What Amazon Workers Need to Know About CAUSE

What CAUSE is

CAUSE, or the Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, is a movement of Amazon workers coming together to demand pay, benefits, and working conditions compatible with a dignified livelihood for all workers. We are a community of Amazon workers in the Triangle advocating for ourselves and our coworkers by fighting to secure a voice for all Amazon workers across the Carolinas, starting at RDU1. We want a union of fellow workers who can collectively bargain on behalf of all workers’ needs. 

What a Union is

What a union does is make it so workers have a say in how their workplaces are run, on everything from pay, to benefits, to the nature of the work itself. Unions are vital in providing workers with a way to represent themselves against management by leveraging their collective power in the warehouse. Without this power, Amazon can dictate to workers the terms under which they work, and as a result, how they are forced to live their lives. With this power, workers gain a voice. Unions enable workers to have a real seat at the negotiating table by standing together, because, in the words of one of our founding members: “Without us, nothing moves”. 

CAUSE is not separate from Amazon workers, we are Amazon workers, coming together to fight against the conditions we have to work under, and defining the conditions we want to work for. 

What We Want

We have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of our fellow workers at RDU1. Overwhelmingly, we have heard that they too want a workplace in which they are treated with dignity and respect, and able to have a say in the work that they do. Our existence is evidence of that collective desire, as well as the fact it does not, and cannot, exist at warehouses like RDU1 without a union. 

What we want is what all Amazon workers want, a voice, through a union made up of coworkers calling for:

• Better Pay
• Dependable Hours
• More PTO
• Timely Accommodations for Injured and Disabled Workers
• A Workplace Where All Workers of All Sexes, Races, and Nationalities are Treated with Respect

The Path Ahead

We want to empower workers to demand a dignified livelihood: Who does not want that? Amazon. If workers have a voice, it means that management cannot order workers to do anything it wants. Amazon already opposes us, and will continue to oppose us as they have all unions, because they do not want workers to have any real say in how the warehouse is run. Amazon does not want us to organize for the power to negotiate contracts, because as long as Amazon workers remain divided they have no ability to resist Amazon. But together, we can lift up all our coworkers and change our workplaces for the better.