Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls lit a fire when he created the hashtag: #HotLaborSummer following his visit with President Joe Biden at the White House and brutally checking Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C) attempt at defending Amazon’s labor record this past May. #HotLaborSummer came out of an off-the-cuff moment when he spoke during the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago this past June.
“We had 4,000 people from all over the country and the world underneath one roof,” Smalls said during his visit to the office of Random Lengths News this past month. “Naturally, I was a part of a keynote speaking, I was with Bernie Sanders and and others. It just naturally came out and I kind of ran with it on Twitter and now the organizing world embraced it,” he said.
Since the nascent Amazon Labor Union’s victory in organizing the JFK8 Staten Island warehouse this past April, Smalls has been in a whirlwind of attention and traveling across the country lending his voice to labor actions in cities from coast to coast.
Smalls and Keeling are different from labor leaders of old, but they have more in common with labor’s trailblazers than realized.
“In Cleveland, they organized a couple of stores after I left there,” Smalls said at the start of the interview.
“Then I visited Texas…There’s a lot of great energy down in Austin right now. These are people who are going to target Tesla,” Smalls said.
Smalls said New York is buzzing right now with the news spreading that Apple and Google workers are starting to form unions. Trader Joe’s in Massachusetts is the first store in the nation to unionize and the list grows every day. Smalls said he has people reaching out to him from across industries, from insurance companies to car washes.
These companies pour billions of dollars into fighting against organized labor, Smalls noted. Smalls characterized traditional-styled organizing as often being done in secrecy, or a number of militant actions staged within the workshop as being ineffective.
These companies [00:06:10] design their businesses [in such a way] and use their tactics so well that they’re able to withstand these tactics by just hiring and firing people.
“[But] the type of guys who are [organizing] from within, they are very difficult to fire,” Smalls explained.
“When you got your whole workforce inside the building formed into a workers collective, as opposed to an established union that had to come and learn the ins and outs of the company, and learn how to organize within the company. They [third party unions] had to learn the data, metrics and language and that takes time… It’s very difficult to organize from the outside in,” Smalls said.
“But when you’re an actual worker who has been invested and living the reality of the grievances that we’re fighting for, it’s very easy to have these conversations with them,” Smalls said.
This reality became clearer to Smalls when he started leaving his state to help organize another warehouse. He said he noticed while on the campaign when he had conversations with Amazon workers, it was easier coming from him, a former Amazon worker.
Smalls started working for Amazon in 2015 and was happy there. He was getting promotions until he hit a wall trying to get promoted higher into management. He worked there for four and a half years. He said from a process assistant, it takes two years to become a salaried manager.
“So when I applied several times and didn’t get anywhere, I didn’t get the feedback that I thought I deserved,” Smalls said. “I realized that there was something deeper and systemically wrong with Amazon when it comes to its equal employment opportunities, especially for black and brown workers.”
He said he applied to become a manager more than 50 times. Unfortunately, it took me four and a half years to realize that two interviews [out of those 50 applications] were unacceptable.
“Especially when I opened up three buildings and trained hundreds of their employees,” Smalls said. “There’s no way that I shouldn’t have been a manager from the qualifications that I had, so it was easy for me to fight and stand up when the time came.”
Smalls noted that Amazon has 14 leadership principles they preach… at least to management. “They have it all over their warehouses,” Smalls said. His favorite one was No. 13: “Have a backbone, disagree, and commit.”
“They didn’t like that one, but it was their principle and I used it often,” Smalls said. “I used it before organizing the union, I used it as I was moving up in the company, working in the company. So for me disagreeing to how they treated us during Covid was one step, and having a backbone and committing to getting to a place where there were some results that was going to benefit us, that’s the commitment side. Unfortunately they fired me.”
But now he’s using the same principles he learned from Amazon to grow the union. Smalls said that despite its principles and efforts in tinkering with its culture of work, Amazon has always been disconnected from its workers and always been disconnected from the community.
“We prove that theory once we won our election,” Smalls said. Amazon spent $4.3 million opposing the union effort. Smalls said it was probably more.
“They put these anti-worker propaganda in front of workers, a captive audience of over 3,000 and they got myself and others arrested several times,” Smalls said. “[Amazon] did all these things and thought that there was no chance that we were going to even be successful.”
Smalls said Amazon big wigs were very celebratory on the last day of the election because they calculated they won by a landslide.
“They used whatever they could and what they failed to realize is that we are so much more connected to the workers and they underestimated that,” Smalls said. Amazon thinks that workers are going to listen to them just by you telling them to say, ‘vote No’. But it doesn’t work that way. We earned the trust and we built our relationships every single day on the ground.”
In Staten Island, a full-time worker faces a commute of two and a half to three hours depending on the borough a worker lives. Then the worker has a shift of 10 to 12 hours. If you work a 10 hour shift, you had a four day work day. If you work a 12 hour work day, you had a three day work week. Smalls noted that Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights was the worst shift to ever have.
“I did that one as well,” Smalls said.
These buildings are a million square feet, the size of 14 NFL football fields. By the end of a single shift at Amazon, Smalls explained that a worker would have completed a whole regiment of calisthenics and have walked the length of Rhode Island from east to west in a single shift.
“I used to tell my new hires, ‘if you’ve got a gym membership, you might want to cancel it,’” Small said.
“As far as operations as a picker, you’re required to pick 400 items an hour,” Smalls explained. The average is about 4,000 to 5,000 items a day that you’re touching and that’s just one normal day for an Amazon worker. For part-time workers, it’s the same thing. It’s just a lot less hours. They do about 20 to 25 hours a week, but they still suffer the same injuries and have the same grievances as any full-time worker.”
“You’re given a paid one 30-minute lunch and there’s a second 30 min break which is unpaid, so you may get two breaks,” Smalls explained.
Amazon’s warehouses fundamentally discriminate against older workers and workers with physical challenges. Amazon workers over the years have said those with military backgrounds were a better fit because of the regimented nature of Amazon’s automated warehouses. YouTube videos of work in Amazon warehouses depict an almost Disneyesque quality of humans working harmoniously with robots 10 to 12 hours a day instead of the reality that these human workers are being forced to meet certain efficiency metrics in an inflexible automaton system.
“I’ve seen them for years,” Smalls said of the videos. “They use South Park-like characters and make [Amazon] look like it’s a fun place to work.”
Smalls sees the videos as Amazon’s effort to spread propaganda as well.
“It’s more about them trying to water down union-busting but it’s for them into safety, protocols or whatever they want to frame it as but we see we see right through that. And what that does not get articulate is the very fact that when workers are in the same position who in the same motions repeatedly for ten hours straight, but 30-minute break, behind whatever problem here, it actually causes actual physical damage, forcing [00:16:12] people to get, no, actual physical therapy in order to even heal or deal with these issues they might not even be able to afford.
I know people who died working there. That’s unfortunate, especially even after we tried to protect people when it came to COVID-19.
The company dropped the ball on that. And now, as a result, several people from that facility have lost their lives.
One in particular down in Virginia, Poushawn Brown, a 38-year-old black woman who was Covid testing station at Amazon but with no proper PPE, no facial masks, and no N-95. No nightgown or any type of gown. No Plexiglas. She left behind a 12-year-old daughter, Gabby. motherless.
Smalls said he has stayed in touch with the family.
“I had to actually help push the raise money because Amazon has not only been held accountable,” Smalls said. “[The company] offered them two months of family counseling, which already expired over a year ago.”
Smalls said these are just stories that get buried by the media.
“I can go on and on and I got fifty thousand emails [that tell these stories] I know it’s our to amplify these things.”
COVID is when this all began.
He and his partner Derrick Palmer staged a walkout on March 30, 2020. He was fired two hours later. A couple of weeks later, Amazon’s internal memos between Jeff Bezos and his general counsel in which they described Smalls as not smart or articulate.
“Ironically, I ended up being the face of the whole unionized efforts against Amazon,” Smalls said. “So I spent that next year protesting, advocating still in front of Jeff Bezos mansions and penthouses across the country.”
When we returned to Staten Island, organizers in Alabama were just getting started in campaigning in Bessemer.
“We drove down there. We saw some things, learn some things as well, and we came back and we said we’re going to try our efforts on April 2021,” Smalls said. “We campaigned for about 11 months until we were victorious on April 1st of this year in Staten Island.”
Smalls said he is inspired by the folks he’s organizing with and inspired by all the other Industries that are starting to organize.
“I think we’re writing history as we speak,” Smalls said. “It’s always good to read up on history and revert back to it. But I also think that it’s important that we realized the moment that were in.”
Smalls said this new crop of labor leaders have to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, but it’s difficult when it’s Amazon you’re up against.
“That’s never been done before,” Smalls said. “I know there’s been a lot of organized factories and warehouses but still Amazon uses technology and metrics like no other company.”
Smalls explained that the type of oligarchy that the ALU is up against is unprecedented.
The 33 year-old labor leader also noted that avoiding the business of politics in their organizing has been key.
“When you talk about 8,300 people, there is no way they are all going to be Democrats, so we can’t fall into that rabbit hole of just saying, ‘we only support certain candidates.’”
The youthful labor leader said, “being Independent is being independent.” The ALU only builds on all the commonalities of workplace issues.
“That’s how we were able to get the support of the people whether they supported Trump… Biden or communism. It doesn’t matter to us. We’re talking about the issues inside the warehouse, which everybody can agree,” Smalls said.
“For us, that’s how the identity of the ALU was formed into one big family. And we’re going to have people from all different backgrounds and everybody should have a voice.”
If there’s a word to sum up the ALU’s organizing strategy and tactics, “Love” is the word that comes to mind. Smalls said love is how they beat Amazon in Staten Island.
“It wasn’t numbers… It wasn’t metrics… And it definitely wasn’t money,” Smalls said. “It doesn’t matter what they throw at us. We knew that by showing the workers that we care for one another showing up every day, having conversations and just being there whether it was to be a shoulder to lean on or to cry on, we were there for them.”
That’s the type of love workers want when it comes to their workplace,” Smalls argued. “We showed that in our campaign, you know, paying for Uber rides having barbecues giving out food every day, having bonfires. That was real love they wanted and that’s the reason why we were able to beat Amazon.”
The ALU president said their new union’s next step was to just continue organizing and building up their stronghold, while helping to launch a few other campaigns.
“We already started in Albany. Kentucky is up next and we got some other ones that are going to go public soon,” Smalls said.” We’re going to help those campaigns along with anybody else that wants our assistance as far as the ALU is concerned.”
And the only thing we could do is prepare and hopefully negotiate a contract once this court verdict comes back, which we’re waiting for right now .