New York
CNN
 — 

North Carolina is a state that is generally hostile to unions. Amazon is a company that is, historically, extremely hostile to unions. Now an upstart union is attempting to represent more than 4,000 Amazon workers at one of the online retailer’s facilities there.

The National Labor Relations Board is overseeing a six-day vote starting Monday, with votes due to be counted Saturday. A win by the union, Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or CAUSE, in the town of Garner would be just the second Amazon facility to see a union win a representation vote, following a 2022 election at one of the company’s major sorting and distribution centers in Staten Island, New York.

Amazon, the nation’s second largest private sector employer, has faced increasing pressure from unions in recent months. And despite the fact that North Carolina has the lowest percentage of union membership among workers of any state — only 2.4% of workers overall, which is less than one-quarter of the national average — leaders of the union’s efforts said that they are confident about the outcome of the vote.

“As you imagine Amazon has been doing everything to make sure we don’t win,” Italo Medelius-Marsano, an Amazon worker and one of the leaders of the campaign, told CNN. “The amount of money that Amazon is pouring into this, the people they’re flying in to take us on, the propaganda — all of that tells us they’re scared. That fear tells us that they know we’re on the verge of something great.”

The company said that it is confident that workers in Garner, a town of 35,000 just outside of Raleigh, want to keep the sorting and distribution warehouse union-free.

“We believe our employees favor opportunities to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team,” said a statement from Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards. “The fact is, Amazon already offers what many unions are requesting: safe, inclusive workplaces, competitive pay, industry-leading benefits.”

The company said it pays workers in the facility a starting wage of $18.50 an hour and top pay of $23.80 an hour. The union organizers said they’ll be pressing for $30 an hour.

“I would challenge anyone to say $20 an hour is a livable wage here,” said Medelius-Marsano. “In the Raleigh area, that’s a slap in the face. Given the profits at Amazon and what it’s worth, $30 an hour is incredibly reasonable.”

Amazon has a market cap of $2.4 trillion and made $59 billon in net income in 2024, nearly double what it made the year before.

But even if the union wins, it could take years to negotiate a first contract. Amazon has continued to challenge the union representation vote it lost at the Staten Island facility in court, nearly three years after the NLRB certified the vote results. And it has refused to negotiate with the Amazon Labor Union, the upstart union that won the vote, or the Teamsters union, with which ALU members voted to affiliate last year.

“As we have shared before, we strongly disagree with the outcome of the election at (Staten Island),” said Hards. “Both the NLRB and the ALU improperly influenced the outcome and that is why we don’t believe it represents what the majority of our team wants.” The official total showed that 55% of the workers who voted supported the union.

Organizers in Garner said they have gotten support from other unions that are trying to organize other Amazon facilities and that it has learned from past union defeats at the company. Amazon has defeated union organizing votes twice at a facility in Bessemer, Alabama, as well as at a second Staten Island facility next to the one that voted for the union, as well as one just outside of Albany, New York.

But the organizers in North Carolina said the fact that theirs is an independent union is an advantage.

“Amazon paints us as an outside group,” said Ryan Brown, a union organizer who was fired by Amazon in December, after five years at the company. “But the workers here know we’re not outsiders. Those of us who have lived in the South all of our lives know our culture, which is that we’re skeptical of strangers, of outsiders.”

Brown and the union claim that his firing was due to his union activity. The company denies this, saying it was due to “repeated and well-documented incidents of misconduct.”

But despite Amazon trying to hold back union representation, it has been facing greater pressure than ever before from union efforts.

Workers at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia just became the first at the Amazon-owned grocery chain to vote to for a union.

And the Teamsters announced a six-day strike just before Christmas.

In addition to the workers in Staten Island, that strike primarily involved drivers who deliver packages for Amazon exclusively but who the company argues are not its employees, because they officially work for “independent contractors.”

CAUSE filed complaints of unfair labor practices against Amazon on Thursday, which is not unusual, as the company already has multiple such complaints filed against it with the NLRB. The labor agency staff and administrative law judges have found against Amazon in numerous cases.

One of those judges issued a decision finding substantiated unfair labor practice allegations against Amazon, requiring the court to set aside the 2022 rerun election in Alabama and ordering a third election there. But before that can happen that case needs to be considered by the agency’s full board, and upon taking office, President Donald Trump fired a sitting NLRB board member for the first time in history, which means there is no longer the quorum necessary to hear such cases. The fired board member is challenging her dismissal in court.

So even if a union is to win the vote, it will face an uphill battle to win the contract it says its members deserve, given Amazon’s track record fighting unionization efforts in the rest of the country. The union leaders said they’re ready for that.

“When you look at the civil rights movement, it was years and years to get the justice some Americans weren’t getting,” said Brown. “I am committed to this fight for the rest of my life.”

“The workers want Amazon to recognize their humanity and not treat them like a robots,” said Medelius-Marsano. “Our cheap labor has helped produce so much wealth. But they won’t even meet us halfway.”