Dec 15, 2024
Amazon is one of the
largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the
U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of
revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure.
But Chris Smalls took
it on anyway.
Chris had worked at
Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading
a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic
working conditions.
"We all got
radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life
changed forever when I got fired from Amazon."
Chris used that
motivation to work with his former colleagues to try to unionize
the warehouse. The first attempt failed, but in March 2022 the vote
passed, and it became the first Amazon warehouse in the United
States to be unionized.
As of today Amazon has
not come to the bargaining table and is pursuing multiple legal
actions to avoid recognizing the union, including challenging the
constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.
What's going on?
I flew down to
Hackensack, New Jersey to find out.
What really happened
at that warehouse?
And what happens
next?
Chris filled me in on
life after the union drive, why he's been traveling the globe, his
experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, what
it's like leading protests at Jeff Bezos house, and why the Amazon
Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.
Chris calls bullshit
on a lot of what we hear about labor organizing and reports on
what's happening in the street. What can we learn from socialist
countries? Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce
antitrust regulations? What does fair human work look like in an
increasingly algorithmic and AI-dominated society?
Pull up a white
plastic chair beside us in Chris's backyard as he leans back behind
dark shades and plumes of smoke to tell us how working at Amazon is
like slavery, what's happening with human jobs as automation
skyrockets, whether unions can be effective today, what politicians
represent the working class, his 3 most formative books, and much,
much more...
Let’s flip the page to
Chapter 143 now...