I am willing to make sacrifice
Axed Amazon worker proud of role in protest
Fired Amazon worker Christian Smalls, suddenly the unemployed father of three kids, posed a simple question Tuesday to his former employer.
“How do you fire somebody in the middle of a pandemic?” asked Smalls, who lost his job one day earlier after organizing a protest outside the retail giant’s Staten Island warehouse over allegedly dangerous coronavirus conditions inside.
The rhetorical question comes with a new reality and an uncertain future for Smalls and his kids: 7-yearold twins and a 10-year-old. He remains certain the workers’ complaints were legitimate: lack of Amazon transparency and misinformation about infected employees at the facility.
The firing left Smalls out of work and utterly confused.
“They wrongfully terminated me,” Smalls told the Daily News. “I feel like everybody knows that. I was not expecting it. It was a thought that never came across my mind.”
While Amazon insisted Smalls was canned for showing up at the warehouse while under a 14-day paid quarantine ordered by the company, the ex-employee said the axing was clearly punitive. He received a phone call with word of his termination from a company official two hours after the protest in which dozens of frightened employees walked off their shifts.
Some of his fellow demonstrators demanded a total disinfection of the warehouse, compared by several workers to a sprawling petri dish with walls. Two employee cases of COVID-19 are confirmed, although protesters say the number is at least 10. “It cost me [my job],” Smalls said of the protest. “But if I’m the sacrificial lamb and I get people out of that building, so be it. … I don’t want to work for a company that doesn’t care about people.” Smalls insisted the firing would not stop his activism. The Staten Island protests will continue, he vowed, and may spread beyond the borough.
“I’ve been getting messages from all over the country from different Amazon buildings, from different employees that are thanking me for what we are doing,” he said. “They wish they had the strength to do what I’m doing. … The fight continues.”