Chris Smalls visited Netroots Nation 2022 to discuss being fired from Amazon for organizing employees. He said Jeff Bezos tried to defame him.
Chris Smalls, the Amazon slayer, speaks.
It was late, and everyone was getting tired. Chris Small’s assistant had scheduled an interview with Politics Done Right to coincide with our live show. He came over and said that the interview would not happen. In my mind, I said, HELL NO. I waited for Chris to finish with another independent media outlet, bypassed his assistant, and went straight to him.
“I need five minutes of your time,” I told Chris. “Your assistant had set up an interview.”
Chris kindly obliged for a very short interview
. I know the man was tired, but my audience needed his story. Chris explained that he got fired for organizing workers. Worse, he said that Jeff Bezos and his cohort defamed him.
Here is how VOX defined Smalls.
A year ago, Chris Smalls couldn’t get politicians to return his calls.
But on a muggy morning in late April, two of the biggest names in politics — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — were making a special trip to Staten Island, New York to visit with the 33-year-old former Amazon warehouse process assistant, father-of-three, and leader of a resurgent labor movement sweeping the country.
Smalls and his former colleagues, organizing under the banner of the newly formed Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, surprised the world in early April by doing what many thought was impossible: leading the first successful US union campaign at Amazon, a tech giant that has long viewed worker organizing as an existential threat to its business, and done virtually everything in its enormous power to stop it.
We need more workers willing to stand up for all workers. Once workers are organized, corporations will not have the ability to take advantage of them as they ultimately do today. The reason that Amazon came down hard on Smalls was to use him as an examle.