MY INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN SMALLS

In April of 2022, a young man named Christian Smalls led a powerful unionization drive at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York. An 8,000 person work force was working under conditions that Smalls, and others, found unfair and unsafe particularly during the COVID pandemic.

Amazon spent over $4M to deter Smalls’ unionization efforts, which he funded with $120,000 raised on a Go Fund Me page. Yet as everyone now knows, Smalls’ David beat Amazon’s Goliath; the final vote was 2,654 yes votes, 2,131 no, with 68 challenges. While Amazon was left with more arrows in its quivers with which to beat unionization, the vote at JFK8 was a historic win with an indisputable emotional and psychological effect on labor activists around the country. 

 Was Amazon’s material power enormous compared to that of Smalls and his friends? Oh yes. Was it almost ridiculous to think that Smalls - particularly with so few resources compared to Amazon’s - would be able to rally enough support for his efforts? Absolutely. So what happened there? What was it about Smalls - about his commitment and his perseverance and dedication to his cause - that despite the forces arrayed against him enabled him to work a miracle?

 Speaking on the New York Times Daily podcast, Smalls referred to the process as “spiritual.” He said the effort was built on “love and caring for one another.” Amazon spent millions of dollars on anti-union consultants; Smalls put up a folding table on public property near the bus stop outside the warehouse, talking to Amazon workers as they got off and on the bus day after day, night after night. He talked to workers, he listened to their stories, he helped where he could, he built a community of sorts. They all sang together, he said, and even prayed together. In the end, the power of connection, community, human sharing and understanding, overcame Amazon’s gargantuan material power.

Many have referred to Smalls as the David to Amazon’s Goliath. And there was far more to the Biblical David and Goliath than simply their difference in size. First of all, David wasn’t even a warrior; he was a shepherd delivering food. He knew nothing about fighting. But his heart was touched by the pain and fear of his brothers, and it was that which inspired him to volunteer to take on the giant. He was bound to win … because the giant had no soul.

Smalls, like David before him, was going to hit Goliath in the one place where it has no defense: its lack of conscience. With his slingshot David hit Goliath at the midpoint of the giant’s forehead, a point referred to metaphysically as the Third Eye. If you have a conscience and the opponent doesn’t, then ultimately you will win.

A soulless neoliberal economic order, devoid of ethics and human compassion, will have no power once confronted by a politics of love, of radical humanitarianism. The way Smalls discussed his union drive made me think he understands that.

Amazon didn’t know what hit them.

Most experts in the field of union organizing would have doubted Smalls’ effort, and the executives at Amazon certainly did. Amazon’s general counsel made the mistake of emailing a thousand people to describe Smalls as “not smart and not articulate,” a line that will go down in history as the famous last words of a dinosaur system. They became a rallying cry not only for Smalls but for thousands of people who could relate to the experience of their legitimate calls for justice going unheard, their needs being dismissed, and their very way of speaking being derided.

The Amazon executive said he hoped the press would focus on Smalls as a kind of mascot for the unionization effort, as he felt it would be good for the company on the public relations front. If ever there was a “watch what you wish for” moment, that was it.

Smalls didn’t try to look or sound like a union leader is “supposed” to look or sound. Nor did he look to professional organizers to build his union. He knew the experts had failed in their effort to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama; only Smalls knew the workers themselves and what they were going through on Staten Island. He’s unabashedly of a new generation of labor leadership that is going to do things their way.

We can’t beat the old system with the tools of the old system, for the old system is loveless. If we put our lovelessness up against its lovelessness - and it has more money or power of brute force than we do - then we will lose. It is only when we claim the power of deep human connection, of the authentically human, that we can invoke nonviolent revolution. Call it solidarity, call it community, call it brotherhood or call it love - whatever you call it, it’s the key to transforming the world.

Interestingly enough, it was the American labor union advocate Nicholas Klein (not Gandhi, to whom