After several Amazon workers died on the job this year, Italo Medelius-Marsano, an Amazon worker and CAUSE organizer, is on a 40 day hunger strike to protest worker deaths at Amazon facilities across the country.
In Italo’s words: “Nobody should be going to work and not coming back home to their family. So as more of these deaths came about–the death in Oregon earlier this year, and then as the death of our colleague at RDU1 came out–we started hearing about more people who had witnessed deaths here in our vicinity, in the facilities that we work in. Something just told me that we need to do something, right?”
Too many Amazon workers have died on the job just this year.
In April, an Amazon worker in Oregon collapsed and died in a warehouse. His coworkers were told to look away and keep working.[1]
One month earlier at RDU1 in North Carolina, where CAUSE is organizing, workers told us that a coworker showing signs of a stroke was sent home instead of being called an ambulance; he died the next day.[2]
And on Mother’s Day, an Amazon worker in Ohio died unexpectedly while on the job, leaving his family desperately seeking answers to how. “Amazon refused to speak to me,” his grieving mother told local news.[3]
Amazon workers across the country have shared with us that they’ve been pressured not to call 911 in an emergency. While Amazon has insisted that workers are allowed to call 911, Amazon has yet to meet demands to publicly announce such a policy to all employees.[4]
The demands of Italo’s hunger strike are simple: for Amazon to definitively allow workers to call 911 in an emergency, for Amazon to agree to hold open town halls where workers can ask union leaders and company officials about unionization, and for Amazon to sit down and negotiate in good faith with Amazon Labor Union-IBT 1 in New York.
No worker should have to go on a hunger strike to have such simple demands for safety and respect met. That Italo felt the need to take this step says everything you need to know about Amazon’s corporate greed, and why Amazon workers are fighting back and unionizing.
In Solidarity,
The Labor Force
[1]https://www.thewesternedge.media/p/everyone-is-replaceable-death-rattles
[2]https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXb5OJWkbLP/
[3]https://www.cleveland19.com/video/2026/05/12/amazon-employee-dies-northeast-ohio-fulfillment-center-family-wants-answers/
[4]https://www.instagram.com/p/DXz8mYdEk4h/