Chris Smalls is sitting across from me in Chicago. For six years, he’s been told he was wrong. For six years, he’s been proven right. He was right that Amazon was an unsafe place to work in the early weeks of the pandemic. He was right that workers at the Staten Island JFK8 warehouse, a million-square-foot facility with ten- to twelve-hour shifts and a thirty-minute lunch break, could win a union election against the second-largest private employer in the country, even when nearly every major labor organization in America believed they couldn’t. Now, at a warehouse where 5,500 workers still don’t have a contract, he says he is right that Amazon will eventually be forced to the bargaining table. The federal government has ruled in his union’s favor on that point twice. Amazon is in court trying to argue that the federal labor board itself shouldn’t exist. And on May 4, three weeks before this conversation, Smalls decided he was right that Jeff Bezos, the lead sponsor of the Met Gala, should not be allowed to walk a red carpet thirty minutes from the warehouse without consequence. “There’s no way I’m going to allow this billionaire to come to New York City and do a fashion red carpet gala thirty minutes away from the warehouse that he refuses to negotiate a contract with,” Smalls says. He jumped a barricade. The NYPD tackled him. He spent twenty-four hours in a Manhattan jail. He is now facing charges for resisting arrest, trespass, and three other counts. They get dismissed if he stays out of trouble for six months. His entire life suggests he has no intention of doing that. “We put so much fear in Jeff Bezos,” he tells me, “that he didn’t show up on the red carpet.” The book In two weeks, on June 1, Crown will publish When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. The memoir opens with a prologue on what it feels like to walk inside a grocery warehouse, then circles back to his childhood and moves chronologically through to the 2022 union victory at JFK8. It’s not a manifesto, despite the title. Publishers Weekly called it “plainspoken” and noted that it “leans more toward personal history than political rallying cry.” Smalls confirms as much when I ask what he wants readers to take from it. “A lot of people see a piece of themselves inside of me and my story,” he says. “Whether it’s evictions, whether it’s divorce, whether it’s having kids, whether it’s getting fired from a job several times, whether it’s hitting rock bottom — all of that is in the book as well. It’s not just about the success that I had at Amazon. It’s also about the failures I had as well.” That’s the thread he wants readers to follow. The book moves through his father’s stints in prison, an early Amazon firing for two minutes of “time theft” (he was rehired), a Florida community college he didn’t finish, sound-engineering classes he didn’t finish, a basketball dream cut short by a hit-and-run on the job, an ex-wife and twins, and a brief rap career. He did a showcase with Meek Mill in New Jersey, he clarifies, not a tour. Multiple outlets have gotten this wrong. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a working-class American who happened to be standing where the pressure broke first, not a labor icon. His mother was a member of the healthcare workers’ union SEIU 1199 for more than twenty-five years and never once mentioned it at home. “She wasn’t like an organizer. She just was a rank-and-file member.” When I ask if he ever imagined this life, he laughs. The skill sets he draws on now, he says, are the ones he watched his mother use to hold down their household. “The grit and the grind that I saw my mom go through, it carried over into the things that I do and how I fight back now.” The Palestine turn The Chris Smalls who became famous in 2020 was a workplace organizer. The man in front of me in 2026 is something bigger and less easily categorized. He talks about Gaza, Cuba, ICE, surveillance, and the prison industrial complex as if they’re the same fight. Last July, he boarded the Handala, a vessel operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza with humanitarian aid. Israeli forces intercepted the ship in international waters. Smalls, the only Black activist on board, was singled out for particularly aggressive treatment, by his account and the accounts of others on the ship. He spent five days in Israeli custody, hunger-striking the entire time, before being released without charges at the Jordan border. He is now banned from Israel, he says, for 100 years. The flotilla, he tells me, is what ties it all together. “Once again, connecting the dots with Amazon and genocide was something important to me.” Amazon and Google’s joint $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract provides cloud infrastructure to the Israeli government and military. “It’s the same technology that’s being used to empower ICE over here,” Smalls says, “and the local police departments and the rain cameras and also the government contracts they have with the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.” His argument: the line between an Amazon warehouse worker in Staten Island and a Palestinian under occupation runs through the same cloud server. He invokes the longshore workers’ creed. “There’s a saying in the labor movement from the ILWU. Injury to one is injury to all. And it doesn’t say injury to one is injury to all except for Palestinians.” That position has put him at odds with the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the International Longshoremen’s Association, both of which he has publicly accused of complicity in the war. Among nationally known U.S. labor figures, he is more or less alone on this. Surveillance and sacrifice I ask him about the cost. He has been arrested in New York, detained in Israel, and most recently stopped by ICE at the U.S. border on his return from a humanitarian aid mission to Cuba. “My phone was taken by ICE,” he says. As we are speaking, he tells me, a comrade of his has just been detained at JFK airport. The agents are asking him questions about Smalls. “I’m being surveilled,” he says. “I’m being targeted, of course. I’m being doxxed. It comes with the sacrifice of the work that I have to do, unfortunately. But I ask myself if I don’t do the work, then who else is going to do it?” He grew up, he tells me, in a context where this was always going to be the cost. “I was in handcuffs by the time I was ten years old. The average Black man has probably been in handcuffs at least once by the time they’re in their thirties. I can sit here and say I’ve been in handcuffs a dozen times, and I probably have a dozen more to go.” He pauses. “Martin Luther King was arrested, I believe, twenty-nine times. So I’m trying to break his record.” You can read that line as bravado, or as something more deliberate: a claim to a tradition, a way of locating himself inside a longer arc of Black American resistance. I think he means it both ways. The institutional reality The harder question, the one I keep circling, is what all this adds up to institutionally. Smalls is no longer the president of the Amazon Labor Union. His successor, Connor Spence, led the union through the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling that ordered Amazon to bargain. It was the most significant legal victory at JFK8 since the original union vote. Smalls’s old union publicly described his Met Gala arrest as a “lone-wolf direct action” that was not coordinated with leadership. The arc that landed him outside that institution is worth naming. The ALU Smalls founded in 2021 was conceived as a rejection of established labor. If the big unions had been capable of organizing Amazon, he argued at the time, they would have done it already. By June 2024, that posture had reversed. ALU members voted 98 percent in favor of affiliating with the 1.3-million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The leadership election a month later was won by Spence, who had founded the dissident ALU Democratic Reform Caucus and sued Smalls in 2023, alleging he had refused to hold officer elections in violation of the union’s own constitution. Smalls did not run. To grasp the distance he has traveled, it helps to remember how high the rise was. In 2022 he was named to the Time 100, fielded statements of solidarity from Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren, and watched Amazon’s general counsel hand him a national platform by calling him “not smart or articulate” in a leaked internal memo. His profile from that period is mostly intact. His institutional standing is not. He has no organizational vehicle of his own anymore; The Congress of Essential Workers, the nonprofit he founded in 2020, appears largely dormant. The Teamsters local he now belongs to answers to international president Sean O’Brien, who delivered a primetime address at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Smalls, whose recent advocacy has centered on Palestinian solidarity and a public attack on the AFL-CIO leadership, has not publicly addressed the contradiction. When I ask how he balances direct action with the slower, more institutional work of organizing, he is generous about both. “Everybody has a role to play. I don’t think everybody has to do the same thing. Whatever you can contribute to the movement, you do that. My skill sets are different. My skill sets have always been direct action.” “Coalition building is always going to be hard,” he says. “But one thing people know about me, whether it’s 100 people, 1,000 people, or 10 people, I’m going to go forward. No matter who shows up, no matter how many people we get, we still got to show up and do what we can.” That’s the most honest articulation of where Smalls is in 2026, I think. He’s not trying to run anything.
