Amazon workers at a warehouse near Raleigh, North Carolina, overwhelmingly rejected the chance to form a union in another setback for the labor movement’s efforts to organize against the online retailing giant.
The vote results announced on Saturday by the Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) showed 2,447 votes opposing the union and 829 votes in support of the union at the warehouse in Garner, North Carolina.
The union received 25.3% of the vote. According to the National Labor Relations Board, at least 30% of workers need to sign cards or a petition saying they want a union in order for the NLRB to conduct an election.
A spokesperson for the NLRB said it had no comment. The board’s count of more than 4,700 eligible voters showed only 3,276 valid votes were cast. Of the votes, 77 ballots were challenged by one side or the other and not opened. Another 10 were void.
CAUSE alleged that Amazon had interfered with the vote-counting process.
“The election results today are a result of Amazon’s willingness to break the law and use its enormous wealth to try and break our movement,” the grassroots union said in a statement.
CAUSE added that it “will continue to organize because over half of Amazon employees are still struggling with food and housing insecurity.” The union, which started in 2022, said Amazon employees work for a multi-billion dollar corporation and deserve a living wage.
“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,” said Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to make this a great place to work together, and to supporting our teammates as they build their futures with us.”
In 2022, workers at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse voted to join the Amazon Labor Union, the company’s first union.
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.
Amazon has faced increased pressure from unions, despite its efforts to stave them off.
Unions face strong pushback
The workers at the Garner facility, where the company says a starting wage is $18.50 an hour and the top hourly wage is $23.80, were seeking wages of $30 an hour.
“I would challenge anyone to say $20 an hour is a livable wage here,” Italo Medelius-Marsano, one of the leaders of the organizing effort, told CNN ahead of the vote. “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 about $2.4 trillion and made $59 billion in net income in 2024, nearly double what it made the year before. Ahead of Saturday’s vote, the company said it believed its workers in Garner and elsewhere would prefer not to be in a union.
“The fact is, Amazon already offers what many unions are requesting: safe, inclusive workplaces, competitive pay, industry-leading benefits,” Hards said in a statement ahead of the vote.
North Carolina has also been hostile to union efforts. The state has the lowest percentage of union membership among workers of any state — only 2.4% of workers overall.
There’s a cultural resistance to unions, like many other right-to-work states, said Jeff Hirsch, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The state also has a powerful Chamber of Commerce and various industry groups “representing employers that would prefer that no new worker protections be passed,” said Clermont Ripley, director of the Workers’ Rights Project Director at the North Carolina Justice Center.
But there is more organizing happening throughout the state, Ripley noted, especially after the Covid pandemic when essential workers began advocating for better treatment.
“I already knew that history wasn’t on our side,” said Rev. Ryan Brown, CAUSE’s president and co-founder, after the vote results. “I had braced myself for this loss, recognizing that the probability and the odds were against us.”
This story has been updated with additional content.
CNN’s Chris Isidore and Robert Ilich contributed to this report.
