In 2022, a group of Amazon workers in Staten Island led by Chris Smalls achieved a remarkable feat when they fought Amazon and successfully won their union vote, becoming the very first unionized Amazon workplace in the U.S. as the Amazon Labour Union.
Union, the documentary directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, conveys how Smalls organized issues to rank and file employees and encouraged them when things looked desolate. Spring member Tia Duffy caught up with Chris Smalls on the release of Union in a new interview.
Tia Duffy: Where did the idea come from for the movie?
Chris Smalls: Well, it was really just natural. One of the organizers that I organized with was already producing [films], so he knew some of the producers in California. I convinced him to help us organize in New York. So he moved over to New York and he started filming the documentary. They just started filming our day to day journey.
TD: Is the story told in a chronological format like a reenactment of your time at Amazon?
CS: It shows how we organized our campaign and won against Amazon. It’s 90 minutes. So, they have thousands of hours of footage that isn’t even out there yet. I was at that bus stop for over 300 days, so there’s so much that could be in the film, but they can’t put it all in there. It’ll give you chronological order, but there are some things they have to move around so that it makes sense for the audience when they watch it.
TD: Will you have involvement in the production room or in the editing process of the documentary at all?
CS: Oh no, we have nothing to do with it. The director and producer are independent filmmakers. Brett Story, the director, is actually from Toronto.
TD: I hear you talk a lot about how you became an agitator in Amazon and people started to become suspicious of you. How do you tackle fear and intimidation in the workplace?
CS: Well, yeah, I mean, everybody wasn’t really following me prior to the Amazon Labor Union. My story began four years ago. I was fired in 2020. I’m just a fired Amazon worker that wanted to prevent people from dying during Covid. That was my original plight. It was really Jeff Bezos who motivated me to continue fighting. When that memo came out about me, for a whole year and a half, I had to figure out what way I wanted to organize workers. We had a nonprofit first called the Congress of Essential Workers. We went to Jeff Bezos’ house and after that, we realized unionizing was the only way to really hold the company accountable.
So, I just knew that it comes with the territory. The good, the bad, and the ugly. People are going to say what they say because they don’t really know me. Everybody talks about how I look, how I dress more than the work I do because it’s a distraction. If you look at pictures of me 20 years ago and you ask my Mom, she’s going to tell you I was the same way. I opened up three Amazon warehouses In New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. I came to Amazon looking the same way in 2015. I started working there when I was 25 years old, and I’m 36 right now. I’ve been dealing with this company for over a decade. It is the experience that helps. The time at the company helped cultivate the trust between my coworkers and I. People trusted that I just play for the team of the working people.
TD: Big corporations are quick to expect loyalty from their workers in an attempt to control and exploit them but the irony is that many years of experience can actually help to cultivate workers’ power. I love your rank and file approach.
CS: Got to meet the people where they are at.
TD: You have a very calm demeanor. Does this contribute to your success as an organizer?
CS: Yeah, of course. I mean, you have to be authentic and truthful. I don’t see no other way around it. I have a huge target on my back, you know, being a Black man from America. I’m not supposed to be doing none of this. They don’t want me to. So, you know, my days are valuable. Every day I have to do something because I’m not promised. You know, I get death threats. I get people coming at me, and I have to remind myself I’m putting my life on the line every day. Being a Black man in America is hard. I can go on and on about that. My father’s been incarcerated since he’s 18 years old. He’s still incarcerated. So, the bottom line is, I just don’t play about it. I just have to be as real as I can. And hopefully people see, and they will see honesty.
TD: Did you encounter any challenges making this movie?
CS: Well, yeah, I want people to understand this movie’s a tool. Amazon doesn’t want it out there. They actually sued us already for it. They tried to shut it down. Obviously nobody’s going to buy the film. Amazon Prime is running everybody off. Even though we’re doing all the film festivals, we’re releasing the movie independently, something that’s unprecedented. Hopefully a lot of people will see it. We want it to spread the word worldwide.
So that’s that the goal is to make it a tool for workers to see how hard and difficult it is to be against a $1 trillion dollar company but to also see that with organizing it IS possible.
And that’s what these film corporations are scared of. They don’t want their Netflix and HBO. You know, nobody’s gonna buy this film. So we have to build it ourselves.
[The producers] did tell me that. They said “oh we took a page out of your book Chris”. You know, we’re going to just do it independently. I’m like, I love this.
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