Peak season means mandatory overtime at RDU1, so most of the Amazon workers who showed up to Tuesday’s Garner Town Council meeting arrived after the window for public comment had closed.
Mary Hill had hoped to address the council on the recent arrests of three people affiliated with C.A.U.S.E., the unionization movement she and recently-fired worker Ryan Brown launched at RDU1 in 2022.
Hill did make it in time to watch one of the three arrestees, Eleanor Ross, speak. An NC State graduate who works at a consulting firm in Garner, Ross was arrested on December 6 while distributing free food and helping to collect union cards outside RDU1 during a shift change. Ross is not an Amazon employee.
Garner Police Captain Michael Medlin wrote in an email to the INDY that Amazon called GPD to the warehouse on December 6 “because people had a table set up and engaged with employees as they came to work.”
“Amazon wanted them to leave and be trespassed from the property,” Medlin wrote. He did not identify anyone arrested by name.
Ross and another person “refused to give their identification for the trespass notice and were subsequently arrested for Resist, Delay, and Obstruction,” according to Medlin, while the third arrestee, Orin Starn, “supplied his information and was trespassed from the property.” Starn then “stated that he wanted to be arrested and refused to vacate the property,” Medlin wrote, leading to a second-degree trespassing charge.
Medlin told the INDY that to his knowledge, GPD has not previously responded to calls about non-employees being on the premises at RDU1. (Starn, who was fired from Amazon earlier this year, argues that he is still an employee: “Before being arrested I told the officer that I had the right to be there, ” Starn says. “The National Labor Relations Act says you’re still an employee if you have an active unfair labor practice complaint, which I do. I pulled out a copy of the law and proof of my active complaint, but he did not want to look at it.”)
According to Ross, the property regularly hosts all kinds of visitors who aren’t Amazon employees. To the Garner council, she described what she called Amazon’s selective enforcement of property restrictions.
“Amazon claimed that people who aren’t workers are not allowed on the property for the safety of the workers,” Ross said. “But that parking lot is constantly full of people who are not Amazon workers—Uber drivers, food delivery people, friends or family of workers, and even vendors who come to sell food during shift breaks.
“However immoral and disgraceful I find these arrests to be, I recognize that Amazon has the right to call the police and trespass people from their property,” Ross continued. “But something that is within the town’s power to change is the ordinance severely limiting the power of picket lines.”
The ordinance restricts picket lines to sidewalks and limits them to 10 people—spaced at least 15 feet apart—per block. It also mandates that signs carried by picketers must not be “derogatory or defamatory in nature.”
Another C.A.U.S.E. supporter, Jody Anderson, told the council that the ordinance was enacted in 1959 “as part of the same racist and anti-worker push that led to NC passing the Jim Crow law banning public sector collective bargaining.”
Rick Mercier, communications director for the Town of Garner, told the INDY that Garner’s legal department “currently is undertaking a comprehensive review of all Town ordinances, and this is one of the ordinances that will be reviewed.”
“Council will take under consideration any proposed updates to the ordinance,” Mercier wrote in an email.
When the meeting shifted from public comments to a resolution celebrating a retiring police officer, the group—Ross and Anderson, Hill and four other current RDU1 workers, and Erroll Macleod, a former RDU1 worker and C.A.U.S.E. organizer who was fired last month following what he described as a “passionate conversation” with a manager about labor-sharing practices—filed out of the chambers and gathered outside.
Standing beneath a giant wreath chained to the facade of town hall, Hill read the statement she’d planned to deliver during public comment as someone livestreamed on C.A.U.S.E.’s social media.
“They’re thinking, ‘well, they’ve lost their leader, so now maybe they’ll just tuck their little tails and go away,’” Hill said, referring to Brown’s termination. “Well, that’s gonna make us stronger. We’re gonna fight harder.”
Amazon has maintained that Brown’s termination was not related to union activity. As Hill spoke about working conditions at RDU1, two police officers approached. The scene seemed primed for confrontation, coming less than two weeks after C.A.U.S.E. supporters were arrested at the warehouse. But Garner Police Chief Lorie Smith and Captain Medlin introduced themselves with broad smiles. “If y’all need anything, Garner PD is just across the parking lot,” Smith said.
“Would you cut us some slack, Ms. Police Chief?” Hill asked, drawing laughs from both officers and workers.
“We’re not gonna pick a side one way or the other,” Medlin said. “We’re just gonna do our jobs and enforce the law.
The officers left and Hill continued talking about workplace concerns, including safety issues at the warehouse, which stands where the ConAgra Slim Jim plant operated before a deadly explosion in 2009.
The past week has seen both broader scrutiny of Amazon’s safety practices—a Senate committee report released Sunday found that Amazon prioritizes productivity over preventing worker injuries—and escalating labor action nationwide. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers at seven Amazon facilities across the country went on strike Thursday in a coordinated action launched by the Teamsters union.
“If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien wrote in a release. “We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.”
While C.A.U.S.E. has collaborated with the Teamsters on previous actions, RDU1 is not among the striking facilities and the Garner warehouse’s unionization effort remains independent rather than affiliating with an established union.
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment about the December 6 arrests, the Senate committee report, or the ongoing strike.
Correction: Orin Starn was fired from Amazon earlier this year, not last year. The story has been corrected.
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected]
You must be logged in to post a comment.