Amazon, Labor, and Race

Reverend Ryan Brown:

I’ve seen so much behind those walls that I feel like I’ve been in war. When this whole process is over I want to go have a conversation with someone in the medical field because I generally am showing soft signs of PTSD. You cannot be human and not see the injustice-

Danny Caine:

Monopoly power has a devastating impact on people and communities of Color. Is that a symptom of monopoly power or part of the plan? Hello, and welcome to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m your host, Danny Caine, here to bring you more stories of interesting folks doing interesting work, fighting, corporate control, and well, building local power. Today’s episode is the first in a new season, centering on how monopoly power interacts and intersects with systemic racism. The Building Local Power team was inspired to explore this vital issue by Power Play, an ILSR report written by my coworker, Sue Holmberg.

In Power Play, Sue argues that systemic racism is not simply a side effect of monopoly power. Rather, it’s a method that monopolies exploit in order to gain and hang onto that power. It flips the script on an already proven assumption. We know people in communities of Color are especially susceptible to the devastating impacts of monopoly power. Sue takes it a step further and shows, in her words, that racial disparity is not merely an outcome of monopoly power, but rather a means by which corporations attain it. We’ll have Sue on to discuss her report in detail in a few episodes. Until then, we’re going to look at a few case studies to hear stories about the people impacted by this monopoly-driven, systemic racism.

I’m really thrilled to welcome our first guests in that storytelling effort. Reverend Ryan Brown and Adam Stromme. Adam and Reverend Ryan are both leaders in Amazon CAUSE, or Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment. Amazon CAUSE is fighting to organize a union at Amazon’s RDU1 Warehouse in Garner, North Carolina, just south of Raleigh. Reverend Ryan Brown has been an Amazon worker since 2019. He’s the founder and president of CAUSE, and an ordained minister and former pastor of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. Joining him is Adam Stromme, the CAUSE community committee chair, and a member of the CAUSE Steering Committee. Adam has also been a member of DSA since 2015.

Reverend Ryan and Adam, I’m really honored to welcome you to Building Local Power. My first question I think is, and this is for both of you, whoever wants to answer it can jump in. I’m wondering about the makeup of the workers at RDU1. Who are the people that are working there? Where do they come from? How wide of a net does the warehouse draw towards it from the surrounding area in North Carolina?

Reverend Ryan Brown:

I’ll take that question. And first of all, brother Danny, I want to thank you for giving us this opportunity to speak to your viewers on building local power, something that Adam and I, and the rest of our comrades have been doing for the last three years at Amazon RDU1 in Garner, North Carolina. Our warehouse is a very diverse workhouse. It is a warehouse that is mostly made up of workers of Color, large influx of Black workers, Hispanic workers, migrant workers from Muslims or Arabic-speaking countries.

The unique thing about our warehouse, and one of the things that reasons that we also started organizing is because of the racism and discrimination that is in front of your face every day. Amazon discriminates against four unique demographics at RDU1. They discriminate against workers of Color, older workers of any color, women and disabled workers. And one of the things we noticed is that the higher and higher you get up into leadership, the wider and wider it gets. And we have several of our coworkers who are just as qualified, and the DEI that they preach is pure hypocrisy.

Danny Caine:

Thanks for that Reverend, Ryan. Adam, would you like to chime in?

Adam Stromme:

I’m the chair of the community committee, so throughout I’m just representing volunteers who have helped with this work. We tend to get a lot of support from the Research Triangle area, so it tends to be a lot of people living in Durham, Raleigh, and a pretty substantial number of people who live right near the warehouse and know how important it is in the community. But we’ve always been working to branch out and I’m very happy to say that we’ve gotten support from people all over the country in various ways, including people like yourself who have reached out to or contacted us or been in touch with us to help us get where we are. So, we’re always very appreciative. The more help the better.

Danny Caine:

That’s great. Thank you for that Adam and Reverend Ryan, and I have so many follow up questions. We’re definitely going to get to racism and discrimination later. Adam, I want to pick up on something you said, and you mentioned the importance of the warehouse to the community. Can you expand upon that a little bit? What does RDU1 mean to the area or the Research Triangle or North Carolina?

Adam Stromme:

I think a little history lesson is very indicative about RDU1. It’s on haunted ground, in my personal opinion. I looked back into the history of it because it’s a massive industrial site, it’s clearly zoned for it. It’s this very big sprawling location, and it is currently one of the largest workplaces of any size in the state of North Carolina, and it was always zoned to be a big industrial plant. So I looked into the history of it. RDU1 is on the site of what used to be a former meatpacking plant. In fact, I believe it’s specialized in poultry processing. It’s actually on 4851 Jones Sausage Road in Garner. And Garner is not a big town, so if you have a plant that is employing thousands upon thousands of people, as is the case in Garner, that is the big enterprise. So then one logically asks, well how did Amazon get there?

And the answer is that there was actually an industrial accident. There was a natural gas leak at the poultry plant that blew up and it killed workers. There was a massive settlement. The plant was shuttered. It was a ConAgra facility, if my memory serves, payouts had to be made to the families, and the facility just sat empty. It was a lot for a number of years, and the Garner city government obviously was losing a lot of previously expected tax revenues as a result of that. But you close up a place like that, that’s set aside like that, it’s too expensive for a lot of these deindustrialized areas, really depressed areas, to quickly pivot. Those are exactly the kind of communities, especially one near an airport and off of I-40, which are big air shipping and interstate logistics hubs, respectively, that Amazon preys on.

And so, Amazon reached out a number of years ago to the city government, did what they do, which is when a sweetheart deal, I’m sure there were tax breaks. They get their representatives into basically squeeze them as hard as they can, and they opened up a facility. But I would just close on this note, which is really telling about the scale of the struggle, and what I mean when I say that there are local people who understand how important it’s that we win here. I was at an event that we organized with workers, talking to workers, trying to give them more explanation about what unions are, what CAUSE is trying to do. And I sat next to a guy and I got into a conversation with him. He was a Black worker, I believe he worked on the first floor, and he was telling me a little bit about himself.

He worked at that ConAgra plant. He was there the day the natural gas explosion happened. He remembers where he was. He remembers the confusion, the fear, the fallout from it. Obviously, he basically lost his job as a result of it closing. And when you’re in a community like Garner, you wait a number of years. When that facility reopens as an Amazon plan, it is really the only game of town, and the only game across a lot of towns that people can go to get a job that pays more than starvation wages. It’s not, really, these days it’s about starvation wages, but it’s better, quite frankly, than some of the smaller facilities that you see.

And so, I think it’s really important to stress that that is why this struggle is so important, and that is why people like myself, who otherwise have no direct relation to this warehouse, nonetheless, when we learned about what was going on and we heard from people like Reverend Ryan, what’s going on, that we immediately understand the scale of the struggle. You go to this warehouse and it’s massive. And that is ultimately why it is so important that we win here.

That was a long explanation, but I think it’s really important that people understand that predatory relationship of Amazon to this community, the importance of that lot and the warehouse to the facility, it’s all interconnected and it all means that CAUSE really has to win, not just for the immediate workers but for that community across multiple generations.

Danny Caine:

Not to mention the site itself, the very address has a legacy of harmful workplace conditions regardless of who is in control of the property. So, Reverend Ryan, you work at RDU1. I’d love to hear a little bit about your work, what you do and what’s it like inside, what are the challenging aspects of the job and perhaps what led to an organizing effort with CAUSE in the unionizing?

Reverend Ryan Brown:

Okay, so thank you for that question. I’ve been employed with Scamazon now for five years. At the RDU1 plant in Garner, I work in a department called Single Pack. And since our organizing started, now I am forced against my will to go work in Pick, and they sold it to workers as that it was for your safety. Well, because they don’t want you working the same muscles. Myself and other co-workers, we work back to back to back in the same department working the same muscle, so we know that that’s not true. And if I could be candid with you, I’ve seen so much behind those walls that I feel like I’ve been in war.

When this whole process is over, I want to go have a conversation with someone in the medical field because I generally am showing soft signs of PTSD. You cannot be human and not see the injustice in there. How folks will pass out, folks who are working so hard and Amazon demands so much on them, but they don’t provide them a living wage that allows them to live a dignified life. And these people have to leave work and go work two or three other jobs because they’re barely getting by. At the heart of who I am, I’m a pastor, I love people, all of God’s people, regardless of your sexual orientation, have you identified pronouns, your religion, it don’t matter to me. And we started organizing right at the pandemic. And I will hasten to conclude answering this question, but let me put that in perspective for you.

When the pandemic first hit, I was at Amazon. Those first two months, I was like, “Wow, this feels really good.” We had a two or $3 pay increase. Any time worked over 40 was not time and a half, it was double over time. And if we felt like we wasn’t feeling well, we could leave and time wouldn’t be counting against us. And in two months, they rolled all those benefits away. And for the first time in my life during that period, I was proud to be an American. I’ve never served our country in the military, but I was on the front lines helping my fellow Americans get the essentials and other things that they need because they couldn’t go out.

During that time Amazon would tell us that there were individuals who had tested positive. They wouldn’t tell us the number of how many people tested positive of COVID and they wouldn’t tell us what department. But we started taking measures in our own hands by having discussions with one another, and so we knew where the hot spots were in the building. And so, one day I was asked to go to a part of the facility that we knew that was a hot spot and I was told that I had no choice, only a slave has no choice, and I refused to go. And in that moment, that was our proverbial Rosa Parks moment. And Mary Hill and I, Ma Mary, we started organizing our coworkers.

Danny Caine:

Thank you for sharing the insights to behind the walls at RDU1. And I’m sorry to hear about how much you’ve gone through. And it’s completely understandable how the organizing efforts started right there. So, Adam, you say you don’t have a direct relationship to RDU1. What brought you into the fight?

Adam Stromme:

So, I’m a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I’ve been a member for about nine years now. I just believe, labels aside, that labor is where you make your daily bread. Labor determines the rise and fall of communities. And I will say that what is really magical about this work is you come to be involved with the lives of so many people. I’ve been to Reverend Ryan’s house, Reverend Ryan’s been to my house. There are so many people in this campaign that I can truly call my friends, I feel, over the course of this, and that’s why it’s such rewarding work to do.

It introduces you to something that you can very easily not get, and which can really rapidly hollow out your life, which is relationships that are only essentially mercantile and business-related outside of your family. This is just people talking to people. I work from home all the time. I work horrible hours, frankly, but at a company that treats me a little better. But it’s still not a human connection in the same way that working with my coworkers are. And that’s part of the reason I wanted to help the labor movement. And that’s part of the reason why I got involved in the CAUSE campaign.

The very first thing I did, actually, was we were handing out flyers to workers to try to get a list of grievances because workers like Ryan had seen that actually it is not cataclysmic to a company’s bottom line to treat human beings like human beings. And when people took that away, I think that opened up a class consciousness about them that Amazon was only really doing that because they felt like they had to. But it shouldn’t take a pandemic that kills a million Americans for them to treat people like human beings. Let them go home if they feel sick, let them take a bathroom break. I truly believe that.

But the relationship between what happens to workers at RDU1 and what people outside of the warehouse, beyond the wall of see I think really needs to be stressed. Ryan was talking about Singles Pack. He knows the jargon so well, so I’m not going to get way into it. Ryan, correct me if I’m wrong. Singles Pack, that’s when you have only a single object that’s been ordered. People will recognize them. Those are the little tear bags that you get, or they’re the little tiny boxes that you can quickly pack up and hand out. They process hundreds of thousands of those, if not millions of those every day or every week. And the workers are just not even getting paid enough to make rent.

One of the flyerings that I did, we try to catch people as they’re getting in and out of the building. A lot of workers, we struggle to get flyers to them. Eventually, they got cool about it, but we struggled to get flyers to them because they were taking taxis, because they can’t afford the disposable income to get a car under any circumstance. And I’ve actually handed out to flyers to workers who were walking out, not only because they didn’t have a car, but because they were homeless.

And when you see that, just so much of the talk about what passes for important politics today, and what is considered a proportional and acceptable response to corporate greed and to capitalistic exploitation America. You can’t really be fooled by the propaganda anymore. What are you going to tell to me that tells me that Amazon is being a responsible employer when I just got back from a shift handing out flyers to people who are working 10-hour shifts there as the standard and still homeless? Something’s wrong in America when that happens.

Danny Caine:

So, Reverend Ryan, you mentioned Amazon’s discrimination of four different classes of people. I want to get into the nuts and bolts of that because that’s what we at Building Local Power and at ILSR are working on right now. So, tell me a little bit more about how that discrimination and racism works inside the walls of RDU1.

Reverend Ryan Brown:

If you ask most workers of Color, specifically Black workers, to describe Scamazon, you will hear several of them say that it is a 21st century plantation. Those other minority groups, who have been in prison, they will tell you it feels like a prison when they were in prison.

If I could just talk about in general how Amazon targets communities. Adam gave you the historical background of that location. Amazon strategically puts their warehouses, delivery stations at certain choke points. Where Garner’s at, just right down the road and Rock Quarry that is Southeast Raleigh, it’s a large influx of middle class Black community. So, with the Research Triangle part and The Triangle in general being a place that has a lot of folks like Adam who work from home, is prime location for Prime members. So what they do, they find a location, they put that warehouse there, and then they exploit that Black and that brown labor. And slowly but surely gentrification takes place. The rent goes up, and a lot of these workers who are working at Amazon, they are slowly but surely displaced.

The home that I live in is a piece of heaven in the country. I live here because I’m getting a little older and want a life to go a little slow and I don’t have to worry about HOAs. But if you go into my front yard, it used to be a beautiful field there. Now every day that I wake up, I have to see the back of RDU2, another Amazon facility. What’s interesting, to prove my point, I’m watching what I’ve read and seen in data happen right before my eyes. Gentrification has already taken place all around my home. I’ve seen workers, when I say older workers, be discriminated against. I’ve seen them be sent into departments that they knew that these older folks could not perform. Matter of fact, just as recently, Ma Mary, the matriarch of CAUSE, she needed an accommodation that would’ve allowed her to sit down. But one of the senior ops had a problem with this 70-year-old lady who’s fighting for her life sitting down as her accommodation said.

When I say women of any color, Adam, and you would be perfect for Amazon because you got the look, you’re bright, you’re handsome, and they’ll move you up really quick into management. When I say disabled workers, the disabled workers is a white brother, was a real good friend of mine. He worked in the indirect role and he’s autistic. I have a deep empathy for autistic population because I have a non-verbal autistic nephew. This brother that I’m talking about, he can’t read, he can’t write. Amazon knew that, so they had to put him in an indirect role, but then they forced him to go upstairs to Pick, to read a screen. The brother couldn’t read it. It frustrated him so much he quit.

I could go on and on with these stories of the discrimination, the racism, and all of the exploitations and injustices that take place on that modern-day, sweatshop, 21st century plantation.

Danny Caine:

Reverend Ryan, thank you so much for sharing those stories and those experiences. You mentioned, they strategically are putting the warehouses in these neighborhoods. And it’s not to mention the gentrification. It also has devastating environmental impacts with all the exhaust from the trucks. They’re not friendly, these warehouses, and they keep popping up in these neighborhoods. All of that is well documented. A lot of people are talking about the impacts of corporate monopolies on people of Color, and I think all of your stories are evidence to back that up.

What we’re arguing at ILSR is not that it’s a side effect of monopoly power, but it’s a tool that these companies are exploiting. Meaning, Amazon’s power was achieved through racism. It’s not an accident. They cannot achieve that power without these racist policies and this systematic racism. So I would love for both of you to weigh in with your direct experience working with all of this. Does that ring true to you?

Adam Stromme:

I’m happy to speak on it. Let me just say two things. So, Ryan spoke very eloquently about the business model, which has an obvious racial dimension. Get into these fast-growing suburbs with people with money, and then outsource as much of your labor to people who you think you can get away with paying nothing to. And then he even pointed out how perversely, the very people who then work at those facilities not only lose out on a proper job with workplace protections, real wages, and a retirement, but then the reward is that home prices around them jack up, or rent prices around them in the case of places where a lot of RDU1 workers come from jack up and it forces them out. Thank you for your time, and then they kick them out.

But the relationship of racism and a monopoly power that we’ve seen and that I think happens in America is even more crass and direct than Ryan is telling. Ryan’s story is still true, but let me just give two examples. One about North Carolina in particular, which is a really problematic racial history. And then about Amazon in particular, and the work that we’re doing. When we got started, first off, just objectively was a pretty insane thing to be trying to do. No matter how egregious it was at RDU1, you’re talking about thousands of people. And so, we went basically looking around to see if we could figure out who had done something like this before. And someone had came across Jane McAlevey’s book about organizing for power in the new Gilded Age. And there’s a chapter on there about the Smithfield Plant union drive.

And for those who haven’t read McAlevee’s book, there’s a whole chapter on it. It was a huge victory for meatpacker workers there. Just had been UFCW workers that had just been the ones that had been at Smithfield at that location, and it took them some 20 years to win a union. And we spoke with some of the organizers who were involved in that work to try to learn their story. And they really conveyed to us the extent to which race was going to be used as a weapon to divide and conquer workers in any campaign. But again, it’s not just these subtle things like gentrification that Ryan can see on his porch, but struggles to explain to people just how sinister it is. What happened, the reason that the Smithfield campaign took so long was because the meatpacking plant, Smithfield, was consciously using racial strategies to divide workers against each other. They were eventually investigated and a massive report came out because they had to throw out the entire first election because of how many illegal practices were carried out.

And one of the things that they found was that internal company documentation advised that the path to success for the company, to beat the nascent union drive, was to, in their own specific language, incite a race war between the Hispanic workers at the facility and the Black workers at the facility. Now, in North Carolina, people don’t know this, but North Carolina has one of the largest Latino populations in the entire United States. It was especially something that happened after NAFTA, when there was a lot of the free trade movement. Basically, communities in Mexico and the Central Triangle were devastated, and a lot of workers, or people, moved to places like North Carolina because there was a lot of agricultural work that was available for them.

And so, a lot of these people have been looking for jobs and we’d meet many of them at RDU1, and they are coming from positively traumatized communities looking for work, trying to make the American dream, make a better lives for themselves. And now we’re in our second story, which is you’re on the shop floor at RDU1 with people like Ryan and Ma Mary. And we find that as CAUSE is doing its work, we are hearing from workers, they’re whispers, but we always seem to trace them back to management. “Cause, that’s a Black workers’ thing, that’s a Black people thing. That’s not a… You’re a good worker. It’s the Black workers.” And it’s every vicious slander you can think of. It’s the lazy workers trying to protect themselves. It’s a Black workers’ thing, it’s just in certain departments.

Anything that you can come up with, it’s ginned up as a way to divide workers. And we’ve even found strategies that we think if provable would be illegal. We’re struggling with the fact that just because they do illegal things doesn’t seem to mean we can get the state to do anything about it. We had suspicions at one point that management was attempting to suggest that there should be a Latino workers union, with the only logical reason for that being that it would be not CAUSE, management controlled, and obviously, you can’t win an election when you are dividing up a union by race. On top of being illegal and immoral, it’s just impossible to win on that basis.

So, that’s a story from NAFTA to Smithfield to Garner and RDU1, of how racism is absolutely a tool that corporations have used, dividing workers across national boundaries from each other, and even down to the specific warehouse to keep them from uniting, joining organizations like CAUSE, and fighting for their common interest.

Danny Caine:

That horrifying story reminds me very much of what happened to Chris Smalls immediately after he was fired with the leaked memo with the Amazon execs trying to racially scapegoat him.

Adam Stromme:

Ryan can speak to this very eloquently. The casual racism, Ryan, you’ve got a trunk of horror stories, but I think you should really speak to this more. Because I still can’t believe some of the stuff that I hear from workers.

Danny Caine:

Rev. Ryan, I would love to hear you chime in.

Reverend Ryan Brown:

Okay, so thank you. I would just say yes, those racist stereotypes, I’m glad how you brought us back to Chris Smalls, how they described him. Those are the same racist stereotypes that how they have always described a marginalized groups. What I find very interesting with the union busting tactics. A lot of people, because they may not have an understanding of history as some others, they put it right in your face every day. How do they describe us? “They’re an outside group. If you feel threatened by them, file a report.” Like we’re violent people. And many of us have worked in that building since the building opened. The conversations that I have is that as early as even the Civil Rights Movement, how would they describe those freedom riders and those who were fighting for upward mobility?

Then, my also struggles with, you have the union busters that they send in. They send in an older Black lady, be the auntie, the grandma to try to talk to people. They send in the Hispanic folks to get the Hispanic people together to talk very negative about Black workers. I was shutting down captive audience meetings and this one militant Black man, and it took me about 10 minutes to realize what was going on. He was wanting an emotional reaction out of me so that they could terminate me off of my emotions because I figured that after the stereotypes you think I’m this angry Black man. And I can’t even make this up. The man whispered in my ear, “Nigga, you going to sit your down in this meeting and you aren’t going to say a damn word.” Danny and Adam and to your viewers, every fiber in me legitimately want to swing on him. But true strength is when you can restrain.

Then I’ve noticed that here lately, anytime that they have any interaction with me, they try to send Black males. The last two amateurs that they sent, we are all Black males, we all attended HBCUs, but we’re not the same type of Negroes. You understand what I’m saying? We’re made from different cloths. I fight for the oppressed, you fight for the oppressor. So, we’re not the same type of people, so I could never relate to anyone like you. But a lot of the workers, they complain. A matter of fact, and I’m going to close off this one, I’ve watched folks who shouldn’t have been promoted, get promoted. We have one gentleman, and I like this guy, and he’s a leader and I really do like him, but he doesn’t even have a high school diploma. And you have several people that’s on that floor that have education beyond high school and work there longer, but they can’t get promoted.

And so, the racism, what I try to teach and explain to people, it’s a tool that wealthy people have always used to divide us. Even in the election, it’s just a tool and a distraction. And while we’re fussing and fighting about stuff that has nothing to do with us, they’re stealing all the loot.

Danny Caine:

Thank you, both. Powerful stuff. And it strikes me now and at other points in our conversation how you both have so convincingly linked this to history. This is not new at RDU1, it’s a tactic that Amazon is using, but this stuff goes way back. This has been how people hang onto power for a long time, and it’s definitely a toolbox that corporate monopolies are using to hang onto their power. So, you’re organizing, you’re collecting cards, you’re hoping to have an election. I want to end by pivoting towards your goals and your hopes. So, both of you tell me what your hopes are for the future of Amazon CAUSE and RDU1.

Adam Stromme:

Our hope is we win. Our hope is we get union. And our hope is we figure out how to win real concessions from Amazon. Everyone involved in CAUSE believes not only in the importance of a union, but in the importance of fighting for an independent union. Opinions differ. For the most part, I think most people don’t have any problem with the existing unions, it’s just that we all value our independence and we want to be able to tell workers that we are a part of something that is truly by and for Amazon workers.

Ryan, I’m sure agrees when I say this, but the volunteers that I work with are fantastically considerate people in that they will not step out of line. They only act on the order for the workers, and they do a fine job doing that. And so, our goal is to be able to not only win the election, but help workers deliver to their coworkers the opportunity to do something really transformative. Because if we win here, and we can organize on the shop floor and we can force Amazon to the table, that single example would be a transformative moment for the labor movement.

We know that others like Smalls have struggled to bring Amazon to the table. We always want to work with other unions where we can, and with our community members to win the best possible contract for Amazon workers. But what we are doing is really unprecedented in that we remain an independent union after a really bitter campaign than Amazon has been waging. And we are doing so with no external support, except people who care and the work of the workers above all else, and we’re doing it in the South. Even the Bessemer campaign was fundamentally right. It was a union drive that continues to be driven by the workers at RWDSU. CAUSE is not like that. CAUSE has worked with and always cherishes its relations with other workers, but we are still fighting not only to win, but win big and win as an independent union in the South.

If we can win in North Carolina, one of the weakest states on labor in the country, we can win anywhere. And that is a message that I think that many people need to hear because that is the kind of politics that they can win that puts bread in their mouths and food on the table for their families. And it is just a direct artery line, in my opinion, to making America and the world a better place to live.

Reverend Ryan Brown:

That was well said, Adam. It’s really nothing to add to it. One of my favorite cartoons is Pinky and the Brain. “What are we going to do tonight?” “The same thing we do every night. We’re trying to take over the world here.” And we’re going to do it one warehouse at a time, starting at RDU1. You talked about connecting the dots with history. I am a minister, an ordained minister, and I see that what we’re doing, in my opinion, is God’s work. We’re making this world a better place. And even those workers who may not understand it now or may even reject us, we tell folks, “Well, we’re still going to fight for your children. We’re still going to fight for your grandchildren, and all of those that are younger than you.”

Jesus of Nazareth, if he is who Muslims or Jews or Christians say he is. I’m not making a theological argument here. I’m just talking about a brown Palestinian Jew named Jesus. He was a revolutionary, and he was executed because he started fighting the corruption in a nation that was occupying his land. Amazon seems similar. It’s like the Roman Empire. It comes in, it occupies our neighborhoods, and it depresses our neighborhoods, and it oppresses those residents that are in those neighborhoods. And just like that brown Palestinian Jew named Jesus, people tell his story every Sunday. We want to start a movement, and our goal and hope is that years from now that folks will still be talking about what was done in a little town called Garner, North Carolina.

Danny Caine:

Adam Stromme, Reverend Ryan Brown, thank you so much. The conversation was incredible. We find ourselves in this season where hope feels out of reach at times. But I have to say that talking to you for the last half hour has given me hope. So, best of luck in your campaign. We’ll all be following along.

If you want to stay updated on Amazon CAUSE’s efforts, follow them on social media @amazoncause on Twitter and Instagram. We’ll also share a link in the show notes to more info about Amazon CAUSE as well as the GoFundMe if you’re inclined to support their efforts. The show notes will also have a link to ILSR’s Power Play report so you can further contextualize the role systemic racism plays in monopoly power.

This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine, as well as Reggie Rucker. I edited the episode with the help of Matea Noel, who also wrote the music. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power and see you next time.

• Amazon CAUSE’s website, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter
• Donate to Amazon CAUSE
• No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey
• Leaked memo shows Amazon execs scapegoating organizer Chris Smalls with racist stereotypes
• ILSR’s Power Play report