Amazon workers across NC reach out to group seeking to organize union in Garner

GARNER – A group working to form a union at one of Amazon’s largest facilities in North Carolina says that it is hearing from employees at other North Carolina sites who are interested in forming unions.

However the group says the priority is pursuing an effort to unionize a facility in Garner.

In an update provided to WRAL TechWire from the Steering Committee of Carolina Amazonians for Solidarity & Empowerment, or CAUSE, the group also said that Amazon may be misleading prospective workers who apply to the company’s 1,000 new Triangle area jobs announced last week, while the tech giant has said that recent wage increases as well as the average wages for the new jobs are in line with what is being paid for comparable work in the region.

Last week, Amazon announced it would hire 150,000 workers nationally with 1,000 roles in the Triangle area, including at a facility known as RDU1, a distribution center in Garner.

An Amazon statement said that a variety of roles would be hired, with a pay rate, on average, of “more than $19 per hour” and some new workers would also receive hiring bonuses that could be as high as $1,000, but are dependent upon location and role.

Those figures may be misleading, said the CAUSE Steering Committee in a statement.

“[T]he claim that the average wage of new hires will be around $19 is likely both misleading and a testament to the importance of the work CAUSE is doing,” the statement reads. “We have had some communication with other members of other warehouses, but at present our efforts are focused at RDU1 as it is a large regional hub for Amazon operations,” the steering committee added in a follow-up note to WRAL TechWire.

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Company at odds with workers on compensation

Inflation persists in the U.S. economy, and that means that the cost of living has increased for many North Carolina workers, as well.

And that includes workers at the Amazon facility in Garner known as RDU1.

“According to the best estimates, the cost of living has risen by nearly ten percent annually, especially visible in the cost of basic goods for workers, while rent increases in North Carolina metro areas have been some of the highest in the country,” the CAUSE Steering Committee wrote in an email to WRAL TechWire. “Compared to this, wages have utterly stagnated. When this issue was raised, Amazon proposed a utterly unsatisfactory and insulting 50 cent (barely 3%) raise.”

And following last week’s announcement, the CAUSE Steering Committee noted that the published pay rate of average wages at more than $19 per hour for Amazon’s announced jobs “is likely misleading because it is highly likely that this average — rather than median — merely reflects the addition of a few reasonably better paid managers and more workers at the current rate of around ~$15.50 an hour.”

Amazon told WRAL TechWire that all full-time, hourly, frontline employees that work in customer fulfillment and transportation are paid between $16 and $26 per hour in North Carolina and in the United States.

Yet, according to the CAUSE Steering Committee, the designation of “average wages” is another indicator “that Amazon will not consider meaningfully moving wages beyond the starvation wage level wages that they currently offer without the market demand for more workers and agitation from workers themselves.”

But Amazon has said that the recent wage increases for North Carolina facilities and others in the United States followed an annual process that aims to ensure hourly pay is in line for what is being paid for comparable work locally.

“We’re committed to supporting hourly frontline employees by ensuring competitive pay for the work they’re doing,” said Steve Kelly, Amazon spokesperson. “Every year, we conduct a pay review process, which this year, led to a $1 billion investment to raise pay over the next year for all U.S. frontline, hourly, permanent employees in customer fulfillment and transportation.”

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What is ‘living wage’?

Still, the CAUSE Steering Committee told WRAL TechWire that it has made its members familiar with a cost of living calculator provided by MIT that calculates a living wage, or “the hourly rate that an individual in a household must earn to support his or herself and their family” in North Carolina.

MIT’s living wage calculation for the state is that one adult with no children must earn $17.14 per hour, but a household with one adult and one child must earn $33.10 per hour.

A recent study conducted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition measured how much workers would need to earn in order to afford a modest apartment in each U.S. state, including North Carolina.

Across North Carolina, the study found that workers needed to earn the equivalent of an hourly wage of $19.18, assuming a 40-hour work week, when they worked or received paid time off for all 52 weeks of the year.

But in Raleigh’s metropolitan statistical area, a worker would need to earn $23.52 per hour to affordably live in a two-bedroom apartment, and a worker earning minimum wage would need to work 90 hours per week in order to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Raleigh, the study found.

“To the extent that these wages are higher than before,” said the CAUSE Steering Committee, “these small increases were clearly directed to head off the kind of work we are doing.”

Yet the CAUSE Steering Committee also noted that this is “one more sign of how much Amazon is concerned about the power of its North Carolina workers uniting together, and further sign of how much CAUSE has the power to transform RDU1, and North Carolina.”