One of the flashiest critiques to emerge from the recent firestorm over Jeff Bezos cosponsoring the Met Gala came from Raleigh resident Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon worker.
On the eve of the gala—an annual display of wealth that critics found particularly grating this year with Bezos and his wife Lauren at the helm—an anti-billionaire activist group projected a video onto the side of the Bezoses’ palatial Manhattan penthouse that showed Hill addressing Bezos directly. She did not mince words.
“Shame on you, Jeff Bezos,” Hill said, her bespectacled face and yellow hoodie towering stories tall above Fifth Avenue. “The people that need to be being celebrated at the Met Gala are the workers—people like me.”
Hill went on to remind Bezos that “ordinary people” made him his billions and issued a warning: “If we built it, we can tear it down.”
Footage of the stunt has racked up more than 10 million views on Instagram and inspired a BuzzFeed listicle.
“It seemed to resonate with a whole lot of people,” Hill said. “Workers all across this country are sick and tired of being invalued and treated like we’re fungible.”
Hill, who has worked at Amazon’s RDU1 fulfillment center in Garner for the past five years—and did two years at the company’s Durham facility before that—told the INDY that neither she nor the activist group, Everybody Hates Elon, knew how the video was going to be used when it was filmed. The group captured the footage while assembling a series of anti-Bezos actions ahead of the Met Gala and eventually floated the idea of projecting it onto the penthouse. Hill thought it was genius.
“I said, ‘Heck yeah, I wish I could say it to him face-to-face,’” Hill said.
Short of that, she did get to see her message land on the penthouse with her own eyes—she was in New York the night it went up, having traveled to walk the runway the next morning at the “Ball Without Billionaires,” a worker-centered fashion show staged as a counterprotest to the Met Gala. The ball featured workers from Amazon and Whole Foods as well as former journalists from another Bezos holding, The Washington Post, which recently underwent historic layoffs.
This was not Hill’s first rodeo on the labor action front. Since 2022, when she spearheaded a unionization effort at RDU1 with her then-co-worker Ryan Brown, she’s helped build Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment, or C.A.U.S.E., into one of the most galvanizing union efforts in the South. She’s taken on an even weightier leadership role after Brown was fired in late 2024 for reasons C.A.U.S.E. maintains were union related. (Brown remains involved with C.A.U.S.E. from outside the warehouse.)
Last February, C.A.U.S.E.’s work—advocating for higher wages and safer conditions—took a blow when RDU1 workers voted nearly three-to-one against unionizing. Organizers attribute the loss largely to an aggressive anti-union campaign by Amazon, though they’ve also used the year since to reflect on what they could do differently—chiefly, broadening the fight beyond a single warehouse.
Hill had no formal organizing background before launching C.A.U.S.E., which is hard to square with how naturally the scrap of it seems to come to her. She chalks her instincts up to a life that’s required a lot of fighting: She grew up in Jim Crow Louisiana, will mark 13 years of sobriety next month, and has beaten cancer three times.
One of Hill’s most defining skills as an organizer is her ability to steer any conversation back to what she’s fighting for. It’s a kind of inversion of celebrity red carpet chatter: Instead of deflecting away from politics, she reliably routes toward them.
Asked about her Ball Without Billionaires runway outfit—a scarlet-red ensemble designed by the label Labyrinthave—Hill obliged briefly, noting that the designer had read her as “feisty” and colored the get-up accordingly. Then, swiftly, she returned to the bigger picture.
“Most of my co-workers at RDU1 work two jobs,” Hill said. “Make that make sense.”
Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.