Amazon has fired the worker who spearheaded the growing unionization movement inside the company’s RDU1 warehouse in Garner.
Ryan Brown’s termination on December 3 followed an alleged exchange in late November, when Amazon claims Brown called two managers an “Uncle Tom” and a “bitch” in the warehouse parking lot, according to emails reviewed by the INDY. Brown, who is Black, denies making these comments, though he acknowledges telling a Black manager that the manager was “not trained for a Negro like me” and that the manager should “get back in that field.”
At the time, Brown was distributing free food to workers outside the warehouse and collecting union authorization cards. He was joined by members and supporters of RDU1’s fledgling union, known as Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, or C.A.U.S.E. It was the evening before Thanksgiving and managers had come out to inquire whether the people there were employees, and threatened to call the police for trespassing, says Brown. (A week and a half later, on December 7, three C.A.U.S.E. supporters were arrested while distributing food outside RDU1.)
Brown, who founded C.A.U.S.E. with coworker Mary Hill in 2022, says Amazon had already been investigating him prior to the alleged incident. Emails reviewed by the INDY show that in early November, Amazon HR began contacting Brown about an investigation into “alleged behavior,” though Amazon did not specify what behavior was being investigated. Brown declined to participate in the investigation, seeing it as part of a pattern of Amazon “throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks” in attempts to get rid of him, he says, and adding that Amazon would not have allowed him to have a lawyer present during conversations with HR.
On November 15, an Amazon employee relations manager wrote to Brown, “I am extending one final opportunity to speak with you regarding your alleged behavior,” and stated that the investigation would be concluded by November 20.
Then, on November 27, the exchange occurred that Amazon would cite as grounds for Brown’s termination, stating in a December 3 email that an investigation “confirmed you called a manager a ‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘bitch’”’ in violation of Amazon’s Anti-Harassment Policy.
In a statement to the INDY, Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards wrote that while Amazon does not “normally discuss personnel matters, since Mr. Brown has chosen to push misinformation to the media, we’re compelled to share the facts.”
“Mr. Brown was terminated for repeated misconduct that included making derogatory and racists [sic] comments to his co-workers,” Hards wrote. “Mr. Brown has a history of using derogatory and racist language and following a previous investigation that substantiated similar misconduct, he was issued a final written warning. His most recent violation resulted in his termination because we don’t tolerate that type of inappropriate behavior at Amazon.”
Now unemployed after four years of simultaneously working at and organizing against Amazon, Brown says the past few days have brought a bittersweet reprieve.
“These past couple days have been the best sleep I’ve had in a few years,” he says. “I’m depleted—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically. I’ve been fighting them for so long.”
Brown’s termination comes at a critical moment in C.A.U.S.E.’s card-signing campaign. The group began collecting union authorization cards in September. They need signatures from 30 percent of hourly workers to trigger a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—a particularly demanding threshold at Amazon facilities, where annual turnover rates exceed 100 percent.
Only one Amazon facility in the U.S. has successfully unionized—JFK8. Two other warehouses, including one in Bessemer, Alabama, managed to trigger union elections but failed to pass them. If C.A.U.S.E. succeeds in collecting enough cards and winning an election, RDU1 would become the first unionized Amazon facility in the South.
Brown is not the first C.A.U.S.E. organizer who’s been terminated from RDU1. Orin Starn—a Duke anthropology professor who worked at the warehouse for six months last year while researching a book about Amazon—was a key organizer, particularly effective at building relationships with Spanish-speaking workers. He was fired after making a social media post showing him making an after-hours toast to the union in the parking lot. Amazon claimed this violated its drug and alcohol policy, though Starn maintains in an NLRB appeal that the policy only prohibits working under the influence, not off-duty consumption in the parking lot. In his appeal, Starn maintains that Amazon used the post as a pretext to terminate him for his union activities.
Hards wrote in a statement that “The decision to terminate Mr. Starn is unrelated to whether he supports any particular cause or group. Mr. Starn was terminated for violating Amazon’s drug and alcohol policy, a violation that has resulted in several other terminations at RDU1.”
Another C.A.U.S.E. organizer, Erroll Macleod, was fired this fall, shortly after returning from Washington, D.C., where he had traveled with a C.A.U.S.E. delegation to meet Senator Bernie Sanders. The termination followed an investigation into what Macleod describes as a “passionate conversation” with a manager about labor-sharing practices. Macleod says he voiced frustration about how the department’s time-sharing system differed from what workers had been told to expect.
HR called him in for questioning, Macleod says, and accused him of cursing at the manager—though according to Macleod, HR told him that security cameras showed no threatening body language and that no one had overheard the alleged comments. They placed him on paid suspension while continuing to investigate. Two months later, in September, Macleod says HR called to tell him that “somebody finally came forward” about the incident. He was terminated for behavioral misconduct and deemed ineligible for rehire, he says.
“It seems like they were spending those two months trying to figure out how to fire me,” Macleod tells the INDY.
Hards did not comment on Macleod’s termination.
Starn filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge (ULP) regarding his termination with the NLRB in January. After the board dismissed his charge in October, Starn appealed the decision and is awaiting a response. Brown and Macleod plan to file their own ULPs this week.
Regarding his own termination, Brown acknowledges that his “get back in that field” comment crossed a line: “I can interpret that as being racist,” he says. But he maintains he never made the specific comments cited in his notice of dismissal.
The C.A.U.S.E. Twitter account has previously used inflammatory rhetoric similar to the comments Brown was accused of making. In August, the account posted photos of a Black RDU1 manager with text reading “Coon: A white supremacist trapped in a black person’s body. Similar to an ‘Uncle Tom.’”
“Just to be very straightforward with you: we’ve been quite vulgar in our language since we started this,” Brown says. He says strong language serves multiple purposes: giving workers an outlet for their raw emotions about working conditions, and also pushing back against management’s psychological tactics. “We’re at war,” he says. “They play mind games with us. They break us down mentally… so these same people who are doing this, we return the favor and we play mental games with them.”
Brown says he hopes to channel his experience into becoming a professional labor organizer. While his termination from Amazon might make some RDU1 workers more hesitant to engage with the union campaign, he maintains that C.A.U.S.E.’s momentum will continue.
“Of course there will be some workers who will be discouraged,” he says. “But I’m not the union. The union is all of us.”
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