In the early days of the pandemic, Christian Smalls made headlines for his efforts to organize the workers of one of the world’s most powerful corporations. With upwards of 800,000 employees at the time, Amazon had become notorious for the unrealistic demands it imposed on its warehouse workers. On March 30, 2020, Amazon fired Smalls for leading a walkout at the firm’s JFK8 facility on Staten Island. Two years later, his independent Amazon Labor Union would win an election to represent the workers at JFK8.
Since then, Smalls, 36, has graced magazine covers and toured Amazon warehouses around the world, helping some of them achieve impressive bargaining agreements. More recently, he has been promoting Union, a film documenting the story of the ALU, which premiered at Sundance and is slated for theatrical release in October. And as of June, the ALU has joined forces with the Teamsters, which Smalls told me “will allow Amazon workers for the first time to have strike benefits” when the time for industrial action comes—which he hints won’t be far from now.
Yet despite this progress, Smalls is frank about the obstacles facing organized labor. He says that establishment politicians “are all talk,” which is why he has opted to steer clear of the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns.