‘The only enemy is Amazon’: Chris Smalls talks to Bezos, unions during WA visit

When Chris Smalls, the president of the first union at an Amazon warehouse in the US, visits classes, he says 10-year-old students know who Jeff Bezos is – and often criticize him.

Smalls, who was in Seattle for a labor conference on Tuesday, takes it as a sign that the labor movement and unions overall are doing something right.

Smalls said, “I was an employee who got fired, that’s all. And I’m still the same person.” “I’m doing something that, hopefully, will help the children I’m raising and the generations to come.”

When students talked to him about Amazon founder Bezos, Smalls said he knew “something is right.”

Smalls became one of the most recognizable names in 2020 in an effort to unionize Amazon’s warehouse workforce after he was fired for helping organize a strike at New York City’s JFK8 facility on Staten Island. Smalls and other co-workers turned union leaders demanded that the company provide more cleaning and safety precautions to protect workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2022, JFK8 workers voted to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse in the country through an independent organization, the Amazon Labor Union. That group is still working to secure its first contract with Amazon.

On Tuesday, Smalls traveled to Amazon’s backyard to speak to labor leaders and union members at the Washington State Labor Council, an AFL-CIO conference at SEATAC. The labor council acts as the representative for hundreds of unions in the state. It works on political action and legislative advocacy as well as organizing campaigns.

In town for only a day, Smalls said he hasn’t been working directly with any Amazon warehouse workers in Washington, but he has heard about efforts to organize in the same state Amazon calls home.

Workers here are “in a mecca for billionaires, and Seattle is a tech city, so it would be historic for them to win here,” Smalls said in an interview.

With more than 65,000 employees, Amazon’s largest corporate center is in the Puget Sound region.

Outside its corporate campus, Washington workplace regulators monitor conditions at Amazon’s warehouses. Washington’s Department of Labor and Industry has fined Amazon four times for failing to provide a safe workplace for its warehouse workers. Workplace safety regulators have accused Amazon of setting an unsafe pace of work that puts workers at risk of injury as they rapidly move package after package.

One of Amazon’s warehouses in Washington — BFI 3 in DuPont — has experienced the highest injury rate of any Amazon fulfillment center in the country: In 2019, it recorded 22 serious injuries for every 100 workers.

Amazon warehouses nationwide could record 7 injuries per 100 workers in 2022, according to an analysis of injury data from the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor unions. Amazon’s own analysis showed an injury rate of 6.7 injuries per 200,000 work hours that year.

Amazon has appealed against all four citations. In April, when the Center for Strategic Organizing released its report, Amazon told The Seattle Times that it does not have fixed productivity quotas for workers and that employees are free to take breaks as needed. Managers have been told that productivity or speed should not be stifled at the expense of security or quality, Amazon said.

The company plans to invest $550 million in security initiatives in 2023, including $1 billion committed to security from 2019 to 2022.

“The safety and health of our employees is our top priority and always will be, and any claim otherwise is false,” Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel told The Seattle Times in April. “We are proud of the progress our team has made and we will continue to work hard together to get better every day.”

Amazon and Washington state regulators are set to hold a trial later this month to determine whether Amazon violated state law, and whether the company should make changes to its operations.

Smalls, who said he has not been following the dispute, said the Amazon labor union understands the injuries Washington workers are facing because “we have those at home as well.”

Smalls said, “We see ambulances come every day, every other day. We’re going to continue to try to pursue this—Amazon needs to be held accountable.”

Smalls himself has faced criticism within the organizing effort in Staten Island.

This month, a dissident group within the Amazon labor union filed a complaint in federal court, seeking to force the union to hold a leadership election. In its complaint, the Reform Caucus argues that the union and its president have illegally “refused to hold officer elections that should have been scheduled before March 2023.”

Smalls said in an interview Tuesday that “the only enemy is Amazon.”

He said, “All this petty fighting is ridiculous.” “If we are divided, Amazon wins.”

Amazon has been mired in its own legal battle with the labor union company since last year’s vote to certify the union.

Amazon is still contesting the outcome of that election, and workers in Staten Island and elsewhere have accused the company of illegally interfering with the campaigns and retaliating against the workers involved.

The National Labor Relations Board ruled in January that Amazon had violated federal labor law in its efforts to oppose unionization in New York. The ruling states that Amazon illegally threatened to withhold wage increases and better benefits if workers chose a union.

Amazon told The Seattle Times earlier this year that it doesn’t think unionizing is the best answer to the concerns raised by workers, but believes that employees have the right to choose whether to join a union.

On Tuesday, Smalls praised labor rules in British Columbia, where workers can now participate in a single-step certification process that allows employees to certify a union when a majority of them sign a card indicating support. In the United States, one of the first steps is to sign a card in support of the union.

While Smalls felt the Here movement was doing a good job educating the next generation, he implored union members to do more to hold leaders and politicians accountable. He criticized other union presidents for speaking to conference attendees only through recorded video or deciding not to attend the conference. And he pressed President Joe Biden to intervene in discussions between the railroad companies and their workers to stop a nationwide strike.

Smalls told union members at the conference, “We have a problem here. We have to hold the unions accountable.” “We have to organize and go to new places. It’s not going to be traditional anymore.”

2023 The Seattle Times.
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