Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy
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...