The following is a crosspost from NC Newsline. It is being cross-posted under the rules of Creative Commons.
by Brandon Kingdollar, NC Newsline
November 3, 2025
The campaign to unionize Amazon has set its sights on Durham, with Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment launching an organizing drive outside the company’s RDU5 warehouse on Monday.
This represents CAUSE’s second union push in the state, with the first in Garner resulting in an election defeat by a three-to-one margin in February that organizers challenged with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company coerced its employees into voting no and violated protections for union organizing. That election complaint remains ongoing.
Around 50 demonstrators rallied in support of the campaign kickoff at the truck entrance of the RDU5 facility on Monday afternoon, handing out union materials to workers finishing their shifts and raising their fists to delivery trucks honking in approval.
“I came to tell you we didn’t lose, we learned,” CAUSE President Ryan Brown told supporters.
“They thought they had buried us, but all they did was plant us,” Brown said. “And the thing about seeds is that seeds, they will always rise. They rise in Garner, they rise in Raleigh, and Durham, and Winston-Salem, and in Charlotte.”
Organizers said the campaign will target four facilities in the Durham area, including the RDU5 warehouse and three others. The union estimates that RDU5 has around 1,000 employees, while the other three each range in the hundreds.
“The good thing about Durham is that the facilities are smaller,” CAUSE Secretary Italo Medelius said in an interview. “Bringing all of these facilities together will give people a lot more solidarity to share strategies, to talk about what’s going on inside these warehouses, so we feel very, very confident that this campaign is going to turn out differently.”
A key tenet of the campaign is fairer wages. According to the union campaign, workers start at $18.50 an hour — less than half of what MIT estimates constitutes a living wage for a single-income family with one child in the Durham area — and caps at $22 an hour, regardless of experience.
At the RDU1 facility in Garner, pay begins at $18.50 and goes up to $23.80, Amazon spokesperson Marc Heintzman said in a statement in February. But he added that “pay is not capped” and that the company raises hourly wages every year.
Supporters with the Union of Southern Service Workers and other area unions joined Monday’s event in solidarity, as did Durham City Council Member Nate Baker. The Durham City Council passed a resolution in June that “enthusiastically encourages” Amazon workers in the city to unionize.
“The city of Durham stands behind you in this fight!” Baker said to cheers. “What’s your wage? It should be higher. What’s your leave? It should be longer. You deserve better.”
In a statement Wednesday morning, Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards said the company supports all employees’ right to decide whether to participate in a union.
“Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union. They always have,” Hards said. “We favor opportunities for each person to be respected and valued as an individual, and to have their unique voice heard by working directly with our team.”
“The fact is, Amazon already offers what many unions are requesting: competitive pay, health benefits on day one, and opportunities for career growth. We look forward to working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work,” she added.
To date, the only successful union campaign at an Amazon warehouse took place in a New York shipping facility in 2022, led by the Amazon Labor Union. No other unions have won recognition by the NLRB to negotiate on behalf of Amazon warehouse employees.
Jorge Meza, a worker at the RDU5 facility who volunteered with the union effort, said he’s pleased that the campaign has come to Durham. “I think it’s a really smart move. Durham has a rich history of labor organizing, organizing within intersectional communities here.”
Medelius, the union secretary, said part of the learning process from the first campaign was getting an in-depth understanding of the Durham facilities beforehand. That has resulted in a multilingual campaign, with pro-union signs in Spanish, Nepali, and Arabic present at the rally, reflecting the diversity of the warehouse workers.
“We feel strong enough inside of all those facilities that if Amazon wants to retaliate, we’re ready to jump in the boxing ring with them,” Medelius said. “We’re here to announce that we’re not going anywhere and we’re going to unionize.”
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