Amazon is fighting to crush a burgeoning union wave, which had its first victory at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, NY, earlier this year. In recent months, pro-union Amazon workers have found themselves the target of suspected retaliation by management at their work sites. Albert Elliott, a former Amazon employee and organizer with the rank-and-file group Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE), is the latest worker-organizer to be terminated in an act of suspected retaliation. CAUSE began organizing workers at Amazon facilities in North Carolina earlier this year, including the RDU1 distribution center, where Elliott worked for two years as part of a 4,000-strong workforce. CAUSE organizers say workers are forced to endure brutally long shifts in sweltering facilities under constant surveillance by managers. Workers regularly struggle to make ends meet on their $15 hourly wages, and some have even been driven to attempt suicide. Real News editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Elliott to learn more about conditions in Amazon’s North Carolina facilities, and the suspicious circumstances of his firing.

You can support CAUSE’s organizing efforts by donating to their GoFundMe. 

Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden

TRANSCRIPT

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Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.