Unions face Amazon-sized difficulties

Editor's Note: The Snooze Button Generation originally published "100 Nonfiction Books I Recommend" in 2019. As we read exceptional books, the list continually updates. Today, "When the Revolution Comes" by Chris Smalls enters the Humanity in the Digital Age category.

I come from a blue-collar land — "The Land," Cleveland to be exact.

My Polish ancestors worked in factories in the U.S. starting in the 1910s, and my grandfather also worked in a factory and eventually was promoted to a supervisor. But then with my parents' generation and future ones, the mindset became all about college, snagging white-collar jobs and doing whatever we could to stay out of factories.

I point this out to say that in many ways, I am an outsider to many, many jobs in the U.S. I have not witnessed, first hand, the grind of a factory job, or the drudgery of working in a big-box store and many other positions. But to get a sense of what a job like that may entail, I highly, highly recommend When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class (2026) by Chris Smalls.

Smalls received a bunch of media coverage around the start of the pandemic when as an Amazon worker, he asked for PPE and Covid-19 protocols for a warehouse in Staten Island. Amazon's response: They fired him!

Smalls solicited media outlets, and they ran with how unjust the firing was. He became a spokesman for Amazon workers — and even workers in general. Now, he is an all-around activist, or activist for hire, as a media personality.

Shortly after his initial media attention, Smalls helped that Amazon warehouse in Staten Island unionize. On the surface, it's a shockingly amazing success story. But in his book, Smalls points out that it really isn't that successful. Staten Island has the only union anywhere in any Amazon warehouse. He was hoping for a chain reaction of unionizing. Faced with the millions of anti-union dollars Amazon spends, that appears unlikely — actually impossible — to happen.

While that whole Amazon odyssey is interesting, the strengths of the book are Smalls' excellent, page-turning writing, the realities of working paycheck to paycheck in factories and the information dispensed on what the modern-day worker faces.

Smalls writes about an ordeal he went through as a teenage worker at Target, where he was corralling carts and hit by a Mercedes that fled the scene. He incurred damaged ligaments in an ankle. Eventually, they tracked down the driver, he was awarded a minor settlement of $25,000 in which about half went to lawyers' fees. Soon, Target, which has no unions, fired him mostly because the company perceived him as a nuisance.

Smalls makes it obvious early in the book that he is not one to back down for standing up for himself or workers' rights.  He starts the book with what he did as a worker in a grocery warehouse. It was physically grueling work, and his writing had me engrossed from the get-go. He repeatedly was verbally abused in his warehouse job, and it certainly feels that likely is commonplace in jobs in which people of color do the brunt work under white supervisors. 

Smalls remains unapologetically himself and even refuses to change the way he dresses. Because he refuses to wear a suit and tie, some might not take him seriously. But he has sold me on his argument that true leadership should not have folks looking different that who they represent. His dress came to a photo-op pinnacle when he met President Biden at the White House in 2022 as he remained in his typical garb, reminding my of hip-hop star Nelly.

Amazon (1.5 million employees) is second only to Walmart (2 million) in private employers in the U.S. With these two employers completely non-unionized, except for Smalls' former warehouse in Staten Island, it is a statistical fact that unions are not even close to being seen as a priority or important in the workplace. Why?

While it might be a trap to believe that the workers don't want unions because of constant anti-union rhetoric in social media and the press, the reality is that these corporations' plan is to have their workers turn over so frequently that they are unable to unionize. In addition, neither the Republicans or Democrats really do anything to help workers or their rights. Both parties enable non-unionizing because that helps the people at the top, AKA their donors.

Smalls pulls no punches in his book by criticizing modern unions as corporations — and he is right. Of course, a "corporate" union is better than none, and he also mightily criticizes Biden and the Democratic Party. He points out that when Biden was president and the Dems controlled both the House and Senate, that zero significant pro-labor bills were passed. While I must point out that the PRO Act did pass in 2021, I'll agree that Dems — and, or course, the Republicans too — have repeatedly shown that they are pro-corporation and not whatsoever pro-worker.

When the Revolution Comes is a remarkable book that views modern work from an actual worker's perspective. The last important book that I can remember that tried to do that was Nickel and Dimed (2001) by Barbara Ehrenreich.

In that book, a relatively well off white lady took three brief jobs to see what they're really like, and then she went back to her regularly scheduled privileged life. In stark contrast, Smalls' book is raw and real and recommended for anybody who believes that actual workers deserve attention, dignity, fairness and unity.