Chris Smalls: When the Revolution Comes
Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls lays out his vision for the future of U.S. labor organizing, rooted in the most surprising union win in recent history.
Why we picked this
Smalls organized a union at an Amazon warehouse without institutional support, at a company that had spent years building anti-union infrastructure — the book is a manual as much as a memoir.
In April 2022, the Amazon Labor Union — a scrappy, independent effort without backing from established unions — won a historic election at a Staten Island fulfillment center, becoming the first successfully certified Amazon union in U.S. history. Chris Smalls was a former Amazon employee who had been fired after organizing a walkout over COVID safety conditions, and who then built the organizing campaign that produced that victory largely through direct relationship-building with co-workers.
“When the Revolution Comes” is Smalls’s account of that campaign and his argument for what it means for the future of American labor. The book arrives at a moment when labor organizing has been spreading to sectors — warehousing, technology, graduate education, coffee shops — where it was essentially absent a decade ago, and when the infrastructure question (how do you organize without institutional support?) is the most pressing one in the movement.
Politics and Prose is a particularly appropriate venue for this conversation, given Washington’s own labor landscape and the policy implications of what Smalls is arguing. Free and open to the public.