Amazon fired him - now he's trying to unionize 5,000 workers in New York

[douglas9]

Christian Smalls has taken on the biggest challenge of his life. Still smarting from when Amazon fired him last year, the 32-year-old is spearheading an effort to unionize more than 5,000 workers at four Amazon facilities in Staten Island, including a giant warehouse.

Smalls is taking a highly unusual route in pursuing this goal; he has founded an independent union, the Amazon Labor Union, convinced that a new union comprising only Amazon workers is the smartest way to rally Amazon employees behind a union after the crushing defeat of an effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama earlier this year.

“I believe we’ll be successful,” Smalls said. “New York is a union town. The bus drivers, the sanitation workers, the police, the firefighters, they’re all unionized. Everybody is related or knows somebody in a union.”



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/amazon-workers-staten-island-christian-smalls