Chris Smalls Two hours after the strike outside the JFK8 warehouse, Chris Smalls received a call from the company where he had worked for five years. I was released. This overseer dared to organize his colleagues. It was March 30, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was also wreaking havoc on the American population, and workers were asking Amazon for masks and disinfection of facilities. Prior to the protest, the company did not even conduct a temperature check at the entrance to the warehouse. “Working on Amazon is awful – do it or die,” Smalls told CBS Money Watch at the time.
The organizers counted 50 workers. The company said there were no more than 15. He could have stayed, but the release of Smalls sparked a wave of information. Amazon sent a statement justifying his dismissal because the invitee did not protect his social security distance. “He was asked to stay at home for 14 days with pay. “He put the safety of others at risk,” said the company, which also accused him of “close contact” with a COVID-19 certified employee.
Smalls condemned that Amazon had quarantined him to end the strike and that he had been selected after management demanded that the warehouse be disinfected and made more transparent about the number of sick workers. New York Attorney General Leticia James called the release “disgraceful.”
“They are not going to stop me. I will continue to fight. “It is a shame for them,” he said. Vice-News 33-year-old worker and father of three children (twins). That day was born Jeff Bezos’s worst enemy, who traveled eleven minutes in space on July 20, 2021 on a spaceship built by his rocket company Blue Origin.
On Earth, Chris Smalls spent last year in a small tent at the entrance to JFK8. There he went on a weekly basis distributing food among his companions. Chicken, pizza, pasta and homemade food. They made barbecues, collected signatures to form a union, and distributed weeds for free … “because it’s legal,” Smalls explained.
The efforts of him and some of his former colleagues have paid off: not a single established and influential union has been able to organize Amazon. “We had nothing. “We started with two tables, two chairs and a tent,” he said.
Chris Smalls approached the media microphones waiting in the street. Already as president of the Amazon Labor Union, the union that ensures the dignity of the international distributor of New York workers, he remembered a second fate on the planet, according to the latest list published by Forbes this Tuesday, which gives a legacy. $ 171,000 million (€ 156,027 million). “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going into space, because while he was there, we started dating,” Smalls said, showing off his gold-plated teeth.
The company said they were “disappointed with the outcome of the Island state election because we believe a direct relationship with the company is in the best interests of our employees.” Prior to approving the first merger with the company, Amazon said it was considering challenging the outcome for “the NLRB’s inappropriate and improper influence, which we and others (including the National Retail Federation and the US Chamber of Commerce) have witnessed. Elections.”
As a trade unionist, Smalls has already shown that his style is highly unorthodox. In the early days of the mobilization, he wore a T-shirt from the Congress of Key Workers (TCEW), a group of labor activists he founded when Amazon released him. This is the origin of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). His initials were read on the T-shirt with which he appeared before the media.
His uniform was a New York Yankees red tracksuit, scarf and hat, an old stadium in Heckensek, New Jersey, an hour’s drive from Manhattan. Smalls, who played basketball and hoped to get into the NBA, was born and raised there. Before being struck while working. Before Amazon he was at FedEx, Walmart and cashier.
The red sports suit will be his war suit against Bezos and company executives, who carry out “invasive surveillance” to monitor workers’ time and estimate break time. “Who wants to be watched all day?” This is not a castle. This is a work in progress, ”said Smalls, who has not forgotten his gold chains and bracelet on the most important day of his life, as he himself admitted. “We worked, we had fun and we made history,” he wrote on Twitter.
As support for Smalls grew, Amazon executives gathered to drop fans of nonsense. The fired employee had to be slandered. In the filter that Vice-News The company’s plans against Smalls, which he described as “neither intelligent nor eloquent,” were revealed. The company’s lawyer, David Zapolski, told Bezos at the meeting that Amazon always favored the media because they explained “how we try to protect workers for the first time.”
They also supported the accusation of the strike organizer’s behavior as it was “immoral, unacceptable and possibly illegal”. According to records released by the lawyer, the plan was also to make Smalls the face of the trade union movement in order to beat him.
Two years later, the National Council on Labor Relations confirmed the results of the vote at the Staten Island warehouse, which had nearly 6,000 workers. The workers’ union won by more than 500 votes: 2654 workers in favor, 2131 against. It will be the first and only Amazon hub at this time to be united among the 110 that exist across the country.
New York Times Recently published an investigation into JFK8. It describes in detail the dismissal according to the algorithm, the inability of the dismissed workers to communicate with the person, to explain their reason. Amazon has emerged as a company that has driven workers to despair.
For Amazon, Chris Smalls and the rest of the union leaders are the “Avazaks,” and the company is known for its warehouse workers at JFK8, the largest in New York City, according to a complaint from the National Labor Council. . They explained that they should forget about voting for the union because it would be “useless”. The complaint from this administrative body also specifies how Amazon assured its employees that a trade union would never be established there and how they would attend to their claims if they did not support the trade union.
As reported უ New York Times, More than 60% of employees at JFK8 are African American or Latin American. In contrast, management is more than 70% white or Asian. The probability of dismissal of black workers in JFK8 is almost 50% higher. The excuse is often due to low productivity, misbehavior or absenteeism.
New York is a federal city. Bus drivers, police, firefighters, cleaners … everyone knows someone in the union. But it was the extreme conditions during the corovarious health crisis that forced Amazon workers to arrange. Maybe President Joe Biden’s “Pay More” was also forced.
Source: El Diario
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