that Amazon will be ruthless in suppressing workers.”
The spokesperson noted that while inflation has increased the cost of living by nearly 10% year-over-year, with the price of rent in the Triangle rising by double-digits, the workers in Amazon’s Garner facility were offered a raise of 50 cents per hour, about 3%.
That was seen by organizers as “utterly unsatisfactory and insulting,” the spokesperson told WRAL TechWire.
A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment on this story.
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