Chris Smalls

other organizers to bond with beleaguered Amazon employees by skewering the CEO as a feckless billionaire whose head was literally in the clouds. A year earlier, Smalls had demonstrated the same savvy when he had led a protest outside Bezos’s mansion in Washington, D.C., in which he set up a guillotine. (“I thought that was a little too crazy,” said Flowers.)

A visit to Bessemer, Alabama, in February 2021 finally convinced Smalls that a union was needed in Staten Island. In Bessemer, Amazon employees had invited the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union to help them organize. He couldn’t believe what he saw. He wanted to meet with local pickers, but RWDSU staff seemed uninterested in his help. “What the hell is this other union doing?” Smalls said to me. “We as Amazon workers know how to connect with other workers.”

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. They’ve largely abandoned everyone else, especially low-wage and so-called unskilled workers like the many millions of Americans who work as Walmart cashiers, fast-food employees, hospital staffers, and drivers for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash.

“I’ve been in meetings where I was appalled by what union leaders said about normal working people,” said McAlevey. “The established unions lost faith that working people could actually organize. Smalls showed them that regular workers could do this work—and they could do it as well as, and for less money than, many professional organizers.”

When Smalls and his fellow TCOEW members officially created the Amazon Labor Union and launched their union drive at JFK8 on April 20, 2021, the first thing he did was turn the S40 bus stop in front of the warehouse into a low-budget, welcome-to-all campaign grounds. To collect the signatures required for a union vote, he planted himself there in snowstorms, rain, and heat advisories, playing guitar, serving meals, ordering Lyfts and Ubers for exhausted employees, and handing out free marijuana. Inside JFK8, the growing crew of ALU members built support elbow to elbow with their co-workers. “If we were gonna form a union at Amazon,” Smalls told me, “I didn’t see how an established union could have done it.”

Such tactics succeeded in uniting the diverse Amazon workforce against its common enemy. One member, Pat Cioffi, an Italian American from Staten Island, was said to have convinced more than 500 workers inside JFK8 to change their votes to “yes” and support the ALU. Most workers liked how scrappy the union was and the fact that the ALU’s “union hall” was a dingy two-bedroom bachelor pad Spence and Daniels had rented in Staten Island. Meetings were held in their living room.

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 coworkers in the ALU, with whom they spent more time than their own families. This was the strength of a worker-led union.

After ignoring Amazon’s assistant general manager’s orders to stop delivering food to workers on Amazon property, Smalls was arrested on February 23, 2022. Some sources suggested to me that Smalls had intentionally tried to provoke the confrontation. If so, it was a brilliant move: The arrest, and the widely shared video of Smalls in handcuffs being shoved around by police, reinforced the notion that Bezos and the company were racist bullies.

Less than six weeks later, on April 1, 2022, nearly 55 percent of JFK8 employees who voted said they wanted ALU to represent them. Smalls celebrated by popping a bottle of Champagne and announcing to millions of viewers on the internet and cable news, “We went for the jugular, and we went for the top dog, because we want every other industry, every other business, to know things have changed.”

After the vote, ALU members campaigned to unionize the LDJ5 facility, which sits just across the street from JFK8 and is home to 1,600 workers who sort packages for delivery. But now, Smalls was seldom seen. Following his arrest in February, a judge gave him a deferred sentence, and if he were caught trespassing again, he could go to jail. Smalls was also busy. In May alone, he appeared at an event for a fashion-models union, on the late-night show Desus & Mero, and on the “Breakfast Club” radio show with Charlamagne Tha God. He visited a school in Staten Island, gave a speech for cuny law students, partied at various bars, and posed for photos with Questlove and Zendaya at a Time-magazine gala.

Smalls was suddenly hard for ALU members to reach. It has been widely reported that nearly 100 Amazon employees from across the country contacted him after the JFK8 victory seeking advice on how to unionize their own facilities, but according to one source who had access to the ALU inbox, few of those emails were answered.

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.

“The fact is we was all burnt out. Not just me but everybody,” Smalls told me later. “Everybody was stressed out at that time.”

Under stress, Smalls reverted to an usversus-them mentality, once going so far as to tell me that he trusted only the Four Horsemen and Anthony. “It’s crazy how privileged people think they are,” he said. “They jump onto these campaigns; they get involved at the very tail end and act like they’ve been doing this for the last two or three years like I have. Get the fuck out of here—none of them have. Where was you when we started the union? Nowhere to be found. I know who was with me. Everybody else are secondary-role players. Everybody else I can give a damn about.”

Two weeks after the victory at JFK8, Smalls and I drove out to Staten Island, where some of these tensions were already bubbling to the surface. His Suburban was cluttered with posters, a megaphone, a folding lawn chair, Bob Marley–brand rolling papers, and empty boxes; he had signed a lease on a new apartment but was living in a hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey, until movein day. At the S40 stop, dozens of employees in hooded sweatshirts and orange work vests poured off the bus. Taped to the bus stop was a flyer urging workers to vote “yes” to support the ALU, on which someone had scribbled “Fuck ALU.”

“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.

“People are starting to see him more as a celebrity in my building and not like someone local anymore,” said Mike Aguilar, a worker at LDJ5 and an ALU member. “They ran up to him and were like, ‘Can I take photos?’ And I was just like, What’s going on? People think he’s so famous, he has all that money; people are probably going to believe the rumors a little more. It’s a distraction.”

Those rumors suggested that Smalls had embezzled money to buy himself a Lamborghini and that he had used union funds to buy another ALU organizer a car. Smalls insists none of it is true. He told me he still largely lives off the GoFundMe, and in June he sold a memoir to Pantheon. “I’m broke as hell,” he told me. When I asked if any of the $400,000 the group had received in donations since April had been used for personal expenses, he said, “No. I have a treasurer, and that money goes toward the union. I don’t even touch the money. I have no access to that money. If I need something, I have to request it.” He said one of the reasons he was sometimes hard to reach was because he had to do speaking gigs to pay his rent and child support. “Just ’cause you’re on TV doesn’t mean shit,” he said. “The glitz and glamour doesn’t make you survive.” In the future, the ALU hopes to make Smalls its first full-time salaried organizer, but for now, that’s just one of the union’s many dreams.

The alleged lack of transparency, though, has continued to brew distrust. Dana Miller, a former ALU member from Queens, became alarmed that the organization had no official bank account in July 2021. Smalls, Spence, and Palmer refused, in her opinion, to delegate any tasks that would have allowed others to have access to financial information. (Spence said there is now a formal process to set the budget and allow workers to vote on it.) One day in October 2021, after Miller suggested the ALU get an accountant, the tension exploded at the S40 bus stop. Smalls demanded that Palmer, as Miller recalled it, “cut her off all the channels,” and soon she was removed from the union’s Slack and Telegram, the equivalent of being kicked out of the organization. “It was a total dictator move,” she said.

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. “In a democratic union, it shouldn’t be that way,” said Cusick, “and you can’t just blame that on being busy.”

Meanwhile, Amazon had intensified its countercampaign. The company had hired anti-union consultants who circulated inside and outside the facility to dissuade workers from joining. It had begun its own free-food program, handing out coffee and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Some employees were found destroying ALU literature. Most controversially, Amazon required employees to attend “captive-audience meetings,” sometimes holding more than 20 per day, at which anti-union consultants talked about why joining a union would supposedly lower their wages and “stifle their freedom.” (In April, National Labor Relations Board prosecutor Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memo determining that Amazon’s captiveaudience meetings were illegal.)

These tensions shadowed Smalls that day we visited Staten Island. As he and I arrived at the designated meeting spot for an interview he had scheduled with CBS Morning News just beyond Amazon’s property, he received a flurry of texts that prompted him to pull the Suburban to the side of the road. “What the fuck?” he said, reading the messages. He told me he had a stalker of sorts, allegedly a former Amazon employee who posts rumors and allegations on social media. As Smalls read the messages, his phone rang, he answered it, and before I knew what was happening, he had stepped out of the car and was shouting into the phone, “Stop being a dick rider, bro! You don’t got shit going on! Stop texting me. Stop calling me. Get a life! Stop being a leech! You don’t have proof of nothing, motherfucker!”

About 50 feet away stood an astonished CBS News crew.

“You’re famous, aren’t you?” David Pogue, the show’s host, said, walking up and shaking Smalls’s hand.

“Sort of,” Smalls said, jamming his phone into his pants pocket. He explained to Pogue the situation with the stalker and tried to brush it off as nothing remarkable, but the call had clearly frayed his nerves. He tightened his Air Jordan 45s, adjusted his black-and-white bandanna, and removed his jacket so his white ALU T-shirt underneath was more visible as Pogue tucked a mic into it. Smalls kept his Versace sunglasses on, and before the interview began, one of the cameramen asked Smalls if he would like to take them off.

“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 in the ALU culminated in the disastrous vote to unionize LDJ5. On May 2, under a low gray ceiling of rain clouds, the ALU’s core members gathered in the plaza outside the office of the NLRB in Downtown Brooklyn to monitor the vote that was being conducted on the ninth floor. When word came down that the ALU had lost, the assembled press had one question: “Where is Chris Smalls?” The face of the new-school labor movement might as well have been on a milk carton—no one knew where he was. Anthony, left in the plaza to represent the ALU, blinked at the strobe of camera flashes.

Finally, nearly four hours after the vote count began, Smalls appeared on the edge of the crowd in a patterned robe and sweatpants, like a weary boxer entering the ring. “Chris Smalls is in the house!” Anthony shouted with delight.

It turned out that Smalls had been in Detroit accepting the annual Great Expectations Award at an NAACP conference, and his flight back to New York was delayed. But his absence raised the obvious question of whether he could balance the hopes of a public that wants a working-class hero with the demands of Amazon workers who need a leader who can make their lives better. What had initially made Smalls so effective in his battle against Amazon was the way in which his life story connected him to workers—but now, as his celebrity grew, that same life story risked alienating him from his base.

“I’m not Superman,” he told the crowd. Today, Amazon has shifted its main offensive against the ALU to the courtroom. The company said it has 80 witnesses to support its claim that the ALU had engaged in illegal tactics to win, including offering marijuana in a direct quid pro quo for votes, according to a person familiar with the case. The consequences of the case could be enormous for the hundreds of thousands of Amazon workers across the country who aren’t unionized as well as the 8,000 who are. The case is also the first referendum on Smalls’s leadership approach. Were his roguish give-no-fucks methods a brilliant boon or liabilities bound to backfire?

“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.”

Even if the victory survives Amazon’s legal challenge of the vote, Smalls has an almost unfathomably difficult battle ahead back in Staten Island. The April win at JFK8 requires Amazon only to bargain in good faith with the union over a contract. The average time it takes for a newly formed union to reach a contract agreement with an employer in the U.S. is 409 days, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law, and in one-third of cases, it takes a full three years. The effort to actually get Amazon to ever agree on raises, greater job security, a reduction in algorithm-based performance quotas, a $30 starting wage, a free shuttle, or any of the union’s other demands could drag on or even fail. The ALU’s members largely aren’t paying dues yet, which means the organization is financially dependent on donations to defray legal costs. “If you don’t get a contract,” said Gene Bruskin, a labor strategist and ALU adviser, “you’ll end up being dissed by everybody. And other workers will say, ‘They won, but what the fuck good did it do?’ ”

In the past few months, the company has fired seven managers at JFK8 who it believed were sympathetic to the union, along with numerous pickers and process assistants, including Cioffi, who was revered as a master organizer. The company has also planned to ban the words union, plantation, and negotiate from a messaging app it is developing for workers. Nationwide, dozens of fired workers have filed complaints with the NLRB stating that Amazon had retaliated against them for trying to form unions, which is illegal, though the company has encountered no serious legal repercussions so far except settling several cases out of court.

One of Smalls’s ongoing sources of anger is that even while Democrats like President Biden expect the electoral support of unions and working people, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have failed to successfully challenge 80 years of policy that have helped strip unions of power. One hardly needs to look further than the revolving door between the Democratic Party Establishment and Amazon’s corporate leadership to see the ongoing effects of the cozy relationship between Democrats and big business: Jay Carney, Barack Obama’s former press secretary, has worked as a top executive at Amazon since 2015, and Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm that supported Biden’s candidacy, had been paid by Amazon to “counter-message” against the ALU in Staten Island.

Biden has promised to be the most “prounion 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.

In May, Smalls met with Biden, VicePresident Kamala Harris, and Marty Walsh, Biden’s Labor secretary, at the White House. Smalls was in Washington to testify in support of the pro Act, a national bill championed by Senator Bernie Sanders that would strengthen federal labor laws. During his meeting with the president, Smalls urged him to sign the pro Act into law by executive order. “That pen ain’t broken,” he said. “Trump used it all the time.” But Smalls quickly realized he had been brought there for a photo op so Biden could siphon off some of his clout. “You’re trouble, man,” Biden said, shaking Smalls’s hand.

“People really think that the president is really pro-union?” Smalls later told me. “Get the fuck out of here. What are we talking about?”

As White House staff snapped photos and shot video, Harris then said to Smalls, “The whole world is watching what you’re doing at Amazon.”

“Shit, Kamala,” Smalls thought to himself, growing increasingly annoyed, “they watching you, too.”

This, he stressed to me, is the burden of being Chris Smalls. Everyone—politicians, the media, his cheerleaders online, perhaps even some Amazon workers—expects him to fix what decades of weak labor laws, unrestrained corporate power, and growing inequality have created, and they expect him to do so with little political or institutional support. Even the vice-president, as Smalls understood it, was urging him to do what neither political party had been willing or able to do: bring Jeff Bezos to heel.

“We did something historical,” Smalls said, “and now the pressure is on us to fix the laws in this country, to fix the government, to fix Amazon. But we all need to be doing something, and that starts with the government. They don’t seem to understand that.”

Smalls may be distrustful or even cynical sometimes, but it’s no wonder. He, like those who gravitate toward him, has lived his whole life in a country where hard work can fail to earn you a decent existence and where the working class’s supposed allies have done little to change that fact. If there is a sense of Kismet to Smalls’s rise—that unique alchemy of inevitability and circumstance that creates all heroes—it’s due to the conjunction of his own personality with the anger that raged across the country during the pandemic. Only someone with bravery and ego in equally giant doses would ever have attempted what he did, yet his reward has often been people denouncing him as a megalomaniac for even trying and as a failure for not winning every single battle.

“This is what we do in America,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the

American Federation of Teachers. “We have heroes, and we have villains. And then someone becomes a villain if they can’t rise to astronomical expectations.”

In recent weeks, Smalls has begun to piece together something of a strategy to win a contract. “Fuck bringing AOC out to Staten Island. Fuck bringing Bernie out. It didn’t do shit for us,” he said of a highly publicized rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders that preceded the LDJ5 loss. “We need sometimes to get knocked back down on the ground and get back to basics.” According to a confidential ALU document outlining its “War for Recognition,” the plans consist of an “inside game” and an “outside game.” The outside game of garnering support from politicians and the public to serve as pressure on Amazon is mostly Smalls’s responsibility, a role that will once again challenge him to balance the demands of his public persona with his day-to-day duties as a union leader. The inside game involves bolstering support for the ALU within the facility. It will need to enlist dozens of new leaders inside the deeply polarized warehouse to be able to threaten Amazon with a strike, the most powerful tool to force the company to negotiate. “We’re not anywhere near being able to strike,” Smalls said. “We can’t even say the word strike inside JFK8 right now.”

But the symbolic victories already won by Smalls and the ALU are harder to measure, and harder for Amazon to thwart, and there are signs that his example has caught fire in other parts of the country. Workers at Amazon facilities in Campbellsville, Kentucky, and Albany formed ALU chapters in July. Workers at a warehouse in Atlanta walked off the job ahead of Prime Day, disrupting Amazon’s yearly offering of deep discounts to shoppers.

Smalls has admitted he doesn’t “know how” and he doesn’t “know when” the ALU will win a contract at JFK8, but he feels as though, existentially at least, he’s now back where he started and where he’s most comfortable: alone, locked in a battle of us versus them, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He said the interview requests have subsided since the LDJ5 loss. Union presidents don’t return his calls. And even though he has secured the support of some old-school unions, including $250,000 from the American Federation of Teachers, he’s still skeptical of powerful players who have never supported people like him. “We’re isolated,” he told me. “You think these people care about us? No, they don’t give a fuck about us. We’re back to square one. They expect me to call, beg, get on my knees. Get the fuck out of here. I didn’t need y’all before, and I damn sure don’t need y’all now.”