Chris Smalls became the new face of labor when he spearheaded a unionization drive at an Amazon packing facility in Staten Island. Now he is trying to replicate that success across the country. wesenzinna reports
“I’m not gonna say I’m the Second Coming of Malcolm X,” he said, “but there’s a lot of things that happened in his life that I can absolutely relate to.”
Smalls, who was still unemployed at the time, admitted to me that he mostly survived off this GoFundMe account, which had been created for him by a supporter in Virginia and advertised as a fund to “support us Essential Workers.” While it wasn’t illegal, or necessarily unethical, for him to use GoFundMe money for whatever he wanted, Smalls had allegedly told the women he planned to file paperwork for TCOEW as a 501 nonprofit, but he never followed through.
But his father was soon back in prison. “When they come out, ex-cons, they don’t set them up for success,” Smalls continued. “He literally got a job and tried to do the right thing,” but then “he got laid off after they did a background check.” In 2017, his father was imprisoned again, this time for armed robbery.
Since the 1950s, the share of union members in the workforce has declined from 35 percent to just 10 percent. Most major unions have responded by consolidating their power in the few industries in which they have a foothold: highly skilled jobs like construction and public-sector jobs like teaching.
In May 2021, JFK8’s general manager, Felipe Santos, emailed the letter that Washington and Hoeper had written a year earlier accusing Smalls of financial impropriety to every single JFK8 employee in an attempt to delegitimize the ALU, but this effort backfired. No one was going to believe the word of management over Smalls or their co-workers in the ALU, with whom they spent more time than their own families. This was the strength of a worker-led union.
When one new organizer in the LDJ5 facility told Smalls that she needed help and that his absence from Staten Island was hurting her organizing efforts, he allegedly told her not to be “codependent.” In a meeting, he berated the same organizer so much that she cried, according to someone who was present. He also said that “salts” — those who get jobs at Amazon only to unionize it and who make up one-third of the ALU’s organizers — weren’t real Amazon workers, even while he publicly praised them.
“We gotta be quick — in and out,” Smalls said. “When I pop up here, security is like, ‘It’s Chris Smalls time!’ ” Despite a growing fear that they would lose the election at LDJ5, there was a festive air at the warehouse, and workers competed with one another to get a fist bump from Smalls as he exited his car. But already, other ALU members believed his notoriety had become a liability.
Something similar allegedly happened to former member Mat Cusick. Cusick said he had overheard Smalls asking Spence, who was then the ALU’s vice-president, for $800 in cash, which was given without any sort of receipt. When Cusick started to raise questions, he said, he was ultimately pushed out of the ALU last month. Cusick said no one besides Smalls knew why some key decisions were made.
“I’m not actually wearing them to look fly,” Smalls said, clearly annoyed. He explained that he wore the sunglasses because his allergies were acting up and he didn’t want his eyes to look red and puffy. “I’ll be crying on-camera,” he said. And then, after a moment, he added, “But you guys would probably love that, wouldn’t you?”The infighting
“The stakes of this case couldn’t possibly be higher,” said Jessica Ramos, a New York state senator who has worked with Smalls to limit Amazon’s use of algorithm-based quotas. “Amazon is our Alamo. For our generation, we either organize Amazon or the future of our workforce is doomed.” Biden has promised to be the most “pro-union president ever,” yet so far such claims are largely rhetorical. Amazon recently received a $10 billion government contract, even though it has been charged with hundreds of labor violations.
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