The Little Union That Could

Introducing the "Amazon Labor Union!"

Chris Smalls, Rapper/Labor Organizer

By Keith A. Owens

Issue #43

Let us now praise Chris Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union, also known heretofore as The Little Union That Could.

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You should know that I was all prepared to write this week’s column on the beyond-long-overdue passage of the Anti-Lynching Act, an act that took over a century to pass in order to ban an activity that never, ever should have been legal to begin with. Something so horrendous should not require a vote to shut it down, because no one should be allowed to vote no. Lynching never should have existed, any more than allowing enslaved newborn Black babies to be tossed onto sharpened iron stakes for sport. 

Oh. I’m sorry. Did that image make you uncomfortable?

I could have gone on and on discussing the outrage of the entire thing, but when I read about the victory of Chris Smalls, a young Black man who brought Amazon to its knees, I felt like this was a chance to talk about something more hopeful and optimistic.

Because in the midst of so much overwhelming and depressing news that is assaulting our every reason to allow ourselves to have hope for the future, Chris Smalls showed that we can still win this thing. And by “this thing,” I mean save our country.

He also showed us that heroes don’t always look like you might think they do.

When Chris Smalls formed the Amazon Labor Union after being fired from Amazon (for protesting against the refusal of Amazon to sufficiently protect its workers during the outbreak of the pandemic, a claim which has been thoroughly verified), nobody gave him even the slightest chance of success. Amazon for damned sure wasn’t worried about him as he set up shop in a tent across the street from his former workplace. But even other labor organizers and high-up union types didn’t see how a fired former rapper sporting a gold grill in his teeth that flashed every time he smiled could conceivably manage to thwart the will of one of the largest and most powerful companies in the entire world. Especially when no other labor organizer had succeeded.

Exactly who in the hell did he think he was, anyway?

Well, now we know. When Smalls formed the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), it was not formed as an arm of any other larger union entity such as the AFL-CIO or Teamsters. This means the  ALU did not have access to any of those resources that arguably could have made their struggle a bit easier. But what Smalls had in mind was a union built specifically for Amazon employees, tailor-made to address the specific injustices heaped upon them daily by their Goliath of an employer.

And when you think about it, this was an ingenious strategy. Because it understood what should be the obvious reality, that not all working folk are experiencing the same issues simply because they are all oppressed by a large company. Not all large companies are the same, which means they don’t oppress the same, and Amazon is a large company unlike any other as evidenced by the fact that its owner and founder paid for his own rocket ship. Oppression does not work in cookie-cutter fashion, which means the best way to fight it is to understand how each instance of oppression works and deal with it with targeted specifics.

Smalls, (aka David), defeated Amazon (aka Goliath) because he was able to rally the support of those on the inside. And he was able to rally that support because he was not someone sent from the outside to organize them; he was one of them. Smalls knew what it was like not just to work for Amazon, but to work for that  Amazon.   

But more importantly, he believed he could win when nobody else did.