Bluesky

In 2020, then 32-year-old Chris Smalls was fired from Amazon after organizing a protest at its Staten Island warehouse against the company’s unsafe working conditions in the early days of the pandemic. At the time, the supervisor had been at the company for five years, had helped open three Amazon fulfillment centers in the Northeast, and was one of the most productive warehouse employees in the company’s network. So productive, in fact, that company management shadowed Smalls, he said, building upon his methods to increase productivity quotas for all workers. In April 2021, Smalls helped found the Amazon Labor Union, the first union in the company’s history, at the Staten Island warehouse. He has since become among the foremost faces of a new generation of labor organizers, and was named one of Time’s most influential people in 2022, with ALU cofounder Derrick Palmer.

In May 2026, Smalls made national headlines once again when he jumped a barricade at the Met Gala in protest of Jeff Bezos’s role as honorary chair and sponsor of the event, part of a broader “Ball Without Billionaires” campaign against extreme wealth concentration and worker exploitation. In his first book, When The Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class (Pantheon), out Tuesday, Smalls walks readers through his own harrowing journey to organizing for workers’ rights at Amazon, and details his hopes for the future of the labor movement, and for international solidarity movements on the whole.

The Nation spoke with Smalls about the links he sees between Amazon’s labor practices and the institution of chattel slavery, why labor organizing is so important for young people coming up in the workplace today, and the current state of the “American Dream.”

—Sara Franklin

Sara Franklin: Early on in the book, you describe, in great detail, your experience working in warehouses. You draw clear connections between these workplaces and the system of forced enslavement and labor of Black people, who built this nation’s economy. You explain that in your warehouse, “pretty much every worker was Black or brown, but every supervisor or overseer was white. The place felt like prison. A culture of fear was firmly established.” No one risked “getting into it with management.” When did you come to understand how alive and present this history remains in American labor—especially those workplaces under corporate control—today?

Chris Smalls: [The workers who assemble Amazon packages] are called “pickers.” We’re “the pick department.” They literally use this language for us. Once, a supervisor told me to “Whip your pickers back into shape.” I told him, “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

When I started in my first department in 2015, the hourly quota was 250 items per hour. Because we worked 10-hour shifts, I was touching over 2,500 packages per day. But I was so good at the job, I was doing twice that much. They never saw the numbers I was producing until I arrived. My building was actually the number-one building in the entire Amazon network. I was picking 500, 600 items an hour. That’s thousands of packages I had a hand in preparing every day. The company studied me. They’d literally have management come watch me. They called it shadowing. At first, I thought it was a good thing. I didn’t realize how valuable I was to the company. But then they began to implement what they saw me doing and increasing the quotas for all warehouse workers. It used to be 250 items an hour, then it was 275, 300, 325… Now, the average across all of Amazon is 400 items per hour in order to maintain our jobs. That means the average Amazon worker is picking over 4,000 items every single day. Doesn’t matter who you are—man or woman, old or young. This is the standard now because of [the company’s] focus on productivity and scale, on getting bigger and bigger.

When it came to how slaves had to pick cotton, it was the same type of productivity metric; the same way slaves used to pick cotton in the field, where they had to produce or pick a certain number of pounds daily and weekly, by whoever kept tabs.

Amazon is the new slavery, but with technology, mechanization, machinery, and AI.

SF: What does it feel like to say those statistics aloud, and to have to keep rehashing those stats in your public appearances?

CS: People keep saying to me, “You gotta say different things in your talks.” And I say, “This is what it takes.”

Unfortunately, in this country, a lot of people hear you, but they’re not really listening. People just see the package show up at their door and they don’t know the process that goes on behind it. They don’t know how many people have touched that package. I’m hoping that I’m spreading the message that people’s lives are at risk, no matter how small the package is.

It can be exhausting, but it’s important. I’m planting the seeds in people’s minds. Our kids, our children are going to work at corporations like this. We need to prepare them to make conscious decisions. Our fight is everyone’s fight.

SF: From your perspective, what’s the cost of our culture’s obsession with perpetual growth and with our societal expectations of success—both for people and businesses?

CS: In 2015, Amazon had seven warehouses in New Jersey. Now they have over 30. They’re not going anywhere, and they continue to build these warehouses every single year. Amazon owns 75 companies. In the next two to three years, one out of every four Americans is going to work at Amazon. Amazon has already hired and fired the equivalent of the entire American workforce in its 30 years of existence.

There are so many costs. I mean, this company has affected all of us. I say this a lot: Did Amazon adapt to us? Or have we adapted to Amazon? This company, over the past 30 years, has completely changed the way we live. Our community used to be crossing guards and teachers and bus drivers. We all grew up playing together outside. I used to be able to borrow sugar and milk from my neighbors because we knew them. My mom was a single mom; we relied upon the people around us.

We used to have to go out and go to the store. Now, we’re hitting “one-click-buy” and getting same-day deliveries. The mom and pop stores are mostly gone. The malls are ghost towns. Those stores that were fixtures of our childhood—the Toys ‘R Us, the JCPenny, the Barnes & Noble—[have] closed or, worse, Amazon is buying them up.

At Amazon, the workers are the ones who are being injured. We’re the ones who have ambulances coming every week, who are passing out from heatstroke, who are suffering miscarriages. Who are dying. I’ve literally seen someone sit down in the break room and never get back up.

Kids now are tech savvy. They have to grow up a lot faster. They’re also paying a lot more attention to what’s going on because of technology. They know a lot more. They know how to use technology.

Still, our way of life has changed. You shop online. It’s self-checkout at the grocery store. At the airport, you’re in a kiosk. Even at McDonald’s, you’re ordering on an app or screen.

You know, at the rate we’re going, AI is going to [affect] 50 percent of American jobs in the next two to three years. We need to fight for the regulation of AI. We need to fight so our jobs aren’t replaced. Not just warehouse workers—we’re talking about teachers, nurses, cashiers at the stores with self-checkout, cashless stores, or the people at call centers. You’re not talking to human beings anymore. Even in the music industry, there are artists who are signed to record labels who are AI. AI is coming for all of our jobs.

I just got back from this Big Tech conference in Vancouver. Of the over 20,000 people there, I was pretty much the only union agitator. [Corporations are] building all these data centers; this is the thing right now. Amazon just laid off 30,000 workers because they’re being replaced by AI. It’s gonna be quick, almost an overnight shift. These corporations want shortcuts. Billionaires want to save money. And if that comes at the expense of a worker, they’ll take it every time.

SF: There are some passages in your “Union Busting” and “No One to Trust” chapters that struck me as chillingly pertinent to what’s happening in this country right now.

By the 1950s, you tell us, nearly 35 percent of all American workers belonged to a union. “Income inequality was at historic lows; pension, health insurance, forty-hour workweek with overtime pay, and employee-provided health insurance became standard.… But the backlash was coming.… It’s almost like they wanted people to keep chasing the American dream so that we could keep believing in the system. But they didn’t want us to ever actually catch it.”

And you write about how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson passed a fair amount of pro-labor legislation, but how Nixon’s election in 1968—the autumn after Dr. King was assassinated—set in motion the “dramatic rollback of civil rights and labor that laid the groundwork for everything we see today,” namely, the consolidation “of white voters under the Republican banner” by, above all, implying “that Black people were and Black liberation was, by nature, un-American…They wanted white people to feel like the country was about to be destroyed by these things and that, by extension, white people were about to be destroyed.”

Can you comment on this history and its parallels with where we are right now? And what do you say to all the people who have been drinking, and continue to drink, the Kool-Aid of the so-called American Dream?

CS: What is the American Dream? It’s really just smoke and mirrors at this point. After the Great Depression, there was a rise in labor unions. Labor unions in America were thriving. Since the ’60s, there’s been a huge decline because of regulation when it comes to legislation that hasn’t been touched. We’re talking about laws from the 1940s. We saw how Biden used 1926 legislation, The Railway Labor Act, against railroad workers because they wanted more sick leave.

Trump, one of the first things he did in his first 10 days was to dismantle the National Labor [Relations] Board. Under the Biden administration, it was already $20 million in debt and understaffed. But Trump said, we’re gonna put Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary (you know, she just resigned), because they didn’t have enough directors on the board to make it a full board. It’s still [the case] as we speak. So now we have an ineffective national labor board. Whether it’s Trump or the next guy, we’ve got to understand that we have to reform labor in this country.

One job should be enough; it used to be that way. Nowadays? Absolutely not. Both parents have to work, often multiple jobs. Check to check for 60 percent of Americans, and they’re one check out from being on the street.

When I was fired in 2020 from Amazon, I had to face that full-on: Losing my main source of income and my healthcare during the pandemic was an eye-opening experience for me. I [had] put my blood, sweat, and tears into this company as an assistant manager for four and a half years, and they still didn’t give a damn about me. They still considered me replaceable. Nobody’s job is safe. The American Dream isn’t real anymore.

You know, in other countries, labor has a say in government. Musk, with his ego, sent all these Tesla batteries to Sweden a couple years ago. Now, they have 90 percent union density in that country. They wouldn’t take them. They said, “We’re going to leave your chargers to rot.” They’re still on strike against Tesla. It’s been over two and a half years. Musk tried to sue the Swedish government. He didn’t realize that’s not how it works there.

The Google tech-bros and Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos, they’re competitors. They’ve been at odds. But under the Trump administration, they’ve been united. They’re together, right now, on this one particular lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board, trying to roll back the rights of workers who want to unionize. This is moving forward right now with a federal judge in the state of Texas.

Texas has some of the lowest taxes in the country. A lot of the tech-bros are setting up shop there. All of Bezos’s space programs are in Texas; this is on purpose. There’s no accountability for what they’re doing to the environment, and the governor of Texas is another billionaire corporate guy. [SpaceX v. National Labor Relations Board] has been way underreported in mainstream media for a reason. This is an administration that’s allowing these guys to get away with murder.

SF: Following on that, at the end of your book, you say you feel strongly that workers at Amazon need to organize on an international level in order to enact real change and have broad-reaching, systemic impact. Based on your experience to date, what’s your sense of the appetite for organizing at this level? And, in a global culture that’s increasingly isolated, how do you help folks connect across such geographic range?

CS: I got my first passport three years ago, and have been to 45 countries by now. I was in Vancouver, British Columbia, not that long ago. You know why? They just successfully organized the Amazon warehouse there. Was I a part of it on the ground? No. But they studied us and what we did, and then they pulled it off themselves.

It’s not about being everywhere all the time. I can’t be. But I’m going to be there with them to celebrate their success.

We used nontraditional organizing techniques to go up against this multitrillion-dollar, behemoth company and all their anti-union propaganda. And it worked. People see me and the things I put up on social media—they call me a content creator; I don’t see myself that way—and they can relate. They get ideas. They share them. They take it and make it their own.

You know, for young folks today, if you ask them, “Do you want to be part of a labor union?.” they’re like, “Uh, no.” It doesn’t seem relatable to them. Or they don’t know what that means. That’s starting to change. The way things are trending in organizing right now is more and more about designing strategies and demands to meet basic human needs.

Labor organizing can be hard as fuck. Stressful. Extremely exhausting. You have to sacrifice so much time away from the things and people you love. So the best thing that you can do is make it fun, make it inviting. I think that’s something a lot of labor unions are failing to do.

Traditional organizing methods work in certain sectors. But when it comes to the 21st-century and technology and the tools that we have, I try to make it fashionable, cool-looking. You know, a lot of people still assume that I’m rapping even though I haven’t rapped in over a decade. I still play around with it, though. I try to get labor into different conversations, different spaces, and make it appealing to the younger generations. They’re the ones that are gonna lead the way.

Since I crashed the Met Gala, even those who weren’t aware who I was, now I’m hearing from people in the fashion industry, designers, NBA players, celebrities.… It’s good to see that, as rich as some of these people may be, they understand the power of labor organizing. That’s something that has been [missing] for a long time.

Amazon says their number-one principle is, “Work hard, have fun, and make history.” We used to joke around, “You’ll work hard at Amazon, and the history is when you get fired.” And of course, it’s not really fun. We have to really uphold that principle and make it fun. And the history we’re making? That’s getting organized.

SF: You write, “We also understand now that there are many people who have swallowed the lie that you’ll lose what you have if you care for others.” How do you try to convince people that leading with care is the only way forward in a culture that really encourages looking out for and protecting one’s own at the cost of others?

CS: I tell my organizers, just because we’re radicalized, doesn’t mean that the next person is. I got radicalized six years ago. I had the fight in me my whole life, but I got radicalized in the sense of collective power when Amazon fired me. But that doesn’t mean other people are going to feel the same way. It’s important not to approach other people with the attitude that they should do this because you know better.

It starts with befriending people. Build a relationship, earn their trust. Know what’s going on with their families, their loved ones, what schools their kids go to. You’ve always got to meet people where they’re at. Make it personal. How do you relate? Pay attention to the details, then show you care about them. That one person, that one story, might be the one that changes everything.

One day there was a worker that had high blood pressure—a common thing at Amazon—and he asked Amazon to get him an Uber so that he could get to his hospital, which was 45 minutes away. Amazon refused. So he came out to where we set up shop at the tent across the street from the building. He told me what happened, and I said, “Let’s get you an Uber right away.” We didn’t have much money, but we did it anyway. Next day, when he came back, he said, “You guys saved my life.” The hospital took him right in because his blood pressure was so high. They told him if he hadn’t been seen right away, he might’ve had a stroke. He became our biggest advocate in the building, screamed at the top of his lungs every day that everyone needed to sign up for the union because we actually care about people.

The best accountability is availability. If we weren’t available to have that conversation, that would’ve been a huge missed opportunity.

There’s always something to fight for. And we’ve got to do it with love and solidarity.