Derrick Palmer — Handbook for the Revolution
Amazon Labor Union cofounder Derrick Palmer discusses the history and future of worker organizing in the twenty-first century, with Afeni Evans at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
Palmer helped organize the first successful union drive at Amazon—against all odds, at one of the most surveillance-intensive workplaces in the country. This is what that looked like from the inside.
In 2022, Derrick Palmer and Chris Smalls founded the Amazon Labor Union and pulled off what most labor experts said was impossible: a successful union election at an Amazon fulfillment center. It was the first time Amazon workers had unionized in the United States. Palmer’s book Handbook for the Revolution is both a memoir of that campaign and a practical guide to the conditions and tactics that made it work.
The organizing drive happened at Staten Island’s JFK8 warehouse, against a company that spends aggressively on union avoidance and monitors its workers with extraordinary precision. That it succeeded—and what it required—is the subject of the book.
Palmer joins Politics and Prose at Union Market in conversation with Afeni Evans. Free and open to the public.