Amazon workers voted overwhelmingly against a bid to unionize their North Carolina warehouse, the National Labor Relations Board said on Saturday, the latest setback in labor organizing efforts at the e-commerce giant.
Workers at the RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner, outside of Raleigh, voted 2,447 to 829 against unionizing with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, an upstart union founded by warehouse workers in 2022.
Organizers at the warehouse, which employs more than 4,000 people, sought starting wages of $30 an hour. The current pay range is about $18 to $24, Amazon said. The union also demanded longer lunch breaks and increased vacation time.
In a statement, leaders of CAUSE said the election outcome was the result of Amazon’s “relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us.” They did not say whether they would challenge the outcome, but vowed to keep trying to organize.
Eileen Hards, a spokeswoman for Amazon, wrote: “We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon.”
Leading up to the election, the worker-led union filed charges with the labor relations board accusing Amazon of interfering with employees’ protected union activity. The company gave preferential treatment to workers who did not support the union, according to the charges filed by CAUSE. Amazon also unfairly fired the co-founder of the union one week before workers filed for a union election in December, CAUSE said in a filing.
Amazon denied any election interference. Employees have the choice of whether to join a union, and the company talks “openly, candidly and respectfully” about unionization, Ms. Hards said before the vote. She said the CAUSE co-founder had been fired for “repeated misconduct that included making derogatory and racist comments to his co-workers.”
Addressing demands voiced by the union, Ms. Hards said the company already offered safe workplaces, competitive pay, industry-leading benefits and consistent scheduling. The CAUSE union, she added, “has no experience representing workers or their interests.”
On top of what they characterized as resistance from the company, organizers at the warehouse faced an environment in the South that has historically been hostile to unions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership in North Carolina last year was 2.4 percent, the lowest rate in the country and far below the national average of 9.9 percent.
Amazon has aggressively fended off union campaigns and stalled the bargaining process in multiple segments of its business, including warehouses, delivery operations and grocery stores.
In 2022, workers at a Staten Island warehouse in New York voted to form Amazon’s first union in the United States; it is now affiliated with the Teamsters union. Amazon has challenged the election outcome in court, and has refused to recognize the union or bargain with it. Delivery drivers, who work for third-party package delivery companies serving Amazon, have also mounted campaigns with the Teamsters.
The Trump administration’s moves at the labor relations board since the inauguration — including the replacement of the general counsel appointed in the Biden administration, who was considered friendly to labor — could further embolden employers to clamp down on organizing and refuse to bargain, labor law experts said.
Workers at a Philadelphia location of Whole Foods Market voted in January to affiliate with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, establishing the first union beachhead at the Amazon-owned grocery chain. In a filing with the labor board challenging the election, the company cited President Trump’s firing of a Democratic board member, which stripped the board of a quorum necessary to issue decisions.
In January, Amazon said that it was closing its warehouse and logistics operations in the Canadian province of Quebec, where unions had gained a foothold among some Amazon workers, and that it would lay off 1,700 employees.
The North Carolina election is not the first unsuccessful union bid among Amazon warehouse workers. In 2021, workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., voted against unionizing, but labor officials later ruled that Amazon had illegally influenced the election. Workers voted a second time in 2022, but the outcome was too close to call, prompting a labor judge to order a third election. That vote has yet to be held, and Amazon has denied wrongdoing.
“Ultimately, the biggest thing that we’re fighting for is dignity,” Italo Medelius-Marsano, a member of the CAUSE organizing committee who works at the RDU1 ship dock, said before the vote. “We’re making sure Amazon knows that we are human beings,” he said, citing the movement’s catch phrase: “I am not a robot.”
