Amazon workers reject union in vote at North Carolina warehouse
File: The Amazon distribution center in Garner, N.C. opened in August 2020. Across four floors, the warehouse covers 2 million square feet.
Scott Sharpe | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
Amazon workers at a facility near Raleigh, North Carolina, overwhelmingly voted against unionizing on Saturday.
Of the 3,276 ballots cast, there were 2,447 votes opposing the union and 829 in favor, according to the National Labor Relations Board. There were 77 challenged ballots, a gap that’s too narrow to change the outcome of the election. The results still need to be certified by the NLRB.
The election at the facility, named RDU1 and located in the suburb of Garner, came after organizers with the upstart Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE) campaigned at the warehouse for the past three years. The facility employs roughly 4,700 workers.
CAUSE said in a statement that the election results were a “result of Amazon’s willingness to break the law.”
“Amazon’s relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us prove that this company is afraid of workers coming together to claim our power,” the group said. “Amazon may think it is above the law, but we will not accept a system that allows billionaires and corporations to play by a different set of rules.”
Amazon spokeswoman Eileen Hards denied that the company broke the law or interfered with the election.
“We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon,” Hards said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to make this a great place to work together, and to supporting our teammates as they build their futures with us.”
Amazon, the nation’s second-largest private employer, has long sought to keep unions out of its ranks. The strategy succeeded in the U.S. until 2022, when workers at a Staten Island warehouse voted to join the Amazon Labor Union. Last month, workers at a Whole Foods store in Philadelphia voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
Amazon responded to the Garner union drive with a barrage of anti-union messages in the warehouse, on a website, and sent through its AtoZ app to employees. A leader of the warehouse urged employees to “vote no,” saying a union “can get in the way of how we work together.” The company described CAUSE as an “outside party” that’s “claiming to be a union.”
Amazon has previously said its employees can choose whether or not to join a union, and that it speaks “openly, candidly and respectfully about these topics” so that they can “make an informed decision.”
CAUSE was founded in 2022 by RDU1 employees Mary Hill and Rev. Ryan Brown to voice concerns about the company’s response to the Covid pandemic, which they viewed as inadequate. The group sought to organize RDU1 to boost wages and secure longer breaks.
Starting pay at RDU1 is $18.50 an hour. CAUSE has pushed to negotiate for wages of $30 an hour.
In its statement on Saturday, CAUSE said it intended to continue organizing at RDU1 “because over half of Amazon employees are still struggling with food and housing insecurity.”
Labor groups have looked beyond NLRB elections in an attempt to gain a union foothold at Amazon. They’ve assisted employees with filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB against Amazon, accusing the company of violating labor laws.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters helped coordinate a picket effort at nine Amazon facilities in December. Amazon said the walkout had no impact on its operations.
The Teamsters union has said it represents 9,000 Amazon workers around the country, although the company has refused to recognize the union and bargain with leadership.
Unions have enjoyed increasing support across the country, with 67% of Americans saying they approve of labor unions, according to Gallup. But that hasn’t translated into higher membership rates. Union membership in the private sector declined slightly to 5.9% in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
North Carolina had the lowest union membership rate in the country last year, with only 2.4% of workers in the state represented, according to the BLS.
WATCH: Amazon’s first U.S. union faces an uphill battle after historic win
Medical technology, AI technology is utilized by doctors for diagnosing increasing the accuracy of patient treatments. Medical research and development innovation technology to improve patient health.
Pcess609 | Istock | Getty Images
AI startup OpenEvidence is raising a fresh round of capital from Sequoia to scale its chatbot for doctors.
The new $75 million cash injection, which has not been previously reported, values OpenEvidence at $1 billion, the two companies told CNBC.
OpenEvidence, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded by Daniel Nadler. He previously built Kensho Technologies, a Wall Street-focused artificial intelligence firm that sold to Standard & Poor’s for $700 million in 2018.
Nadler’s newest AI venture is a chatbot for physicians that helps them make better decisions at the point of care. The company claims it’s already being used by a quarter of doctors in the U.S.
Following his sale of Kensho, Nadler self-funded OpenEvidence in 2021 before raising a friends and family round in 2023. The funding from Sequoia represents the first round led by an institutional investor and brings the company’s total amount raised to more than $100 million.
The company will also use the funding to forge strategic content partnerships, OpenEvidence said. In addition to the funding, OpenEvidence announced that The New England Journal of Medicine has become a content partner, meaning clinicians using OpenEvidence can benefit from content sourced from NEJM Group journals.
The founder describes OpenEvidence as an AI copilot. While the experience may feel similar to ChatGPT, OpenEvidence is a “very different organism” due to the data it was trained on, Nadler said.
“Trust matters in medicine, and the fact that it’s trained on The New England Journal of Medicine, the fact that it’s built from the ground up for doctors — the result is a black-and-white difference in terms of accuracy,” Nadler told CNBC.
The company has licensing agreements with peer-reviewed medical journals, and OpenEvidence’s model was not connected to the public internet while trained, Nadler said. Using tailored data helped OpenEvidence avoid the pitfalls of “hallucination,” which is a phenomenon where AI will generate inaccurate, sometimes nonsensical answers to a query.
OpenEvidence offers its chatbot for free and makes money off of advertising. The product has grown organically thanks to word of mouth between doctors, Nadler said.
“Doctors work very close quarters with one another, especially on the floor in hospitals,” he said. “When one doctor pulls out their iPhone and looks at something, other doctors can see that. Their natural question is, ‘What’s that?'”
That level of organic growth was an alluring factor for Sequoia partner Pat Grady, who led the firm’s investment. Sequoia is best known for early investments in Nvidia, Apple, YouTube, Stripe, SpaceX and Airbnb.
“This is a consumer internet company masquerading as a health-care business,” Grady told CNBC, saying OpenEvidence is easy for doctors to adopt. “When they have a couple of good experiences with it, it sticks. There aren’t a lot of products in health care that get adopted the way that a consumer internet company might.”
OpenEvidence is the latest in a flood of Silicon Valley artificial intelligence deals.
The booming sector accounted for 1 in 4 venture dollars raised by startups last year, according to CB Insights. Health care has stood out as a high-potential area for the application of AI. Investors and founders have seen the technology’s ability to sift through large amounts of data, and its potential to transform everything from drug discovery to medical imaging.
“There are a lot of great ideas in health care, but it is such a complex system,” Grady said. “It’s really hard to cut through layer upon layer upon layer.”
While AI has the potential for health-care breakthroughs, there are also worries about the risks. Industry leaders have voiced concern about a “doomsday” scenario where the technology leads to a catastrophic outcome for humanity, and on the smaller scale, others worry about job displacement.
OpenEvidence’s Nadler said he thinks the health-care use cases are the antidote, and represent the upside potential of AI. He highlighted doctor burnout and projections of an almost 100,000 physician shortfall by the end of the decade.
“There’s this big question that’s on everybody’s mind right now, is AI actually going to be good for humanity or not?” Nadler said. “I think it is, inarguably, going to be good.”
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