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By Courtland Milloy<\/p>\n
Here’s to Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer. As co-founders of the first Amazon labour union, the two 33-year-old black men have given a much-needed boost to the labour movement in the US. <\/p>\n
And on Monday, the 54th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King jr, they breathed new life into King\u2019s last and perhaps most important speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe issue is injustice,\u201d King told the crowd gathered at Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968. He was speaking in support of striking sanitation workers, but he was also laying out a blueprint for fighting economic injustice throughout the country. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,\u201d King said. \u201cBe concerned about your brother \u2026 either we go up together, or we go down together. \u201cLet us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day, King was shot and killed while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Smalls and Palmer were born 20 years later. Both New Jersey natives, they aspired to become successful \u2013 as rappers or basketball players or actors.<\/p>\n
They tried community college but that didn\u2019t work out, so they settled for just making a living, working hard for wages at Amazon\u2019s mammoth Staten Island warehouse in New York until they could come up with a new plan. And somehow, by the time Amazon workers had voted to form the union on Friday, both men had come to personify King\u2019s call for a fearless commitment to economic justice.<\/p>\n
When the coronavirus pandemic hit and warehouse employees began getting sick, Smalls and Palmer could have quit their jobs, walked away and not looked back. But they stayed and tried to help their co-workers get safety equipment and public health information from management.<\/p>\n
In March 2020, Smalls\u2019s efforts got him fired \u2013 supposedly for violating quarantine policy. \u201cMy concern was us bringing this virus back to our communities and our family,\u201d he said in one YouTube interview. Not just concern for his family or Palmer\u2019s family. The families of all of their co-workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cBelieve it or not, unionising Amazon was still not on my agenda,\u201d Smalls said in a statement that he posted online as part of his organising efforts. \u201cI just wanted to help inspire others to organise and demand Amazon do better.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that same week, Amazon\u2019s top legal executive began a smear campaign against Smalls, attempting to portray him as \u201cnot smart or articulate\u201d, according to a leaked email. Smalls later said company officials \u201ctried to demonise our character, but it didn\u2019t work\u201d.<\/p>\n
Some might have decided that a public relations fight with a corporation that owned media (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post) was a no-win situation. Not Smalls or Palmer. Smalls set up a union organising shop at a bus stop near the Staten Island warehouse while Palmer continued working \u2013 and organising \u2013 on the inside.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been eating and sleeping out of what I call my union van (his personal SUV) for the past 10 months,\u201d Smalls said in the YouTube interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been out there organising 10, 12 hours \u2013 I\u2019ll stay out 24 hours if we have some kind of deadline to meet. \u201cThat\u2019s the kind of dedication it takes. When you\u2019re going up against a trillion-dollar company, take a day off and they get the one up on you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men were raising money on GoFundMe \u2013 more than $120 000 (about R1.8 million) \u2013 and serving home-cooked meals to Amazon workers at the bus stop, talking to hundreds of people a day. Most were like them \u2013 young men and women of colour.<\/p>\n
Amazon reportedly spent $4.3m last year on anti-union consultants. I\u2019d never heard of union organisers operating like that, so I sought insight from William Lucy, a former secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees.<\/p>\n
Lucy had been in Memphis the year King was killed, also supporting the sanitation workers, who were members of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees trade union).<\/p>\n
Smalls\u2019s mother, a hospital worker, is a member of AFSCME. \u201cTaking on Amazon and winning is incredible,\u201d Lucy said. \u201cWhat Amazon will do is give their employees everything \u2013 except a voice in the process that speaks to the conditions of their work. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut what good is even $50 an hour if the work conditions are going to make you age before your time? \u201cIt\u2019s significant that there was no union convincing them to organise; they convinced themselves that they needed a voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Washington Post analysis found that Amazon warehouses have some of the worst safety records of big-box operations. Employees complain about low wages, lack of opportunity, racial and gender discrimination, and dangerous work conditions \u2013 pretty much the same things that caused the sanitation workers in Memphis to strike. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese buildings are massive, almost a million square feet\u201d (about 93 000m\u00b2) Smalls said in another interview. \u201cEach facility would be the size of 14 NFL football fields. \u201cIt was pretty much like walking the state of Rhode Island every single day. You have a gym membership? \u201cYou might want to cancel it because you\u2019re doing about 10 to 12 hours of callisthenics every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n
For roughly $18 an hour. (The union would like to see that rise to at least $30 an hour. Amazon tech workers can pull down as much as $360 000 a year in base pay.) Chuck Hicks, past president of the DC chapter of AFSCME, was also following the organising efforts at Amazon.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s particularly impressive to see these young black men realise how valuable the union is for them and also their families,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m sure they faced many obstacles. This was no cakewalk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hicks quoted Robert F Kennedy, also slain in 1968, to describe the mindset behind the organiser\u2019s achievement: \u201cSome men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.\u201d King had put it another way in his final speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can remember when (black people) were just going around \u2026 scratching where they didn\u2019t itch and laughing when they were not tickled. \u201cBut that day is over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God\u2019s world.\u201d<\/p>\n
With dangerous unselfishness, Smalls and Palmer are showing the way. <\/p>\n
* Milloy is a local columnist for The Washington Post in which this article was first published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Courtland Milloy Here’s to Chris Smalls and his best friend, Derrick Palmer. As co-founders of the first Amazon labour union, the two 33-year-old black men have given a much-needed boost to the labour movement in the US. And on Monday, the 54th anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King jr, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[11899,11601,11797,6891,11898,2706],"class_list":["post-70681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-amazon","tag-commitment","tag-fearless","tag-rights","tag-unionising","tag-workers"],"yoast_head":"\n