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By Jason Collins
Chris Smalls has never been one to fade quietly into the background. From a fired Amazon warehouse worker labeled as “not smart or articulate,” to a union trailblazer and now international activist, Chris Smalls’s story refuses to end.
What began as a triumph-of-the-underdog story has since revealed cracks, controversies, and reinventions. Smalls finds himself constantly at the center of new battles, sometimes celebrated and sometimes criticized, but always watched. His story is a never-ending saga of political theater, and we can’t seem to look away.
Who is Chris Smalls?
Smalls was born in 1988 in Hackensack, New Jersey, and first pursued a music career. He toured briefly with rapper Meek Mill before giving up the path to support his children. That choice eventually brought him to Amazon.
In 2015, Smalls was hired as a picker in New Jersey before being fired and reinstated. Later, he transferred to the Staten Island warehouse known as Amazon JFK8. On March 30, 2020, he organized a walkout over COVID-19 safety protocols. Days later, Amazon fired him, citing repeated violations of social distancing rules. But when a leaked memo revealed executives had dismissed him internally as “not smart or articulate,” Smalls found his cause.
The man they mocked would go on to form the first-ever union at Amazon.
The Formation of the Amazon Labor Union
Smalls described his firing not as an end, but a spark:
That moment right there motivated me to continue, you know, especially after just being fired.
His next step was the Congress of Essential Workers, a grassroots group fighting for safe conditions for low-wage employees during the pandemic. Smalls traveled the country, speaking with workers, organizing events, and even hosting barbecues to build solidarity.
Eventually, his focus returned to Staten Island. Despite Amazon’s well-funded anti-union campaign and 67 contested ballots, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won 2,654 votes in favor of unionizing JFK8. It was a landmark victory: the first successful union vote in Amazon’s U.S. history.
Yet winning recognition proved far harder than winning the vote. Smalls accused Amazon of spending millions on union-busting and forcing workers into relentless anti-union meetings, blunting momentum.
After the Celebration: Friction & Infighting
The champagne dried quickly. By late 2022, efforts to replicate JFK8’s success elsewhere faltered, and Amazon refused to acknowledge ALU as a legitimate bargaining unit. Negotiations stalled.
To strengthen the campaign, ALU invited veteran strategist Jane McAlevey to help. But her emphasis on methodical structure clashed with Smalls’s improvisational style. She departed within months, leaving organizers divided. Smalls’s blunt message to internal critics only deepened the fractures.
If you don’t like it, you can leave.
These tensions reflected an old problem in labor history: the balance between charismatic leadership and democratic organization. While Smalls could draw cameras and inspire workers, many argued that his fame was overshadowing the union’s slow, unglamorous work of building committees and negotiating contracts.
The discontent boiled over in 2023 when a video surfaced of Smalls trading punches with fellow organizer James “Most” Daley, a critic of Smalls’s rising celebrity. By 2024, Smalls chose not to run for re-election. The union elected Connor Spence as its new president, closing Smalls’s formal role inside ALU.
But if some expected him to disappear, Smalls had other plans.
The Drama Continued After Amazon
Even outside ALU, Smalls stayed in the headlines. He championed labor legislation, such as New York’s Warehouse Worker Protection Act, and continued to speak globally about workers’ rights.
Then, in July 2024, he boarded the Handala, a humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza. The ship aimed to break Israel’s blockade and deliver aid. On July 27, Israeli forces seized the vessel. Smalls was detained for five days, claiming to have been beaten and staging a hunger strike before his release.
To his supporters, this episode fit perfectly into his pattern: Smalls inserting himself into frontline struggles, risking personal safety for visibility and principle. To critics, it was another distraction from the hard grind of labor organizing at home.
But whether one saw him as a reckless opportunist or a fearless advocate, Smalls’s choices ensured that he remained impossible to ignore.
The Story Isn’t Over
Chris Smalls is not the kind of figure who drifts into the background once the headlines fade. From the parking lot barbecues at JFK8 to the deck of a seized flotilla in the Mediterranean, he has proven that his stage is wherever there is conflict, attention, and the chance to disrupt the status quo.
What makes Smalls’ journey compelling is not a clean arc of rise and fall, but his refusal to stay fixed in one role. He was a warehouse worker, then a reluctant protestor, then a union leader, and now something harder to define: a global activist whose campaigns blur the line between labor organizing, political theater, and personal brand.
In that sense, his saga speaks to a larger story about activism in the 21st century. Movements today are shaped not just by workplace meetings and petitions, but by social media visibility, viral moments, and leaders who become symbols in their own right. Smalls embodies both the power and peril of that dynamic: he can inspire hope, but he can also divide the very institutions he builds.
Either way, Smalls has ensured that his story is not just about Amazon or even the Amazon Labor Union. It is about the evolving nature of leadership, visibility, and struggle in an era when attention is as much a battlefield as the workplace floor. Smalls himself once said he never planned to be a labor leader, but history rarely consults those it drafts into the spotlight.
And so his saga continues, not with the certainty of where it will end, but with the inevitability that wherever there is a fight, Chris Smalls will find his way into it.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
