Nimo Omar Is Rallying Workers to Stand Up to Amazon

Who in the world can fight Amazon and win? A 24-year-old Minneapolis undergrad, mobilizing one Amazon worker at a time.

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Nimo Omar has her hands full. It’s a Tuesday in late November, and while we circled a day for this interview more than a week ago, she found an extra second to confirm it only late last night. 

You can hardly blame her, really. She’s been busy. The 24-year-old had been planning and moderating a worker forum for her day job with Minneapolis’s Awood Center, an East African economic and political empowerment nonprofit that she cofounded a little more than a year ago. Meanwhile, she’d been staying on top of her undergraduate course load at St. Catherine University, in St. Paul, where she’s settled on a public policy major (after a handful of false starts).

There’s also the trifling matter of the December issue of Wired magazine, which hit newsstands in early November. The cover line? “Amazon Meets Its Match: Inside the Unlikely Showdown Between a Tech Giant and a Tiny Group of Somali Immigrants.” The cover person? Nimo Omar, the American-born daughter of Somali immigrants, who is helping lead the charge to organize the warehouse and delivery workers at the Amazon distribution center in Shakopee.

Now, the December face of Wired sits across from me at the Capella Tower Peace Coffee in downtown Minneapolis. It’s one of those unnerving late fall days where it’s nighttime dark at 4:30 pm. And Nimo Omar came straight from back-to-back classes, having fielded Awood-related phone calls on the drive from St. Paul. Despite all that she’s casual and chipper, and eager to discuss her work—something she’s been doing a lot the past week: with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and every other publication that noticed her arresting cover. 

Settled, she takes a well-earned sip of her chai tea latte, and we begin. 

From Standing Rock to Justice 4 Jamar, you’ve been involved in some fairly major local social justice movements. But it was a feature in Wired, a tech magazine, that made you famous. 

Oh my god. Right? They’re not known to talk about labor issues. I’ve been a part of so many different spaces that I never think it’s going to lead to something like this. I was always driven to do grassroots community work, because I’ve always, mentally, been an activist and organizer. But for it to lead to a cover like Wired? It’s been overwhelming. Mehdi Hasan—someone I’ve been watching on Al Jazeera since I was 15—messaged me and said, “Your story inspired me.” And that’s like, “WHAT?” Mind blowing. 

You’re 24 and still working on your undergrad, and yet you’ve already been at this for years. How did you get into this so young?  

Going back to my upbringing. I was born in Atlanta, then my mom drove up to Minnesota because she had family here. My whole world was America. But then when I traveled overseas and saw what was really happening in terms of poverty, corruption, and all that stuff—I was like, “Oh, geez, this world is not what we assumed.” So I think at a young age I was able to articulate that there’s more than just being sheltered and living life. When I got back to the United States, I was able to see that the issues happening back in East Africa were similar to what was happening here. 

I read that you had a pretty profound experience traveling back to the United States from Africa as a teen. Due to some sort of mix-up about fees you purportedly owed, you ended up in an Ethiopian prison for three days? 

It’s crazy. People ask me how it felt, how it was. But being 15, with no parents, and your brother is like 10 feet away in a cell with 40 other men—I don’t even know. One thing that gave me life was the other women in the cell, who were so consumed with how I was this American girl sitting in the room with them. But I do remember the police officers and the treatment by them. It was horrendous.

This broader moment in geopolitical history is far from ideal. But do you ever feel like it is also a strangely rich era for someone like you to be coming of age?  

There’s a quote that says something like, “You’re only one moment or one person away from a breakthrough.” And I think I’ve had a couple of those moments in my life. But it’s not a linear process. Like, if I were able to go back to my 15-year-old self and say, “You know, less than 10 years from now you’ll do some dope work,” I probably would not have believed it.

Do you see any parallels between what you helped organize at the Amazon distribution center in Shakopee—where more than 30 percent of the workers are East African—and other labor struggles in Minnesota history, like the Mesabi Iron Range strike of 1916, which was spearheaded by Finnish, Italian, and other immigrants?

In one of my courses we were talking about xenophobia and the hatred of immigrants that’s playing out in some new policies. And I was thinking—tying it back to labor—that every single generational group that came—be it Swedish, German, Somalis and East Africans—had to fight for their dignity and humanity. This is not new. I know for sure that any of the wins the Amazon workers get, everyone else is going to get the same as well.

Easier said than done, I imagine.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a worker I talked to—a middle-aged white man who lives out by St. Cloud—who drives all the way to work at Amazon, but is homeless. He was talking to me about the working conditions: He knows it, he sees it. It goes back to the fear that he might lose his job. He, like a lot of the other workers, doesn’t really have another option. If he’s let go, he’s going to be in an even darker place than he is right now. 

He’s stuck.

People are fearful and anxious, and also not educated as to what a better world could look like. So, it’s painting a picture for them: that GM workers back in the 1950s bought houses with their income, and saved money for their college students. That warehouse workers were making middle-class wages and living their lives. I’m not talking about some theory, and I’m not creating some socialist world. I’m talking about America, and I’m talking about what reality was and can be. 

How do you reconcile Amazon’s role in people’s daily lives with the desire for Amazon to do better by their workers? 

I struggle with that. People are always like, “Should I boycott Amazon? What should I do?” I asked a worker that and he said, “In order for my job to exist, people need to order our stuff.” The workers need a livelihood, and Amazon’s providing that. But Amazon could do so much better.

We touched on this earlier, but before you settled on labor issues you were sort of dabbling in other arenas of organizing and activism, from protecting water rights to protecting black lives. Were you just finding the shoe with the best fit? 

Absolutely. That’s spot on. I wanted to go into dentistry, and then I wanted to be a nurse, so my undergrad was health science. Then I changed that. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I was really struggling. My family was concerned. My parents were like, “Why are you doing all this activism? And why are you not going to school?” I was looking for meaning, and then the labor thing happened. 

And it happened by accident, right? 

It was super accidental. I went in to interpret at the airport.

You basically just answered an ad for an interpreter. 

Abso-fucking-lutely. It was like a year after the Fourth Precinct [the scene of the 2015 Jamar Clark protests]. I was kind of burned out on doing activism work and was like, “I need a steady income while I figure some things out.” But it really went well, because in a month, they won a union, and they’d been fighting for one for five years. One of my gifts is sitting with people and educating them about the issues.  

What made your once skeptical family finally come around on your career path? When you showed them the Wired cover? 

My parents couldn’t stop smiling. They’re obviously proud of me. But, you know, we’re an immigrant family. So they’re like, “Why not a doctor or a lawyer?” My parents really do understand the faith aspect of it. They see the impact on people’s lives. 

When you’re not dismantling the Amazon industrial complex, what are you doing?

I’m a human. So, yeah, I do other things. Family, that’s a big thing, but I’m also a big podcast freak. So we’ll just get together and have podcast house gatherings.

That’s a thing people do?

Yeah! That’s a thing! That’s a thing! 

Wow. I always thought of a podcast as something I do alone. 

Yeah. No. I mean, it depends on the individuals, but we just get together and talk and chat. Like, I can just forget the world, and forget what I’m doing, and just have tea with my girls and chat. And then there’s also travel. Like, I’m trying to rent a cabin up north at the end of December. Just anything to let loose. Like, this work is heavy and it’s hard, and that’s not easy.

What is the strangest effect the cover has had thus far? 

One humbling moment in all this was four different teachers in Minnesota reaching out to me and asking for a poster size [cover] of the magazine for their classroom. I want any girl to see that they can do this. And I’ve had a lot of folks popping up in my DMs. But I don’t know. It’s been overwhelming. I almost just don’t want any more exposure, which probably sounds kind of weird. 

Do you ultimately wish you hadn’t done the cover? Was it a tough decision to do it?

I prayed about it. I was like, I don’t want this. It’s super hard when you’re doing amazing work, but you know it’s not just you. It was like, if this is good, make it happen; if it’s not, then please steer it away from me. And it was actually 50/50 between me and Star Wars [for the cover]. And some of the [Wired] staff were like, “Listen, Nimo, we don’t think you’re going to make it because Star Wars is a huge thing for us.” And I was like, “Cool! That’s dope! I don’t care. Even better.” 

And yet they went with Nimo over Rey. 

Guess what? Anna Wintour from Condé Nast had to review the picture and actually told the Wired people, “Wow, this woman is pretty darn beautiful.” They were texting me this, and I was like, “Oh my god.” 

I mean, Anna Wintour has looked at a lot of beautiful people on a lot of beautiful magazine covers.

Yeah. And she told them to tell me that. So I’m like, “I’m set for life now.” In reality, we’re living in a time where women are being empowered. The last election saw the most women ever elected into the House. And women are also now being seen as people who are actually doing the work, after being ignored for so long. I want people to understand that, yes, I may not look like you. I may wear a hijab, have a different skin tone, and a different religion. But I’m also out to do the same empowering work, and that’s some bad shit. 

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