Redefining What's Possible for Labor

The new Amazon union may inspire organizing efforts at companies that have long repelled them

- Josh Eidelson

Two years ago, on the day Christian Smalls led a walkout demanding better Covid-19 safety protections at his Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in New York City, the company fired him, saying he himself violated safety rules. There were some copycat protests scattered around the country shortly afterward, and the company’s public relations took a hit, but Amazon’s grip on its labor relations appeared very much intact. For longtime labor advocates, Smalls’s firing seemed like one more example of a targeted dismissal that achieves its goal of scaring other workers away from organizing, even if it gets reversed.

When Smalls announced that he was going to try to create a new union and that he was trying to organize the thousands of employees at his old workplace on Staten Island, that, too, seemed destined for a familiar outcome. Over the past few decades, such efforts at the most prominent nonunion companies in America have almost always ended in defeat. Instead, Smalls pulled off a shocking triumph. On April 1, when the National Labor Relations Board finished counting the ballots, his Amazon Labor Union had won 55% of the vote.

Inside the hearing room, Smalls pumped his fist. “We want to thank JeffBezos for going to space, because while he was up there, we were signing people up,” he told a crowd of supporters and reporters outside the agency’s Brooklyn office, shortly before popping a bottle of Champagne.