Jane McAlevey
The post The Teamsters’ Proposed Agreement With UPS Is a Great Victory by and for the Workers appeared first on The Nation.
With labor activity making headlines across the U.S. and wealth inequality at all-time highs, new polling finds overwhelming support among the public for a slate of pro-worker bills advanced by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee last month. According to polling by Data for Progress released Tuesday, all three bills passed by the committee last…
Christian Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), speaks during an ALU rally outside an Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York, on April 11, 2023. (Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Monday, July 10, a group of Amazon workers at JFK8, the company’s largest warehouse in Staten Island, filed a complaint in federal court. In April 2022, JFK8’s workers became the first at any Amazon facility in the United States to win a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election, voting to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). The complaint states that the ALU and current ALU president Chris Smalls “refuse to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.” They are asking a federal judge to schedule an election for ALU top’s officers by August 30, to be overseen by a neutral monitor.
The ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, the group behind the filing, consists of some forty active organizers at JFK8 and includes several leaders from the ALU’s early days: former ALU treasurer Connor Spence, former ALU organizing director Brett Daniels, and Brima Sylla, a key organizer in the lead-up to the NLRB election. The group began organizing in December 2022, after a contentious ALU meeting during which Smalls told members, “You got a problem with me? Deuces.”
In a statement published on Tuesday, the caucus notes that when workers first began organizing at JFK8, they chose to form an independent union — an arduous task that required them to organize in the eight-thousand-person warehouse without the resources they would have received had they worked with an established union — because “it offered rank-and-file workers a level of autonomy and control that was vital in engaging them through a vicious fight against one of the most anti-union companies in the world: Amazon.”
“ALU’s current leadership is entirely unelected and self-appointed,” the group continues. “Not only do we feel this is unlawful and antidemocratic, it is also a major barrier to organizing workers in support of a contract fight, as democracy is a key element in engaging workers.”
The group alleges that the union’s current executive board amended the union’s constitution to postpone elections that were due to take place after the NLRB certified the union victory in January of 2023. Under the new constitution, leadership elections won’t take place until after workers win a first contract. With Amazon continuing to stonewall recognizing the union, much less negotiating with it, there is no telling how long that will take.
In court filings, the current union leadership’s lawyers argued that the constitutional amendment that would have mandated elections after certification “was never completed, let alone adopted.”
On Thursday, US district judge Ann Donnelly of the Eastern District of New York declined the caucus’s request for a temporary restraining order that would restrict ALU leaders from retaliating against or disciplining members who are party to the lawsuit: eighty-six workers were signed on as plaintiffs (the reform caucus gathered 822 workers’ signatures on a petition calling for an ALU election).
As evidence backing their motion for a restraining order, the group’s lawyers cited a text Smalls sent to Sylla that read, in part, “reformALU is not democratic it’s a bunch of bull and I’m warning you now keep petitioning against ALU we will take legal action against you as well for false representation of a government certified union.”
Outside the courtroom on Thursday, Smalls told the City, “It’s unfortunate that they are doing this, because the only winner is Amazon. We’ve got to stay focused on our contract fight.”
The decision to file the complaint in court followed months of internal efforts to reform the union, culminating in the breakdown of planned mediation between the union’s executive board and the caucus. That mediation was to have been led by longtime labor organizer Bill Fletcher Jr.
In a memo concerning the collapse of the mediation, Fletcher writes that he was “honored” to have been asked to mediate the dispute, as he “saw this as an excellent sign that both sides understood that the internal conflict represented a matter that was taking the entire union to the precipice.” But while the caucus’s meeting with him to set ground rules was productive, he says that much of the time during a similar meeting with the executive board was spent on the board “explaining to me why they believed that the Caucus was in the wrong.” On June 18, Fletcher Jr was informed by a representative of the board that they had voted against mediation.
“I am concerned that the apparent turmoil within the ALU Board means that little is being done to organize the workers and prepare for the battle with Amazon,” wrote Fletcher. “It is clear that the ALU’s leadership must be reorganized and reaffirmed by the membership.”
Asked to comment on the conflict by the New York Times, Smalls denied that the union’s actions violate the law, calling the complaint a “ridiculous claim with zero facts or merit.” Smalls did not respond to a request for comment from Jacobin.
The filings come the same week as another legal ruling, this one in the ALU’s favor. On Wednesday, the NLRB issued a formal complaint against Amazon for violating the National Labor Relations Act because it “failed and refused to bargain with the union” in the time since the April 2, 2022, election. Amazon has until July 26 to respond to the complaint.
“It’s about time,” Smalls told Motherboard of the decision. “We’ve been patiently waiting, and there’s nothing patient about waiting against a trillion-dollar company while they continue union-busting.”
The timing of the two complaints — one from the reform caucus, one from the NLRB — underlines the predicament in which JFK8 workers find themselves: more than a year after unionizing, their employer hasn’t stopped stonewalling them. A company that flouts the law so brazenly, and with such immense resources in its coffer, is a company that wants to crush the union. That creates a pressure cooker: hemmed in by an intransigent employer, internal union conflicts metastasize.
The best defense against such a recalcitrant employer is a good offense: spreading the union’s roots so they reach throughout the shop floor in Staten Island. To do so requires creating new leaders: every union meeting should be a means of recruiting JFK8 workers who haven’t yet been involved in the ALU to do so. Familiar faces mean failure: every social event should be a recruitment drive, every workplace conflict a demonstration of power.
According to the caucus, that has not been the case as of late: as Spence told Labor Notes, the ALU’s weekly worker committee meetings became biweekly, then stopped altogether in May. Sylla added that the meetings weren’t even reaching quorum, which is ten active workers.
Failing to reach a quorum of ten workers, at a warehouse that employs thousands, means the current approach is not working. Changing that trajectory is easier said than done — even the most well-functioning, democratic union would have obstacles to overcome in building shop-floor power at Amazon, with its high-turnover workforce and union-busting campaign.
But it’s still early days, and if workers can use their historic win to expand one worker at a time, acting collectively, as a union, they can still force one of the country’s most powerful corporations to meet them across the bargaining table, as equals.
That means building upon the expertise workers developed during the union campaign: having systematic one-on-one conversations, not only identifying leaders in each part of JFK8, on each shift, but building them into fighters. That can’t be done if workers do not believe the union is theirs, which requires democracy.
Getting Amazon to the bargaining table will require nothing less than a strike threat. That much has been clear since the ALU won its election, and the company’s continued legal maneuvers show that it remains true. Amazon can, and assuredly will, continue stalling despite the NLRB’s complaints. The labor board’s drastically limited enforcement mechanisms and underfunded budget are no match for an employer of Amazon’s size that is determined to crush its workers (for more proof of that, see Starbucks). Waiting on the courts is a losing strategy.
The task is monumental, but every ALU organizer knew it would be. Are JFK8 workers willing to wear union buttons? Sign petitions? Are they standing up to management incursions inside JFK8? The ALU isn’t the only union organizing this workforce, and others are finding ways to increase the pressure on Amazon: for instance, the Palmdale, California, Amazon drivers who joined the Teamsters in April of this year have expanded their unfair labor practice picket lines to Amazon warehouses on both coasts.
For all the media attention on conflict between the ALU and other unions — and now, internal conflicts within the ALU — the fundamental dispute is between Amazon workers and their employer. Every union that is organizing these workers should be crystal clear in its focus: building a fighting force to contest power on the shop floor. Nothing else matters.
On Monday, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) ratified a five-year contract covering nearly 200,000 public school workers across New York City. The contract, which will last until November 2027, went into effect immediately and is retroactive to September 2022 when the previous contract expired.
Just a few weeks ago, the majority of my coworkers and I voted no on this contract.
About 75 percent of the roughly 95,000 members who cast ballots voted to ratify, according to a tally by the American Arbitration Association. Though the union leadership is calling this an “overwhelming majority,” 25 percent voted against the contract or didn’t vote at all — amounting to about 24,000 people who were either alienated enough to abstain or informed and heated enough to vote no.
The occupational and physical therapists, school nurses, audiologists, and supervisors of nurses and therapists, however, voted down their tentative agreement, as they did in 2018, with 60 percent rejecting the proposal.
Between the continued racist and gendered pay inequities between titles, “raises” that amount to inflation-adjusted cuts, hidden healthcare giveaways, insidious expansion of virtual learning, and an undemocratic negotiation and ratification process, this contract is hardly the win that city and union leaders are making it out to be. For the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file educators of New York City, a long fight is ahead.
UFT president Michael Mulgrew claimed that the contract “addresses the major changes sought by the union’s 500-member negotiating team.” In reality, it doesn’t come close to meeting the five primary contract demands of the United for Change coalition, nor many of my coworkers’ most basic concerns about our compensation and working conditions.
Instead of offering real raises, the contract includes unpensionable bonuses to tempt us into voting yes. This includes a one-time $3,000 ratification bonus, with yearly retention bonuses, as Mayor Eric Adams said, to “ensure we are holding on to our valuable educators.” As we will see, there is very little that would actually ameliorate the underlying factors that result in these retention issues in the first place.
In a press release, Adams said he was “proud” that the “valuable educators” of New York City ratified the contract, touting the “much-needed wage increases” for public school employees.
This endorsement is a red flag coming from charter–friendly Austerity Adams, who cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the schools last summer, forced through the privatized Medicare Advantage Plan for retirees, halted the expansion of the city’s free pre-kindergarten program, and proposed additional massive cuts to the public school budget (in addition to libraries, CUNY, and other social programs), saying he needs to “make smart financial decisions”. While for the time being, the 2024 New York City budget passed earlier this month has avoided many of the draconian billion-dollar cuts he originally proposed, we should be clear that a contract that meets Adams’s standards is no win for the city’s workers.
For his part, Mulgrew has defended the contract tooth and nail since the memorandum of agreement was released in mid-June while minimizing the very real concerns of the rank and file. In a press release, Mulgrew praises the contract, saying it “increases pay, increases educators’ control over their workday, and decreases the non-educational, irrelevant paperwork demands.” But that statement doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
These “raises” Mulgrew speaks of — starting at 3 percent in the first three years and increasing to 3.25 and 3.5 percent in the last two, respectively — represent a pay cut over the course of the contract. The 3 percent raise for the 2022 period occurred when inflation hovered around 8 percent — amounting to a 5 percent loss in wages when accounting for the cost of living. When we consider the unpredictable inflationary trends of the past several years — driven by supply chain issues, geopolitical conflict, and other factors, increasingly common in the crisis-ridden capitalist system —there’s reason to believe that public education workers will continue to struggle to make ends meet in the years to come.
Even taking for granted these deceptive wage increases, the contract still sells out union members serving the most underserved students: the paraprofessionals. Under this contract, their starting wage is only around $30,000. Even after 15 years of experience, paraprofessionals workers can’t even reach an annual income of $60,000. In one of the most expensive cities in the world, that amounts to poverty wages.
It’s important to put these numbers in context. According to the 2023 True Cost of Living Poverty Report, 50 percent of working-age New Yorkers are struggling to cover their basic needs. Across the five boroughs of New York City, the average income needed to cover only the basic needs for two adults and two young children is approximately $125,000. There is no reason anyone with a full-time union job should have to take on a second job to make ends meet. This salary is unlivable in New York City for paraprofessionals and other titles, positions that are more likely to be held by people of color. This is nothing less than racist hyper-exploitation of a population that has been historically underserved by the same institutions that they are now working for.
On top of all of this, the contract ratification coincided with the opaque process of healthcare givebacks by the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC). The MLC is the umbrella organization of all New York City public-sector unions that negotiates directly with the city on healthcare. District Council 37 (DC37) and the UFT are the two largest unions, and therefore have the most influence in the MLC. During the last round of contract negotiations in 2018, the MLC (again, controlled by DC37 and the UFT) inconspicuously agreed to hundreds of millions of dollars of yearly healthcare “savings” (read: cuts). The new plan is yet to be announced, but public sector workers have every reason to suspect the coverage will be worse based on the attempts to move the city’s 250,000 municipal retirees onto a privatized Medicare Advantage plan, a switch which has been temporarily blocked in court due to tireless activism by the retirees and their allies.
On top of the economic weaknesses of the contract, it leaves much to be desired in terms of real improvements to our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions.
First, the contract does nothing to address the systemic inequities for the most underserved students in a city with some of the most segregated schools in the country. It doesn’t address some of teachers’ major and most basic concerns, such as our overcrowded classrooms. There is no language to reduce class sizes and caseloads, which experts believe will remain unaffected by the new state law due to lack of compliance by the Department of Education.
There are notably few gains for special education or ELL (English language learner) teachers — even as schools struggle to provide for students who are migrants and refugees, who have learning differences, or who need mental health support. In a city that has more cops in schools than counselors, this contract doesn’t meaningfully improve students’ learning conditions, which are one in the same as their teachers’ working conditions.
One of the most concerning aspects of the contract is its virtual learning pilot program, which has created a lot of question marks for both teachers and students. While virtual learning was a major component of the rank and file’s demands for safe school reopenings during the height of the Covid pandemic, the creation of a permanent virtual learning program for all schools in the city is problematic.
This program, which will start with selected pilot schools and will reach 100 percent of schools by the end of the contract, will include more “flexible” learning options for students, with weekend and evening classes. With no protections against subcontracting out to private companies or protecting union jobs, what this program really does is open the door for privatization while deteriorating the quality of education.
Mayor Adams claimed that this program will help “set our young scholars — including those with nontraditional schedules — up for success.” There has been lots of veiled language around these students with “nontraditional schedules” or “different circumstances.” Who are these students, exactly, and what circumstances are we talking about?
While there are students who do genuinely benefit from virtual learning, such as some students with disabilities or students with chronic immunosuppression, that does not apply to the majority of students in New York City public schools.
These circumstances that city leaders are talking about is poverty. With more and more families struggling to make ends meet, many children work jobs outside of school; in 2022 alone, there was a 68 percent rise in child labor violations in New York., which has increased in the wake of the Covid pandemic. “Flexibility” is really a euphemism for pushing low-income students out of the traditional classroom setting. As Jai Gellar and Jia Lee wrote recently, we need a teachers union that “demands universal access to good jobs, healthcare, and housing … not indulge an exploitative system where so many students must work to help support their families.”
That’s the problem: This contract doesn’t meaningfully address the underlying needs of New York City’s public school students and their families, nor the exhausting and demoralizing working conditions of its workers. Heavily-taxed yearly bonuses will never make up for the leadership’s failure to bargain in the interest of the working class and our children.
Beyond the specifics of the deal, what is most horrendous about the 2023 contract is the undemocratic and opaque process to reach it. After the contract expired in September, the membership was given very few updates on negotiations beyond when the committee was meeting, and a few meetings and actions to mobilize for a “fair contract” — the details of which were completely concealed.
While the 500-member negotiating team was historically large and more representative of the rank and file compared to previous years (which was pushed for by rank-and-file caucuses in the UFT), all members of this committee were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in order to take part in negotiations. As the negotiating team was hammering away behind closed doors, the rank and file were left completely in the dark on what the concrete demands actually were until they saw the memorandum of agreement. When the TA was released for viewing, it was rushed to a vote with scare tactics and misinformation to pressure members to ratify, warning that if we didn’t vote yes now, we’d get kicked to the back of the bargaining line behind all the other city unions and, in the meantime, return to a widely hated pre-2014 school day schedule.
When the tentative agreement was reached on June 13, the delegate assembly had to fight to make the entire memorandum of agreement available for the membership to read. Meanwhile, we were racing through the final week of the school year, busy preparing for Regents exam administration and finishing our end-of-year tasks. Yet we were expected to vote by the next Friday — hardly enough time to read, digest, and discuss a document that would establish the working conditions for the next four years.
In a democratic union, rank-and-file voices would be actively sought through a variety of different methods to ensure accessibility for all members, demands would be formulated through a collective and transparent process, the MOA and TA would be openly debated and discussed, and negotiations would be open for every member of the union to attend. But that’s not how the UFT, in its current bureaucratic and top-down form, operates.
The concessions in the contract that New York City teachers did get — shorter professional development, improved family leave, and increased bereavement time among them — would not have been won without the efforts of rank-and-file members who pushed for greater democracy in the process. Only after massive efforts to pressure the leadership by these rank-and-file caucuses, such as MORE-UFT, were there Contract Action Teams (CATs) and rank-and-file members on the negotiating committee.
A vote no campaign is a massive undertaking, and it’s not shocking, given the organizing conditions, that this contract passed. In fact, it’s a progressive sign that only 75 percent voted in favor, compared to the 2018 contract that passed with 87 percent approval. This could point to a growing skepticism in the top-down business unionism practiced by Mulgrew and his Unity Caucus, and the undemocratic methods that underscore the fight for better working conditions.
The elephant in the room underscoring the entire ratification process: the strike.
Workers’ most powerful weapon against the bosses is our power to withhold our labor and hit them where it hurts: their profits. But in New York State, public sector workers are told that this weapon isn’t available to us because of the Taylor Law. Passed in response to the 12-day 1966 transit strike to replace the even more severe Condon-Wadlin Act, the Taylor Law maintained the illegality of public sector strikes, penalizing collective action and targeting the union with harsh penalties to end strikes. Today, the Taylor Law continues to deter strikes and stunt militancy among public sector workers.
Fighting anti-worker laws cannot be challenged merely through legislative efforts aimed at reforming or repealing them — though we should support all efforts to do so in order to make it easier for workers to organize. We need to fight for a union that will take a clear stance against the Taylor Law and undertake a serious campaign of strike preparation. Even Mulgrew brought up the potential for a strike during an interview in late May. The union needs to be willing to seriously stand up to these anti-worker laws and be prepared to break them, with a robust campaign to organize the membership, educate members about what it means to strike, and build strike committees in every school.
Collectively withholding our labor is an essential tool of the working class to win concessions from our bosses and win broader demands. The most essential labor rights were won through strikes far before it was legally protected to do so. Before the mid-1930s, strikes weren’t legally protected at all; in fact, they became legal through a rolling and roiling strike wave that started in 1930 and ran throughout the decade. It was the strike itself that won the legal right to strike, and it is the strike that will win educators the working conditions we deserve.
Many point to the 2005 New York City transit strike — the failure of which paved the way for austerity in the city in the next 20 years — to warn against the potential consequences of defying this law. But there’s a reason why this strike was so heavily repressed: the city stood to lose nearly half a billion dollars for each day the workers withheld their labor. The problem there wasn’t the fact the workers went on strike — it was the lack of wider solidarity among other workers ready to use their power, too.
If the UFT is going to break the Taylor Law, we can’t do it alone. We need the public sector rank and file of DC 37, TWU, PSC-CUNY, NYSNA, and all other public- and private-sector unions in New York City to be ready to join in solidarity — as well as our students, their families, our communities, and all working people. The 2005 strike reminds us that our greatest power lies in our role as workers — in our ability to shut it down to get what we and our students deserve.
This new contract is bad, but we are now armed with the knowledge that at least 20,000 rank-and-file educators are either feeling alienated by the leadership’s top-down business unionism, or are just as angry as we are. That’s an excellent place to revitalize our fight, with even clearer eyes and more fire. To the rank-and-file members who have been long fighting to build a more democratic union and to those who are just entering the battle: let’s continue to build power with our coworkers in our schools, organize within and across our unions, and find out what we can win when we fight together.
The post <strong>New York City Teachers Union Ratifies Bad Five-Year Contract</strong> appeared first on Left Voice.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local 174 is outrageous—valuing property over workers’ rights. But it could have been much worse.
Unions still have the right to strike. Employers still can’t generally sue unions in state court for losses caused by strikes. But the decision does open the door to whittling away those rights more in the future.
Updated May 9, 2023 6:46 pm ET
Striking teachers hold a rally outside City Hall in Oakland, Calif., May 4
Photo: Terry Chea/Associated Press
Teachers unions once focused on the details of compensation and tenure, but these days they’re a vanguard of broader progressive politics. This week’s illustration is the teachers union strike that is holding children hostage in the name of climate and housing for the homeless.
The strike by the 3,000-member Oakland Education Association in California is heading into its fifth day, and the impasse isn’t over pay. The district has offered a record raise that would immediately increase salaries by 22% plus a $5,000 bonus. Most workers would love that increase, especially if performance doesn’t matter.
The Oakland Unified School District has lost students for five consecutive years as families have fled to suburbs with higher-performing and safer schools. This has resulted in a financial squeeze, which was only partly mitigated by federal pandemic aid. The district has had to close schools to reduce costs.
Yet the union’s demands go far beyond teacher pay or working conditions. For instance, the union wants the district to repurpose vacant school buildings for homeless housing and to landscape school yards with drought-resistant trees.
The union also wants reparations for black students to remedy alleged historic injustices. How about instead remedying the enormous learning deficits the union has caused by protecting bad teachers and closing schools during the pandemic? Perhaps the district could extend the school year, or, better yet, provide families with private school vouchers?
Instead, the union wants the first week of school each year to focus on creating a “positive school culture,” whatever that means, rather than instruction. It is also demanding a “Climate Justice Day for standards-based teach-ins, workshops, action, and field trips.” Maybe kids can’t read, but they can be unemployed climate warriors.
The Oakland union is taking cues from the National Education Association. “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power, and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice, for our kids, for our schools, for our communities, and for the future,” the NEA states on its website.
Tired of being criticized for prioritizing their own interests over those of children, unions are now pretending to promote what they call the “common good.” Yet in doing so they are substantiating the Supreme Court’s landmark Janus decision (2018), which held that government collective-bargaining implicates workers’ First Amendment rights.
The district is rightly refusing to bargain over issues unrelated to wages and working conditions. Even Oakland’s NAACP branch is prodding teachers to get back to work. “Education is critical to ending intergenerational poverty,” it said in a statement on Monday, adding “all students, including the most vulnerable, should be learning and thriving in school.”
The union apparently believes drought-resistant plants are more important.
Earlier this year, Payday reported on the dysfunctionality and lack of union democracy within the Amazon Labor Union that had led to several high-profile lopsided defeats and the abandonment of some organizing drives. The union currently lacks any constitution. Even more troubling, Amazon Labor Union (ALU) president Chris Smalls has said that he will wait three years before even holding union leadership elections as the union loses its momentum and suffers defeat after defeat.
At the time, Payday received much criticism for our reporting on the dysfunctionality and union democracy within the union.
One union PR consultant, who was employed by over a dozen unions including ALU, threatened that if Payday continued to provide critical coverage of union democracy issues within the Amazon Labor Union that PR consultant would blacklist Payday from getting interviews with other union leaders that he represented. (Fortunately, Payday is often far more interested in speaking to rank-and-file union members than union bureaucrats interested in this kind of blackmail for simply telling the truth).
For months, many questioned our reporting and even our motives, but since then we have been vindicated. Major outlets such as the New York Times have come out with indepth reporting that confirms and expands upon much of Payday’s reporting.
Now, a new expose by Insider reveals that Amazon Labor Union vice president Derrick Palmer admitted on tape to choking his ex-girlfriend and is currently facing criminal charges for it. Not only did Palmer admit to choking his ex-girlfriend, but photographs of her neck obtained by police showed clear physical signs of choking.
Despite Palmer’s video-taped confession of choking his ex-girlfriend and physical evidence of injury backing up the confession, Amazon Labor Union Chris Smalls has refused to remove his close ally as Vice President of the Amazon Labor Union or even publicly address the situation.
Without a union constitution and no elections, union members have no way to change course. Meanwhile, the Amazon Labor Union, under Chris Smalls, suffers embarrassing defeat after defeat.
For nearly a decade, Payday Report has been one of the few outlets to cover sexual assault within the labor movement. I’ve felt passionate because I’ve seen how the culture within unions can turn toxic when leadership permits sexual misconduct to happen. (See our 2020 piece “Breaking the Code of Silence on Sexual Misconduct within the Labor Movement”)
When unions permit sexual misconduct to persist in their leadership, they decay as an organization and they often do as we have seen here in Pittsburgh. At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, union leaders violently retaliated against a sexual misconduct whistleblower and refused to clean up their act. The result is that their union is currently losing an 8-month strike where 2/3rd of the union has either crossed the picket line or found work elsewhere.
Allowing union leaders, who have committed sexual misconduct, to cling to power almost always results in unions losing in the workplace.
Many left-leaning so-called “labor journalists” have looked the other way and even helped to cover up abuse because they depend on union leaders to promote their work.
However, Payday Report has continued to report on sexual misconduct because it’s just simply wrong. We have been able to do this because our readers have always gotten our back in covering tough stories of sexual misconduct, union democracy, and accountability within the labor movement.
The post Amazon Labor Union Leader Admitted to “Choking” Ex-Girlfriend appeared first on Payday Report.
People participate in a march in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter and to commemorate the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth on June 19, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
At forty-seven million, the African American population in the United States is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Despite the size of one of America’s largest minorities, discussions of black politics tend to be reductive and ahistorical. In cavalier fashion, critics of racism chart a long line of oppression that has its origin in the United States’ earliest days. Similarly, the forces that have, according to the dominant view of American racism, sought to oppose this monolithic racial tyranny have all fought under the single banner of “the black liberation struggle.”
Admittedly, these attempts to examine the history of discrimination offer correctives to right-wing defenses of forms of ascriptive hierarchy. However, they do so at the cost of flattening the complexities of actually existing black politics. This approach ignores, the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr tells Jacobin, that black politics is not immune from the economic and class forces which have and continue to shape American politics more broadly.
You’ve been a longtime critic of the notion of a cohesive or transhistorical “black freedom movement,” or the idea that one can trace an unbroken line from the fight to abolish slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Why isn’t this framework helpful for understanding black politics either now or in the past?
When people talk about something called the “black freedom movement” or the “black liberation struggle” or the “long civil rights movement,” they’re rehashing an old trope that goes back to the beginnings of the study of black American political history and black American political thought. At that time, that construct was called something like the “Negro’s struggle for freedom” or “Negro’s quest for equality.” Both then and now, the construct presumes, first of all, that black people are a singular collective entity. It also presumes an overarching struggle where black people have always unanimously wanted the same thing, and that whatever disagreements you might encounter if you go through the archives of black politics are just disagreements within a fundamentally shared commitment.
Any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it obscures class differentiation among black Americans.
So the main problem with the idea of a timeless black freedom movement is that it’s a single-thread narrative and a reduction of a much more complex reality. The narrative posits racial unity as the essential foundation for understanding black people and constructs and imposes an anti-historical understanding of black people’s experiences in American political life. It defines black people as being somehow outside of history and collapses differences in historical moments by presuming that people are fighting for the same things in 2020 that they were fighting for in 1860 — or 1619, for God’s sake — which is absurd.
Why do you think people find this idea of a singular and cohesive black freedom movement so compelling?
I think there are several reasons. One is simply that people have heard it over and over, so it seems to comport with commonsense knowledge. It’s a framework that gives you the familiar dyads of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois versus Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr. That’s convenient for people who don’t think there’s anything complex that goes on among black people.
Then there are people who have an interest in propagating the narrative. The black freedom movement construct has always functioned to obscure real distinctions among black people. Fundamentally, the most aggressive and insistent proponents of this view have been people who are pushing a class program: any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it’s part of a discourse of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call racecraft, which obscures class differentiation among black Americans, with or without conscious intent. If the black freedom movement narrative were even a reasonably accurate account of black American political history, then you could say, okay, well, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it. But it’s not. It’s false and it works for the other side.
The alternative to this kind of simplistic approach is to recognize that black people, like all people, live within historical circumstances. They’re diverse and have different interests and perceptions, not only at different points in time, but also at the same point. That was true in the nineteenth century and even true to some extent in the eighteenth century. It’s certainly true after Emancipation and once black people were able to claim some kind of civic participation, however badly the deck may have been stacked against them. Eric Foner has compiled a list of black people who held elected office in the South by the end of Reconstruction, and there were hundreds of people who had been elected to all kinds of offices. And that suggests that there was a lively culture of political debate and struggle, and that blacks engaged with nonblacks, as they always have and continue to do today.
It really comes down to following an injunction from Ralph Ellison: he cautioned observers of American life against the tendency to believe things about black people that they would not believe about any other human beings.
How, then, should we think about black politics now, particularly after the 2020 racial reckoning?
I’m probably getting more crotchety by the day, but I would almost argue at this point that the most crucial racial reckoning in US history was at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1864.
Anyway, to answer your question, at the beginning of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Touré [Reed] was talking to a mutual friend and colleague who was part of the campaign’s inner circle and encouraged the campaign not to concentrate on pursuing something called the “black vote” as much as they could possibly avoid it. His argument was that what we think of as “black politics” today is a class-specific interest-group politics that’s rooted entirely in the black professional and managerial strata, whose approach to political life is race reductionist. It’s an elite-driven activity that really has no base at all. And the reality is that once you start catering to the idea of a coherent “black vote” or “black community,” it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
Once you start catering to the idea of a coherent ‘black vote’ or ‘black community,’ it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.
And then there’s the Potemkin thing that happens whenever there’s a police atrocity or some other outrage: people respond to the outrage with protest actions, and then somebody who’s articulate and MSNBC-ready jumps out in front of the protest and talks to the media and is declared the new voice of the black youth or the rising wave of the future.
The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.
There’s another tendency in this type of politics that I trace back to the buildup to the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999. There were activists during that moment who complained that the movement was too white and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to affected “communities.” And I’d say to people, look, if there’s some constituency that isn’t involved that you think ought to be — and you purport to have connections to that constituency — then the thing to do is for you to go out and organize them and bring them into the movement.
Well, of course nobody who was complaining actually wanted that; what they wanted was just the opposite. They wanted to represent or embody the amorphous, voiceless masses. And that’s really the only context — that and nineteenth-century race theory — within which it makes sense to assume that the black American population, which is bigger than the entire population of Canada, can be spoken for in the first person plural.
You and Walter Benn Michaels have a new book out, No Politics But Class Politics. Over the years you’ve both been sharply critical of the tendency to focus on racial disparities. While there do exist plenty of liberals whose idea of justice is a diverse ruling class, what would you tell leftists who oppose the capitalist order but also want to take racism seriously? What does it mean to fight racism today?
Of course we should do what we can to protect and buttress the antidiscrimination apparatus, which includes an affirmative dimension. But this might also be of interest to readers:
In 1945, when the Full Employment Bill was still in play in Congress, the civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray wrote an article in the California Law Review on employment discrimination. In the article, she addresses the argument that you have to fight racism or discrimination before you can win social democracy. She points out that the reality is that racism becomes most politically viable in conditions of scarcity: when jobs are scarce, that’s when people get anxious, and that’s when employers and right-wingers can mobilize the anxiety. And so Murray argues that because of that, the only way to move forward as black workers is to win the social democratic reforms — in particular, at that moment, the struggle for a real political commitment to ground national economic policy on the pursuit and maintenance of a full employment economy — and that those are ultimately even more important than the antidiscrimination measures themselves.
Most people in this country who work for a living need the same things, right? And we don’t necessarily need to have a fight over what happened in 1860, or a fight over what happened in 1890, or even 1920, or even 1960 to recognize that we all need economic security, health care, jobs, and education. And the way for us to get to those things is to articulate our needs and to come together around the things we have in common.
When the anti-racist sensibility now is that making a reference to the working class is somehow conceding to white racism, it’s pretty clear what the class character of this politics is. And this is even before you start counting up all the billions of corporate and investor-class dollars that have gone to Black Lives Matter and other nominal antiracist activist groups since the murder of George Floyd.
So it’s time for us to stop playing around and to be serious and hardheaded about this. Especially for those of us who are professors, part of our job is trying to get the story straight, to demystify the mystifications. That’s what we do for a living, right? Otherwise, we should all just go to church.
Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
As tensions within the union grew, Smalls was caught on camera fighting an Amazon worker outside a warehouse last year.
On the night of December 5, the president of the Amazon Labor Union pummeled another union member. He did it in front of the only Amazon warehouse to vote in favor of unionization.
As Christian Smalls landed blows to James “Most” Daley’s upper body, Derrick Palmer, the union’s vice president, tried to hold Daley back, a video of the incident obtained by Insider shows.
“Ain’t that supposed to be our union rep, acting like a damn fool out there?” a bystander said as the fight broke up. “Did you all vote for the union? Really? Really?”
The whole thing had gone down in view of dozens of people standing at a bus stop outside of the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
The fight was the culmination of months of tension between Smalls and Daley, 37, a former Amazon Labor Union organizer whom Smalls had lauded earlier last year for convincing coworkers to vote in favor of unionization.
The men had a fraught history, and Daley had been threatening Smalls for months, according to messages Daley shared with Insider and interviews with two other ALU organizers. On that December day, Daley initiated physical contact with Smalls, Daley said in an interview with Insider. The video shows Daley moving aggressively toward Smalls. Daley can also be seen taking swings, though it’s not clear if he landed blows on Smalls.
The root of their disagreement, though, was related to Smalls’ ascendant fame — which many Amazon Labor Union organizers feel has overshadowed his responsibilities to the union he helped found.
That sentiment has contributed to a rift within the union that goes beyond the dramatic confrontation with Daley, pitting Smalls loyalists against those who believe the union would be better served without him. The fracture deepened after a December 9 meeting, The New York Times reported, in which Smalls told people who did not support him to leave.
“You got a problem with me? Deuces,” he told union organizers in that meeting, the Times reported. Some longtime Amazon Labor Union organizers decided to begin organizing on their own, without Smalls.
Since the union’s victory last April in Staten Island, Smalls has risen to celebrity status as the face of a newly resurgent labor movement. With a shoestring budget and little formal labor-organizing experience, the Amazon Labor Union had scored a rare victory against a corporate behemoth that has spent millions in an attempt to sway union votes.
The feat propelled Smalls onto magazine covers and red carpets. Smalls was invited to the White House to meet President Joe Biden, who told Smalls the labor leader was his “kind of trouble.” Smalls and Palmer were named two of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022. Both have received book deals, and Smalls has a Hollywood agent, according to IMDb Pro.
But as Smalls’ prominence has grown over the past three years, he has repeatedly come into conflict with fellow labor activists and has often responded to criticism by ostracizing his critics. Drawing on interviews, chat logs, and text exchanges, an Insider investigation found many organizers he has worked with view him as a threat to the success of the union and more focused on personal fame than the workers he represents. These incidents paint a portrait of Smalls’ leadership that is very different from his carefully cultivated image of a beloved labor leader with a unique ability to organize disenfranchised workers.
Over the past year Smalls has also dealt with personal issues that include failure to pay child support and spending a three-day stint in a New Jersey jail.
Workers who support Smalls say his fame is propelling the union’s success, not hampering it. To them, his critics are simply upset that their attempted “coup” didn’t work, and recent media coverage of union infighting is a last ditch attempt from a losing side. Smalls is “helping to inspire” workers to unionize, ALU staffer Evangeline Byars said, and his increased status is a byproduct of managing to take on Amazon when no one else could.
“Someone’s gotta be a potential star in this thing,” said Gerald Bryson, another of Smalls’ close allies. “It happens to be Chris. He’s the one who got us where he’s at.”
Smalls dismisses the notion that he is personally famous. Union organizing, he said, is grueling work. His union salary was less than $30,000 last year, financial disclosures show.
“Just because I meet celebrities don’t make me a celebrity,” he said in an interview surrounded by several of his supporters at the ALU’s union hall, a small suite of professional offices in a wooded area of Staten Island. “I don’t even have health insurance.”
Smalls, 34, rose to national prominence as the face of the fight against Amazon in 2020. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized a walkout of the Staten Island warehouse where he worked to protest what he said were Amazon’s lax safety measures.
Executives at Amazon’s highest levels took notice.
In one meeting, Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, derided Smalls as “not smart or articulate,” and proposed making him the face of labor activism at Amazon in order to weaken the legitimacy of workers’ demands, according to a meeting memo obtained by Vice. (Zapolsky later said his emotions got the better of him.)
President Joe Biden invited Smalls to the White House last May.
The White House
Zapolsky’s remarks generated an outpouring of support for Smalls and his nascent workers’ movement. Smalls had just been fired by Amazon over what he said were his organizing efforts, and he seemed prepared to continue taking the fight to the corporate behemoth. (Amazon has said Smalls was fired for returning to work while in quarantine after having been exposed to a colleague who had coronavirus.)
“We are starting a revolution and people around the country support us,” Smalls wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian at the time.
Smalls founded a group called The Congress of Essential Workers that traveled from city to city to stage protests, including in front of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ homes in Beverly Hills, Seattle, and Washington, DC. Smalls’ courage in taking on one of the largest corporations in the world got him the attention of other labor groups and longtime activists, some of whom joined the Congress, which by the fall of 2020 numbered about 35 people.
Within that organization, though, concerns were growing about Smalls’ leadership.
In late 2020, a group of 15 people involved in the Congress published an open letter criticizing Smalls’ failure to file for nonprofit status, establish financial transparency, and take steps to ensure the safety of protesters at a rally, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Insider.
“Smalls has created a culture of resistance to infrastructure and documentation,” they wrote. “As a result of this avoidance, we have no organization. We have nothing tangible to offer essential workers — no financial assistance, no substantial legal aid, no resources. We cannot even help our own struggling Amazon employee members.”
Smalls told them to stand behind him or leave.
“I don’t owe anyone anything,” Smalls texted dozens of people in the organization’s group chat, according to a transcript of the chat obtained by Insider. He added he was not “obligated to show proof to those who’ve been conspiring behind my back.”
“Those who I hope to have helped turned on me for what is really nonsense,” he wrote, telling people who disagreed with him to “just simply dismiss yourself.”
The signatories, who were mostly women, queer people, and people of color, some with extensive organizing experience, quietly left the organization, according to interviews with three of them. All three said they believe in Smalls’ mission and support the goals of the Amazon Labor Union, but worry about Smalls’ ability to lead.
“To see someone who I believe to be abusing their power, an emperor with no clothes, continue to gain traction was not only painful, but also to see the Amazon Labor Union, or the movement in general continue to grow, I’m like how do I speak to what I experienced without discrediting the entire movement?” said one of the organizers who criticized Smalls in 2020.
Smalls has placed himself at the center of the Amazon Labor Union and its success, a portrayal that has been amplified in the media.
“This movement started from what happened to me,” he wrote in a 2020 Congress of Essential Workers group chat. In Politico, he was “the ex-rapper who made unionizing cool again.” In the New York Times, Smalls and Palmer were “the two best friends who beat Amazon.” Time Magazine wondered if Smalls was the future of the labor movement.
Smalls on the red carpet for an event honoring Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2022.
Angela Weiss/Getty Images
Those characterizations struck some ALU organizers as erasing their painstaking work building support for the union among Amazon employees. And while the ALU had scored one early, momentous success at JFK8, elsewhere, it appeared the union’s momentum was fizzling.
Losses at a warehouse next to JFK8, called LDJ5, and at another warehouse in Albany, where workers voted against joining the Amazon Labor union last year, exacerbated the sense among some ALU organizers that Smalls’ rising public profile was a double-edged sword.
The history of labor movements often includes charismatic figures who become celebrities in their own right, to both the benefit and detriment of their unions. Leaders like Smalls can bring momentum and attention to organizing efforts, but can also become untethered from the difficult work of securing contracts and sustaining organizing efforts, three labor experts and historians told Insider.
“It’s not uncommon that people who build something are not necessarily the most equipped to run it,” said Miriam Pawel, the author of books about labor leader Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.
Among the organizers who bristled at Smalls’ increasing status, Daley was especially incensed. In a New York Magazine cover story profiling Smalls, Daley publicly criticized Smalls, saying he had become self-centered and suggesting he was unfit to lead.
Daley and Smalls had gotten along well until about a week after the election, Daley said. In a press conference on April 8, a week after the union won its historic vote at JFK8, Smalls introduced Daley by saying he’d seen Daley “call people on his damn phone and say, ‘You better get your butt down here and vote for this union.'” (Smalls has since downplayed his compliments for Daley, telling Insider, “I praise everybody.”)
The next day, Smalls, Daley, and a handful of other Amazon Labor Union organizers attended a luncheon in Albany hosted by state legislators to feature labor leaders. Daley took a photo with Mayor Eric Adams.
The Amazon Labor Union organizers returned to New York City that day. Smalls stayed behind. Daley and others later learned he had attended an exclusive after-party by himself. To them, it felt like Smalls was leaving them behind to enjoy the fruits of fame. Daley called Smalls out in an Instagram message. Smalls deflected. “What party?” Smalls wrote in a message to Daley. “Don’t make up shit bro if you don’t know.”
Smalls celebrates with Amazon Labor Union organizers after winning a unionization vote at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the first and only Amazon warehouse to vote to unionize.
ANDREA RENAULT/AFP via Getty Images
Daley responded to Smalls with threats, two other ALU members said, and was kicked off the union’s messaging platforms and uninvited to meetings.
Over Instagram, Daley sent Smalls hostile messages over a period of several months, according to a messaging history Daley shared with Insider.
“Listen and listen real good,” Daley wrote, telling Smalls to “stop trying to play with my intelligence” and warning that “there won’t be any talking.” Daley also sent an Instagram reel of a person pretending to punch and kick the camera. “Finally caught up with my coworker that been talking sh*t about me,” text overlaying the video read. (Daley said he’d originally received that video from someone loyal to Smalls and sent it to Smalls as an example of the type of harassment he was receiving.)
Amazon suspended Palmer while investigating the fight, Palmer said, ultimately reinstating him. His supporters at the ALU offices pointed to Palmer’s reinstatement as proof he wasn’t in the wrong. Amazon declined to comment on their investigation.
In a text message, Smalls criticized Insider’s decision to report on the fight. There are “so many other things to report on with Amazon,” he wrote, including that the company spent $14.2 million on union-busting consultants last year.
The fight “isn’t news for the public,” he wrote. “It happened months ago and we’re not talking about it anymore.”
While Daley’s animosity toward Smalls took on the air of a personal grudge, other Amazon Labor Union members had begun to have similar doubts about how Smalls was handling his newfound fame, according to interviews with four ALU organizers. They felt that the more prominent Smalls became, the less interested he seemed in directing his attention to securing union victories at other Amazon warehouses or building support for the type of actions that might force Amazon to the bargaining table at JFK8.
Last summer, some ALU organizers began publicly voicing concerns about the union’s lack of infrastructure. As the face of the movement, Smalls was essential to organizing efforts, workers told Bloomberg. But some also said he was a mercurial manager who could not be relied upon to do the day-to-day work of union organizing, such as showing up to rallies. (Smalls has said it is dangerous for him to trespass on Amazon’s property, where he is not a worker, because he could be arrested.)
Emails from workers at other Amazon warehouses seeking to start their own union went unanswered. The labor union yanked its support from a warehouse organizing in Kentucky last October, according to Payday Report. It’s still pushing for unionization at another Kentucky site, Amazon’s KCVG Air Hub.
The same month, workers organizing with the Amazon Labor Union at a warehouse in California withdrew their election petition. Byars, the ALU staffer, told Insider that workers at the California warehouse, known as ONT8, are still organizing and plan to seek an election, but she claimed Amazon inflated the number of eligible employees and began bombarding employees with anti-union messaging, prompting delays. (An Amazon spokesperson denied that the company inflated the number of employees at ONT8.)
In the year since the Amazon Labor Union won its election at JFK8, there have been few visible organizing gains affecting the nearly 6,000 workers in the facility. Several workers Insider spoke with outside the facility described feeling relatively disconnected from the union and unaware of the drama that was engulfing organizers. One worker, who had voted for unionization, felt not much had changed about her work since the vote and said she didn’t hear much from the union compared with the weekly texts and emails she received from local Amazon management.
Smalls said about 2,500 to 3,500 JFK8 workers open the regular emails the union sends out. Organizing within the warehouse, he said, had been hampered by a new Amazon policy that banned workers from warehouses when they weren’t scheduled to work. A federal labor agency directed Amazon last month to allow off-duty workers access to break rooms, which Smalls and Byars said will help the union by giving organizers more face time with colleagues.
The disputes came to a head at the December meeting, The New York Times reported last month, where some organizers were surprised to see that the ALU’s constitution had been amended to state that elections would be held only after a contract was reached at JFK8 — which could take years. Until then, Smalls and others close to him would remain at the helm of the organization. Many organizers walked out.
Smalls has partially characterized the rift along racial lines. Most of his critics in the union are white, while the union’s leadership is largely Black, he told Insider. In an interview, his supporter Gerald Bryson described the walkout as a coup: “They wanted more power,” he said.
Amazon Labor Union members consoled each other after the union lost the vote at its second warehouse, LDJ5, last April.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Heather Goodall, who led the Amazon Labor Union’s organizing efforts at an Albany warehouse last year, said Smalls’ constant travel and seeming disorganization derailed her attempts to plan events around him.
She was never sure when he would arrive at the warehouse, she said. Text messages between Goodall and Smalls show her repeatedly asking him to confirm when he would be in Albany.
During one tense exchange, after Smalls said he would be late to a union rally and would miss a call that night, Smalls sent Goodall cash to cover expenses for lunch.
“I just sent you $500 of my own money what else would you like me to do for you?” Smalls wrote.
“I don’t want you to send me your personal money. I just need to be organized,” Goodall replied, “but we will talk about that when I see you.”
The union lost in a landslide last October.
At that point, she said, she began losing faith in Smalls’ leadership.
“I started questioning Christian’s actions, his traveling,” she said. “We haven’t seen or heard from anyone since the election.”
Criticism of Smalls’ lack of involvement in union elections at warehouses outside JFK8 is misplaced, Bryson said. “You can’t have someone like me over in Western Virginia recruit people. You gotta have the people in the building run it,” he said. “It’s up to that person to give support to their building to unionize. It’s not up to us.”
Less than two weeks after the Albany warehouse lost its election, Smalls was at a Los Angeles gala hosted by Ebony magazine, which had named him one of its 100 most influential people of 2022. Since the start of the year, Smalls’ Instagram has shown him in Canada, the UK, and Kentucky.
Smalls told Goodall in late January that he needed to be constantly traveling in order to fundraise. “If I don’t get us money from elsewhere we go bankrupt,” he texted her in January.
Goodall was skeptical. She emailed the union’s executive board, asking for information about the union’s finances. The board declined to answer.
Goodall wasn’t the only person to have raised concerns about financial transparency.
“A lot of money was coming in once we won the first election, and a lot of money is going out,” said Mat Cusick, a former ALU organizer who has said he was pushed out in May. Cusick published a public resignation letter laying bare his concerns about Smalls’ leadership, including his perception that Smalls had launched “a secret consolidation of power.”
“There were not good accountability procedures in place at the time that I left, and there were serious concerns about embezzlement and misuse of funds at that point,” Cusick told Insider.
Cusick next encountered Smalls at a labor conference in June, where Cusick said Smalls pushed him. (Smalls denied doing so.) On Twitter the next day, Smalls accused Cusick of stealing money from workers. (Cusick has said that is false.)
Financial disclosures filed last week by the ALU show that the union raised more than $850,000 last year, more than half of it from just three donors — the American Federation of Teachers, the International Commission for Labor Rights, and the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
Smalls walks with Senator Bernie Sanders at a union rally last April.
KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images
The biggest single line item was $200,000 from the ALU’s GoFundMe. The GoFundMe, though, had raised more than $440,000 from small donors between February and July last year, when the union shut it down and moved the donation page to the ALU’s website.
The other $240,000 raised through the GoFundMe is not reflected in the union’s financial disclosures because it was spent on organizing activities before the union established a bank account last summer, said Connor Spence, who was previously the union’s treasurer. Spence broke with Smalls last year and resigned his role in the ALU.
That discrepancy is not necessarily an indicator of malfeasance, said John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University who has testified before Congress about unions’ required financial disclosures. It’s not uncommon for young labor organizations to struggle to adhere to strict federal financial reporting requirements, he said. And because GoFundMe campaigns are relatively new in the world of labor organizing, it may not be clear how unions should characterize revenue generated through GoFundMe in those required disclosures, he added.
“This is a cumbersome and unwieldy process,” he said. “But the most common thing is mistakes rather than any kind of nefarious activities going on.”
Spence acknowledged that the union should have established more formal accounting structures sooner than it did. “When you’re starting a new organization, no one tells you these things,” he said.
The union’s finances are now managed by an accounting firm, Smalls said in a text message.
Smalls has also said he needs to travel in order to book speaking gigs to pay his child support. Smalls failed to pay child support for nearly a year between September 2021 and August 2022, according to records provided by his ex-wife. He ultimately paid about $20,000 in child support arrears in two lump-sum payments, those records show, after he spent three days in jail last September. Smalls did not respond on the record to questions about his child support payments.
The circumstances of Smalls’ arrest are unclear. An electronic entry in the Bergen County jail’s online inmate finder indicates that Smalls was taken into custody by police in Hackensack for three days September 2022 for “simple assault” and “arrears,” the failure to pay money owed to another party. The Hackensack Police Department said it had no records of the arrest, and a clerk at the Hackensack Municipal Court said it had no records of a criminal charge against Smalls in 2022. A Bergen County Superior Court ombudsman said that records could only be obtained directly from the judge in the case.
Smalls did not respond on the record to questions about the arrest.
Even as the Amazon Labor Union has splintered, Smalls and a core group of trusted lieutenants have begun turning their attention to new battles.
In February, Smalls, Palmer, Bryson and Jordan Flowers, who has also been involved in the union since its earliest days, registered a new nonprofit. They chose the same name as Smalls’ previous organization, The Congress of Essential Workers, where he had once fought over the open letter criticizing his leadership.
One purpose of the organization appears to be to raise funds for the Amazon Labor Union, according to its certificate of incorporation.
That would mean the new nonprofit would be the ALU’s fiscal sponsor — a 501(c)3 organization soliciting contributions on behalf of a union, which cannot accept tax-exempt donations. Such arrangements are not uncommon in the world of activism.
But the new Congress of Essential Workers nonprofit also has grander ambitions, according to its incorporation documents and an interview with Bryson.
Bryson said the new nonprofit will also support labor movements at other companies “whenever we finish with Amazon, whenever this whole ordeal is pretty much under control, and everyone’s falling in line.”
“We gotta deal with Jeff Bezos first. That was always the plan,” Bryson said. Then “it’s back to the next giant.”
Wooing philanthropists to fund new labor battles could pull the union’s focus from the ongoing contract fight with Amazon, warned the Rutgers labor professor Susan Schurman.
“The most important thing that the leadership of the ALU can do right now for the labor movement is to get a contract with Amazon at the warehouse,” she said. “There may be people who think it’s great that clearly this guy’s a charismatic leader, they’re thinking beyond organizing at Amazon, but the fact is a contract with Amazon at that warehouse would be a huge win for organizing everywhere.”
In the meantime, workers on both sides of the divide within the ALU say they’re intent on continuing to organize within Amazon warehouses.
Both Smalls’ backers and the organizers who disagree with his leadership are still trying to mobilize Amazon workers and address their concerns, according to Justine Medina, an ALU organizer in New York City who is hopeful that the two groups will reconcile. “Ultimately,” she said, “we’re all fighting against Bezos.”
As French workers intensify their fight against President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular plan to raise the nation’s retirement age from 62 to 64, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
A poll released Wednesday
shows that reactionary lawmaker Marine Le Pen—leader of the far-right National Rally party, the largest opposition force in Parliament—would beat Macron by a margin of 55% to 45% in a head-to-head rematch. The neoliberal incumbent defeated Le Pen in a runoff election last April, but the openly xenophobic and Islamophobic challenger has gained significant ground since their first matchup in 2017.
The new survey was conducted after Macron
advanced his planned retirement age hike through executive order on March 16. The president bypassed the National Assembly once it became clear that his legislative proposal did not have enough support to pass France’s lower house.
“We’re in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis.”
Macron’s blatantly anti-democratic move provoked an uproar. The labor movement had already been staging weekly nationwide strikes and peaceful marches since mid-January. But the president’s decision to circumvent a vote last month has brought more people to the streets, with heightened participation from high school and university students, some of whom have set up barricades on campus.
Progressive lawmakers and union leaders have urged the working class to keep up the pressure, portraying the left’s struggle against Macron’s pension attack as a struggle for democracy in France.
“Either trade unions win this, or it will be the far right,” Fabien Villedieu, a representative of a railway trade union,
told France Info radio on Thursday. “If you sicken people—and that is what’s happening—the danger is the arrival of the far right.”
Laurent Berger, head of the French Democratic Confederation of Labor,
told RTL radio that “we’re still asking for the reform to be revoked.”
“We’re in the middle of a social crisis, a democratic crisis,” he added.
Macron has so far refused to withdraw his proposed pension overhaul, which includes raising the minimum eligible retirement age and increasing the number of years one must work to qualify for full benefits. France’s constitutional council is evaluating the legality of the government’s plans and is set to issue a decision next Friday.
According to The Guardian:
The constitutional council, which has the power to strike out some or even all of the legislation, will assess the pension changes based on a strict interpretation of the law. Constitutional experts say the council is unlikely to strike the legislation down fully.
The government is playing for time, hoping protests and strikes will fizzle out. Unions want to show that the protest movement still has momentum, whatever the council’s decision.
Hundreds of thousands of people have continued to rally across France in recent weeks. The government has responded with an increasingly
repressive crackdown.
An 11th round of strikes on Thursday caused further disruption to schools, public transit, and energy production. In addition, clashes broke out “between demonstrators and police on the edges of protests in cities including Lyon, Nantes, and Paris,”
The Guardian reported.
Workers’ anger is palpable and mounting.
“In the capital, protesters briefly set fire to the awning of the Left Bank brasserie La Rotonde, well known for hosting Macron’s controversial evening of celebrations when he led the first-round vote in the 2017 presidential election,”
The Guardian noted.
Meanwhile, rat catchers threw dead vermin at city hall.
u201cParis has been without trash pickup for weeks. Chaos and garbage everywhere. And rats: lots of rats.nnNow the rat catchers joined the protest against the Pension Reform, and threw the dead vermin in front of the charming Hotel de Ville, Paris City Hall.nnud83dudd25ud83dudd25ud83dudd25u201d— Paul Serran (@Paul Serran)
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Also on Thursday, striking workers “forced their way into the building that houses BlackRock’s office in Paris Thursday, taking their protest against the government’s pension reforms to the world’s biggest money manager,” CNN reported. “About 100 people, including representatives of several labor unions, were on the ground floor of the building for about 10 minutes, chanting anti-reform slogans. BlackRock’s office is located on the third floor.”
Jerome Schmitt, a spokesperson for the French labor confederation SUD, told reporters: “The meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money of workers, for our pensions, they are taking it.”
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with a nearly $9 trillion portfolio, has not been involved in Macron’s assault on France’s public pension system. But workers targeted the financial institution due to its role in overseeing the private pension funds that they may be forced to rely on.
“The government wants to throw away pensions, it wants to force people to fund their own retirement with private pension funds,” one teacher told Reuters. “But what we know is that only the rich will be able to benefit from such a setup.”
u201cStriking workers storm BlackRocku2019s Paris office to protest the corporate giantu2019s role in privatizing workersu2019 pensions.nnJerome Schmitt, a union spokesperson, said, u201cThe meaning of this action is quite simple. We went to the headquarters of BlackRock to tell them: the money ofu2026u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union)
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Le Pen, for her part, “has kept a low profile, hoping to increase her support among low-income workers, many of whom began their careers earlier and will be more greatly affected by the pension changes,” The Guardian reported.
Earlier this week, left-wing luminaries alarmed by France’s escalating repression of pension defenders as well as environmentalists campaigning against water privatization signed a Progressive International petition.
“We stand with the French people in the face of violent crackdowns on popular protest and the criminalization of dissent by Emmanuel Macron’s government,” it states. “The extreme violence of the police and the criminalization by the interior minister are clearly aimed at suppressing the movement against the pension cuts. This is an unacceptable attack on the democratic freedoms and human rights of French citizens.”
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