Chris Smalls
Illustration by Mwiza Rudasingwa
Chris Smalls started working for Amazon in 2015 as a picker in one of their New Jersey warehouses. Five years later, on March 30th, 2020, he led a walkout at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The walkout was in response to the company’s unsafe working conditions during the early days of the pandemic. These conditions included the company failing to provide personal protective equipment, allegedly allowing a worker to come to work with COVID-19 symptoms while awaiting test results, failing to inform the workforce about a worker’s COVID-19 illness, and not enforcing social distancing measures. Amazon fired Chris that same day.
Since then, Chris has co-founded the Amazon Labor Union, the first of its kind, served as its president for three years, and become a prominent voice in the fight for workers' rights. Much of his visibility can be attributed to Amazon, which, after firing him, launched a PR campaign to smear him. That hasn’t stopped him. Chris has continued to push back against corporate giants, spoken out for Palestine, advocated for the unionization of Amazon workers, and worked to create a more equitable environment for workers everywhere.
A few days after Donald Trump’s unlawful purge of the National Labor Relations Board, we had an in-depth conversation with Chris Smalls about Amazon, the ongoing class struggle, the power of grassroots organizing, and the impact of AI on jobs.
Donald Trump being re-elected makes it easier for people to place all the blame on one party. The media fuels division, reinforcing the idea that it’s liberals versus conservatives. But in reality, we’re in a class war—it’s the rich against the working class, while the middle class is being eroded.
They play into these class narratives, and the way they're doing it is by spreading a lot of misinformation. And unfortunately, we've been fed lies for so long that it's really embedded in our society. When the truth actually is told, they don't believe it. So, I think that's a big part of it—the propaganda mill. The propaganda machine is working. It took me walking out of Amazon at 30 years old to realize, ‘Damn, things have been messed up for a very long time.’ The two-party system doesn't benefit anybody, except, the billionaire class, the 1%. We're so caught up in celebrities, aspiring to live the American dream; none of us have the opportunity to do that—only a select few.
Unfortunately, union density in this country is in the gutter. Even with all the efforts and victories we’ve had in recent years with Amazon, Starbucks workers, Google, Apple, Trader Joe’s— all these new unions forming—union density in America is less than 10% in the public sector and less than 6% in the private sector.
Can you define union density? What does that mean?
Only 14 million Americans are in [a] union. It's far, far from what we need to be. I can go over to Canada, where the union density is about 30%. Not too much further, but they have more union density because they have better federal laws that protect workers' rights. I could travel to Sweden, which I have done. Sweden has 90% union density. There are other countries with 90-95% union density, like Iceland, Denmark, and Norway, because the labor parties and labor unions are involved in the government.
Here in America, because we have this two-party system, we don't have real ground. We have no real federal laws to protect us. We just watched Donald Trump gut the entire NLRB in one day—literally fired everybody. That was our last line of defense when it comes to the federal agency. Now it's up to state and local courts, which we already know are mostly conservative judges, so it's not going to benefit the working class. That is the huge problem we have here in America: none of the federal laws have been touched since the 1930s, since the first Great Depression.
Last week, workers at Whole Foods’ flagship store in Center City, Philadelphia, made history by voting to unionize—the first store in the Amazon-owned grocery chain to do so. There’s still a long road ahead, but does this give you hope for the future of workers and labor unions?
Absolutely, every victory matters. I know Whole Foods workers who have been trying to organize there for the last five years and were unsuccessful. So, to see it go through this time, it's definitely uplifting. But on the flip side, the same day they won, the same day the NLRB was gutted. So, they're, you know, just like us. We're still in limbo, even with our victory that happened three years ago. We don't have a bargaining order. We don't have a contract against Amazon because the NLRB has been understaffed and underfunded. They're going to deal with the same issue, if not worse, and that's only if the victory even holds up in court. Their company now has the opportunity to go to court and appeal and appeal and appeal, just like Amazon has done, and they’re owned by Amazon, so they will. They're going to use the same tactics, and they’re going to try to discourage the workers. They might try to have a rerun of the election and all these things.
But, you know, on a positive note, yes, any victory when it comes to unionizing in this country—especially in this country—it definitely matters. I'm glad to see that, you know, Philadelphia is taking on that fight, and I support them 1000%. I hope to see more Whole Foods workers get involved.
When unions vote to unionize and make headlines, it might seem like the fight is over. But in reality, it’s just getting started. What follows is years of relentless work to secure a contract with the company. Could you speak to that long journey? Because, as we've seen—even with the Amazon Labor Union, Amazon still hasn’t granted y’all a contract and it’s been three years since y’all voted to unionize.
You know, before I started organizing the union, I had no idea that this process would take years on top of years. But yes, this is a lifetime fight. You know, just like any other movement—the civil rights movement, you name it—it's a lifetime fight that you signed up for. And the process here in America makes it very difficult, extremely difficult.
You have to do a threshold-type thing: you have to file with 30% of your workforce. That's step number one. Once you get past that threshold, you're scheduled to have an election, which is deemed by the NLRB, that's supposed to oversee that. Now you have to have 50% of the workforce, plus one person, to actually win. And once you do, if you're successful past that threshold, the next phase is being certified. Once again, because the board is so overwhelmed, that can take a while. Meanwhile, the company is still union-busting throughout this entire process. They're still firing pro-union workers, they're still union busting, and they're still threatening the organizers. It's still happening while these processes are taking place.
And once you get certified, that doesn't mean you have a contract. That's what people fail to realize. They think, 'Yeah, we won. We beat Amazon in the election. We got an automatic contract,' or 'They're forced to come to the table.' Not necessarily. They are ordered by the board to come to the table, but that doesn't mean they're going to do it. So yes, they can appeal and appeal and appeal, and you can go all the way up to the Supreme Court, which they've done, and they're doing with us right now, currently.
It could take anywhere between one to three years to get your first contract. And once again, the board has to order the company a bargaining order to come to the table to negotiate that contract. Without a bargaining order, the company will do what the company is going to do. Operate like business as usual. It's going to disregard the union. And like Amazon, they don't recognize that the union actually won. They keep saying they don't recognize the Amazon Labor Union, but that doesn't make any sense because we all watched—the whole world watched—how we rightfully defeated them. And it's not even rightfully, because it wasn't a fair game. You know, we already know they spent $20 million trying to stop our campaign in one fiscal year alone.
It's a long process to get to a first contract. It could take anywhere from one to three years, sometimes even longer than that. And even when you get to the contract, negotiating the contract, that could be another couple of years before you actually ratify the contract, meaning it has to be approved by the membership of the union. It's, a lifetime fight. People get discouraged during this time. They walk away, they get burnt out, they get fired, they find another job because of this process being so long, and it shouldn't have to be.
In 2020, you led a walkout at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse to protest their lack of COVID-19 safety protocols for workers. Amazon responded by firing you, claiming you violated social distancing rules. It would’ve been easy to walk away, but you didn’t. You laced up your boots and said, 'I’m not about to let them fuck with my former coworkers.' Five years later, you're still fighting. Why?
I've been fired for five years now, and every day, you know, I ask myself the same question: Why not just walk away and go live my life, live my best life, whatever that means? But I can't walk away because I have children. My children are 12 years old, [and] my oldest is 15. He's in high school. They're watching everything that I'm doing. They’ve got iPads, they’ve got all the technology—these kids are exposed to things way younger than we were. For me to not fight for their future, so they don't have to go through the things we're going through now…I think that's the most motivating thing for me.
You held managerial positions at Amazon, where they trusted you with responsibility and never questioned your intelligence. But after your firing and the backlash that followed, leaked memos showed executives holding internal meetings to strategize how to smear you in the press. They labeled you as 'not smart or articulate' as part of their PR strategy to make you 'the face of the entire union/organizing movement.' It was a full-on racist assault on your character.
I was a supervisor and Assistant Manager for four and a half years, worked for them for five years, and [helped] open three of their warehouses in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. But then, when I speak up about health and safety, I'm not smart anymore. That’s the corporate model—that’s a common practice in the boardroom: to demonize and diminish the workers at the bottom, the rank-and-file workers’ voices. So that when things do go public, ‘Oh no, Amazon’s the good company. We take care of our workers.’ They wanted to put out a narrative so that people wouldn’t believe the things I was saying.
When I realized that, I said, 'Oh, hell no. You're not about to do that to me. Y’all got the wrong one.' Because, for one, who I am who I am. I was the most popular person in their warehouses, no matter which one it was, and I was an excellent employee for them for five years. I got hired in 2015 and was promoted to Assistant Manager in less than a year. That shows right there that I was already a model employee. I was a good leader, Assistant Manager, helped thousands of workers retain their jobs, trained hundreds of upper management, and it was just ridiculous for them to take that route. But not surprising.
Same-day and next-day Amazon shipping is a wild concept, and it’s only possible because of the workers in those warehouses facing horrible conditions. Amazon closely surveils its employees, and a 2018 Business Insider report featured workers sharing that some of their coworkers resorted to urinating in warehouse bins out of fear they'd miss their targets if they took too much time to use the bathroom. Others spoke about how their already short, timed breaks were reduced further. I don’t imagine things have gotten better. Can you speak to your experience working in Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse?
I used to tell my new hires, 'If you got a gym membership, cancel it, because you're doing 10 to 12 hours of calisthenics.' These warehouses are massive, the size of 14 NFL football fields. For example, JFK8 is over a million square feet. You're on your feet all day. Living in New York, New Jersey, you’ve got to commute. And if you're taking public transit like I did, my commute was two and a half to three hours each way after working a 12-hour shift.
I couldn’t sleep at night during COVID because I was working, traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike to go to work, and I was the only car on the road. I had a letter saying that we were essential workers. Meanwhile, we were providing PPE but not receiving it. That was the scariest thing to experience. I’m watching my coworkers and colleagues get sick. I’m watching people come to work during the most eeriest time. We had no vaccine at the time, no protocols, no social distancing.
People are ordering all these packages and not understanding that these packages touch about 10 to 12 people before they even end up at your doorstep. Americans don't know that these packages don’t just magically show up or it’s not just one driver dropping it off. They touch several workers, they go to different warehouses to be sorted before they even get to your doorstep. And we come from your community. We’re your neighbors, we're your loved ones, we're your family, your friends. One out of four Americans in the next few years is going to work at Amazon. So we’ve got to understand that our fight is absolutely everybody in the community's fight at the same time.
Your story shows that anyone can be an organizer. People often think you need to fit a certain mold—someone with experience in activism or a specific background—but you’re proof that’s not true. You were just doing your job, saw something wrong, and decided, ‘This doesn’t have to continue.’ In making you the face of the movement, Amazon unintentionally empowered Black workers. Seeing you stand up for change empowers Black people to believe we too have the power to take action and demand better working conditions.
That's the reason I come as is. I definitely carry the culture with me, all the way to the White House. People have things to say, negative things to say about how I look, how I dress, but that was my whole purpose: break these stigmas down, to let people know it don't matter what I look like. I'm representing the community I come from, every step of the way. Anybody and everybody can do exactly what I've done.
People ask me all the time, like, ‘Who did you study?’ or ‘Who did you read?’ And I'm telling people like, ‘Listen, I was on my way to a Pop Smoke concert five years ago, rest in peace. I wasn't thinking about none of this shit.’ I'm just a father of twins that was trying to do the right thing and one thing led to another. Of course, over time, I'm a sponge now, and as a labor leader, I soak everything in; I’m learning. I've learned my history, and I pay homage to the ancestors who paved the way. But we're talking about Amazon in the 21st century. This has never been done before. So a lot of the things that I had to do, and still have to do, are unprecedented and have never been seen before. I'm writing my own history, but also rewriting history as well. And that's what it's going to take to defeat these companies. We have to have a new-school style of organizing.
Y'all organized with no prior experience and no institutional backing, starting with just $120K raised on GoFundMe. Why was it important for you and everyone on the ground to build this from the ground up instead of joining an already-established union?
To be honest with you, nobody believed in us, you know? That's the reality of it. We extended the olive branch to national unions; they shut the door on us. We had conversations with local unions; they gave us, you know, condescending remarks. They basically didn't believe that we was going to win. They sent minimal help, if they did at all. This fight had to be led by workers. Established unions organize traditionally; they wait for a certain moment in time for them to go public with things. They follow the old-school model, which was, you know, 'We need 80 or 90% before we go public. We need 80 or 90% before we file.' You will never, ever get 80 or 90% in the Amazon warehouse because the turnover rate is at 150%. So if I signed up a worker, by the end of the week, I lost 200 workers. That's the turnover rate at Amazon, especially during COVID and the holiday season; the turnover rate is one person in, 10 people out.
We had to go completely against the traditional style of organizing. We were very outspoken. We were very public, which is something unions are now getting accustomed to, but they weren't like this five or 10 years ago. We did it from the ground up, being worker-led, being actual Amazon workers, understanding the culture inside and outside the building, coming from the community, coming from the hood. We were relatable to talk to these workers, and I think that's the best way to be grassroots: actually be worker-led.
Last year, the Amazon Labor Union began a new chapter by affiliating with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, one of the largest labor unions in the U.S., with 1.3 million members. You also stepped down as president, and Connor Spencer, another former Amazon worker who was also fired, took over as the union's president. Do you think there’s a future where unions don’t have to join larger ones—where grassroots efforts can sustain themselves with enough collective power and funding? Or do you think labor unions need these bigger institutions?
No, I don't believe you need them. If we were sustainable financially, we wouldn't had to have affiliated. Unfortunately, we were hanging on by thin ice, just because we were independent for the last three years when I was president. I was the president for three years—I tried to keep things afloat. I gave [up] my own personal salary. I made less than an Amazon worker as the president of the union, trying to keep the union afloat. But financially, it wasn't sustainable. Amazon's spending millions of dollars on legal fees. Our legal fees alone were $30,000 a month. It wouldn't have been a smart move to stay independent, go into debt, and then have to deal with things like that on your own.
Depending on the situation, you may want to affiliate with a larger union. But my personal belief, and from my personal experience, I don't think it's necessary. I actually want to see more startup unions, more grassroots unions in all industries. It doesn't matter what industry you work for—you can start a union right away. People don’t know that. People don't realize that they have the opportunity to form a union, no matter what industry or what job you work for, and I encourage people to do that. If you’re successful or not successful, and you feel that you need that support, then sure, sign on with a larger union.
People often say, 'There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,' but do you really need to give Amazon Prime your money? Do you really need to buy a new iPhone? I’ve had an iPhone 12 since 2020 and use a refurbished laptop. I try my hardest not to give these companies my money because I know what’s happening. However, so much of being an American revolves around consumerism—constantly buying more, even when it comes to sustainability, a movement that should encourage buying less but often does the opposite.
How can we encourage people to consume less and support these companies less? A lot of people don’t want to interrogate their relationship with these corporations. They’d rather wake up, grab their iPhone, and scroll through Instagram and Facebook—like it's second nature. But the truth is, they don’t have to.
I do this experiment all the time. When I speak to crowds, I ask everybody in the room, 'How many of y'all shopped on Amazon 10 years ago or five years ago?' Most of the time, when I say five years, 90% of the room raises their hand, 95% of them raise their hand. When I say 10 years ago? The hands start to go down. When I say 15 years ago, virtually all of the hands go down.
Amazon’s only been around for 30 years, so we’re talking about less than a decade. This company has changed the entire American society on how we order and buy things. I’m not that old and I’m not that young, but I’m old enough to remember getting up on a Saturday or Sunday on my weekend and going to the shopping malls that we all used to love—going to our favorite stores, like Toys “R” Us or going to certain stores that are now gone, like Barnes & Noble bookstores, and mom-and-pop stores. They’re gone. Your local Main Street in every hood in America doesn’t look the same anymore. That’s because of Amazon.
When I put it in that perspective, people realize, like, ‘Damn, I’m doing the damage to my own community by giving the richest man in the world my money every day.’ Amazon owns 75 other companies. And when I start to list them, they’re like, ‘Damn, I didn’t know Amazon owned that.’ So it’s really about going back to education. If people realize what they’re doing, maybe they will stop or try to find another corrective course. I give my testimony: I worked at Amazon, and I never bought shit from there. I don’t know what the hype is.
You ain’t missing much.
Oh I know! I seen it. I’ve seen what people order. This shit is crazy. CDs, toothbrushes, stupid stuff, you know? Things they can get up and walk around the corner to their bodegas [or] stores for. But they don’t want to do that anymore. They want to sit at home and, like you said, scroll, scroll, scroll, hit one-click buy, and then go answer their front door. That has divided our society. That has changed the way we talk to our neighbors. People don’t even know their neighbors anymore.
I grew up in an apartment complex. I knew everybody in all three complexes. You know, they say it takes a village to raise a child? The crossing guard would be my babysitter sometimes. My neighbors would watch me. They’d snitch on me to my mom if I did something [bad], if I had company [over]. I could go to a neighbor’s house and borrow sugar. You can’t do that anymore because people are going to look at you; they might show up at the door with a gun now. Our society has isolated itself, and Amazon has a whole lot to do with why that is happening.
There are a lot of conversations happening right now about companies rolling back their DEI efforts, and it’s led people to make lists of 'good' and 'bad' corporations. But the reality is, they’re all bad. All of these corporations uphold capitalism, and if we’re really being honest, the corporations rolling back their DEI efforts were already treating their employees of color, specifically Black employees, terribly—even when these DEI programs and efforts were in place. Those programs and efforts were nothing more than post-2020 social unrest virtue signaling to pacify Black people.
We leave it up to the corporations to roll out these DEI programs, and they do, but they do it in such a way that they teeter on the fence to make it seem like they’re doing something. But we already know that it's not inclusive. For example, with Amazon—Amazon has been around for 30 years. For the first time in 2020, when I got fired, the Black man who got fired [and] was all over the news. Do you know what they did? They included one Black woman on Jeff Bezos's team, the 'S’ team,' right? They made this whole big article. Do you think she really had power?
No. Hell no!
But they made it seem like, ‘Oh, look, we’re being inclusive. We’ve got the first Black woman on the S Team.’ This woman wasn’t going to do anything. I think she eventually quit. She was in Seattle, at Amazon’s corporate headquarters, being pushed off, not heard. But she’s on the S Team, so we all gotta clap it up for Amazon for having DEI. That’s what these corporations do.
These 'good corporations' and 'bad corporations' lists people are making have led to boycotts, and while they are well-intentioned…
You could boycott Target or you could boycott Amazon, but they own other sub-companies. So, you’re not escaping the matrix by doing that. Noaways, the only weapon we have right now is our labor—withholding our labor. That is it. And that’s the way I see it. That’s our ultimate weapon, just like France showed us.
So imagine that: If one country can come together over retirement age, and the unions can support that—which they’re supposed to do, because they’re supposed to be the shield for the working class—we can get everything we want here in America too. We can do that. But unfortunately, we’re so divided. Our union density is so low, and honestly, our labor unions keep riding the Democratic wave, which, as we saw from this last election, shows they have a disconnect with the working class themselves. We are not going to get any further if we do not change course and create something new from the ground up. It has to be from the ground up.
The re-election of Donald Trump further pushed people into ineffective forms of activism—like marching and yelling for hours in front of the White House—believing that’s a good use of their time. A lot of Americans seem to love the performance of activism rather than taking meaningful action to create real, tangible change in their communities.
But for that to happen, you have to genuinely be interested in liberation. That’s not where a lot of Americans are. Specifically with Black people, everyone isn’t interested in the kind of liberation that comes from dismantling oppressive systems. Instead, some want the same privileges as white people and are more focused on power and the freedom they believe comes with it—even if that means becoming the oppressor.
You’re absolutely right. Donald Trump is in office. We already knew that. We expected him to do the shit he's doing. We already knew that—no surprise. What are we going to do with our time? [That] is the question for the next four years: Are we going to sit and complain? Are we going to, you know, [do] these performative actions? No, we need to build something to get to where we need to be
Me, personally, I'm launching a Labor Party. It's going to be a long fight for that, but I'm going to do it. I've been fortunate enough to go all around the world, learn and meet different governments, meet different presidents, meet different parliaments, meet different politicians, learn their federal laws, and bring them back to America. That's the next fight in my journey—to try [to] form a Labor Party here in America. It used to be one in the 1960s. It dissolved in the 1970s because the two-party system, you know, crushed them. But I'm gonna try to relaunch it. I'm gonna try to incorporate some federal laws that make sense, and hopefully, people will start to wake up because the two-party system is never gonna be our answer.
For this to work, you need to maintain some level of visibility. But it raises the question: how much is too much? There’s a pattern where people pushing for change—specifically Black people in this case—are elevated by white people, liberal media, and white institutions in a way that turns them into celebrities. There were all these opportunities coming your way—some aligning with your mission, others not so much. Joe Biden is a segregationist, you went to the White House. How do you reconcile your mission and what you want to do with the opportunities that come your way—those you have taken and those you haven't—that seem diametrically opposed to it?
It's hard because they try to push me into the celebrity category, and I'm like, you know, nah, that ain't me. I ain't no celebrity. Just because I've been around them, I shake hands, take a couple of pictures, been on a couple of red carpets—that's not my lifestyle. I'm not no millionaire, not no multi-millionaire. I'm in my brother's basement, the same place I was five years ago. I'm still out on these streets every day. People see me all over New York City. They see me all over the world. I don't have security. People know—if you've been around me personally, you know how I move. I'm moving just how I moved before the media came, before America got to know me, before the world got to know me. I'm still the same, same Chris Smalls.
I get up every day and I put my blood, sweat, and tears into the movement, you know. And no matter where I go in the world, I stand on business. I don't care about money. People think the way I dress and stuff—I've been doing this for 20 years. You know, go back to when I was a kid and ask my mother. She'll tell you, like, 'No, Chris been like that.' I walked into Amazon with grillz, two chains, and a BMW. When I got hired at Amazon. At 25 years old, I was a rapper. At 20 years old, I've been around, you know, A$AP Rocky and other artists, prominent artists, you know, years ago, decades ago. So for me, I don't get caught up in that.
My mission is to help the working class out, to help my family out, to try to build a better future. And one thing for sure, we have to get into different spaces. That's why the labor movement is not where it needs to be as well—because we're not in these entertainment spaces, we're not in the fashion spaces. So, I'm trying to break down those walls as well.
Yes, a labor leader should be on the red carpet, or should be going to the White House to get recognized like sports teams do, or should be, you know, on stage opening up something incorporated with A-list artists. Other countries that I've been to that have labor conferences—you know what they do? They invite the biggest hip-hop artists to perform at the labor conference, and the union pays for it, because that's the smart way to reach the younger generation.
So imagine if labor unions in America said, 'You know what? We gonna take a little bit of our strike funds—our $350 million—and we gonna go buy a Super Bowl ad.' A Super Bowl ad might cost them about $1 million. They might get about 10 to 30 seconds. Kanye did it. We saw Kanye's ad on his cell phone. We don't think outside the box. And that's the problem here in America—we're so caught up in 'No, you can't be a socialist if you're, you know, shaking hands with Zendaya.' I'm like, 'Who the hell wouldn't shake hands with her? Take a picture with her? Are you nuts?'
And like I said, y'all see the picture, but y'all don’t know the conversation I had with her, or the conversation I had with Dwyane Wade, or the conversation I had with Floyd Mayweather, or Will Smith, or whoever I met. When I talk to these celebrities, I'm telling them to pay attention to what's going on—because they don’t see it. Everybody lives in their own bubbles, and we gotta break these bubbles down, break these stigmas down, break these walls down—because that's how capitalism works, by keeping us all divided.
For example, last year, I got invited to go walk in the Louis Vuitton fashion show in Paris with Rihanna and Pharrell. I declined it. The same day, I got invited to go to the White House for Kamala Harris for Juneteenth. I declined it. You know what I did? I went to an Amazon warehouse in Canada.
What are your thoughts on worker rights in a world that’s becoming increasingly algorithm-driven and AI-dominated? Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook are shoving AI down our throats, pushing us toward an augmented reality while they wreck our real one. How do we fight for workers' rights when corporations are actively working to disconnect us from reality?
We have five years before AI takes 50% of American jobs overnight, probably less than that now. They’re in competition; you see all the DeepSeek and OpenAI. You see how they’re going crazy over it? Trying to expedite this stuff. Amazon’s already been trying to replace people with robots. Other companies; drones, and all this stuff. This stuff is real. I’ve been to some tech conferences and Fortune 500 conferences where these billionaires are paying these 16-year-old kids to come up with all these startup companies to replace workers.
We need to also utilize AI to push our narratives. Because I say this all the time, we have to create our own propaganda. Hence, this is excellent that you have your own magazine, because we, the people, have to create our own propaganda against the propaganda that the government, billionaires, or whoever is putting out—our oppressors, the opposition—they’re putting out. We have to continue to do that and utilize the tools that are given to us, but at the same time, there has to be a line of defense, and that is the duty and responsibility of labor unions. That is what they were formed to do. This is why we have the eight-hour workday,the 40-hour workweek, [and] vacations.
If they don’t fight for these contracts to preserve jobs, if there’s no federal regulation to preserve jobs—human beings, not robots—we’re going to lose 50% of our jobs overnight to AI.
This fight isn’t just a moment for you or anyone else serious about organizing; it’s a lifelong battle. There are corporations deeply invested in your downfall. How are you taking care of yourself? How do you protect your peace while continuing to do this important work?
Just keeping my strong core—my family, my day ones—keeping them around me to support me. And yeah, I owe a lot of people some money. I borrow a lot. Trust me, I still call people and say, 'Let me get $50,' you know? Because they know that I'm doing work that's important.
For me financially, I'm not on anybody's payroll. I've probably been the freest I've ever been since they fired me, which is fine. I receive donations when I organize, but a lot of that money goes right back into the work. Money comes in, money goes out, but as long as I have a roof over my head and I'm able to get at least one decent meal a day, I'll be fine. That's just how I roll.
What really motivates me is seeing that the work that I have done and the work that I continue to do is affecting so many people worldwide. Every day I get emails from all over the world. That motivates me to just continue going. Because every day, you know, it's a struggle to wake up and be like, 'Damn, I gotta do this.' But I ask myself this question often now: if I don't do it, who else? You know? That's how it continues to give me that same fire that I had five years ago when I got fired from Amazon.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.