Christine smalls, the first American leader to successfully organize a trade union in Amazon, sent a message to those in power on Thursday. He wrote some words on his jacket and gave more testimony before the Senate Budget Committee.
Smalls is the head of the Amazon Union, which won last month at the Amazon warehouse facility on Staten Island, New York. At the invitation of Senator Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the budget committee, he testified about the strategy of undermining trade unions and the problems faced by workers during the unionization of the technology giant.
Wearing a red, yellow and black jacket with the words “eat the rich” on the front and back, smalls looked out from under the New York Yankees baseball cap and told committee members what tactics Amazon had adopted.
“They enter the factory and isolate the workers every day,” smalls said. “When they question them, they almost annoy them, acting as if they are trying to improve conditions, but in fact, they are just voting to see who supports the Union and who doesn’t support the union. They feed this information back to management. They attract a large audience every day.”
Smalls was fired by Amazon in 2020 for leading a worker strike after he hoped Amazon would take more measures to protect warehouse workers at the beginning of the 2019 coronavirus outbreak.
“Companies have control,” he said Thursday. “They broke the law and got away with it. They knew that breaking the law during the campaign would not be solved during the campaign. So they deliberately continued to break the law.”
In Washington, D.C., smalls pushed the Senate to pass the protection of organizational Rights Act, which aims to amend labor laws to make it easier for workers to form trade unions.
In his comments, Sanders expressed dissatisfaction with the high turnover and injury rate of Amazon warehouse workers and his efforts to defeat the trade union and billionaire founder Jeff Bezos.
“Considering all your wealth, how much do you need?” Sanders asked Bezos, who was not there. “Why do you do everything you can, including breaking the law, depriving Amazon employees of their right to join the union so that they can negotiate for better wages, better working conditions and better benefits? How much do you need?”
In his opening remarks, smalls made some sharp remarks to Senator Lindsay Graham. Graham is a senior Republican member of the budget committee.
“You forget that it’s people who let these companies run,” smalls said. “If we don’t get protection, if our process of holding these companies accountable doesn’t work for us, then… That’s why we’re here today.”
Smalls told Graham that this was not a left-wing, right-wing, democratic or Republican thing. “It’s a worker’s business,” he said.
At the White House, smalls met with President Joe Biden, vice president camara Harris and other pro union representatives in the Oval Office.
Biden said on twitter that smalls and others were “motivating the labor movement across the country.” smalls replied on twitter that the president said smalls “caused him trouble.” he may refer to Biden’s remarks in front of union leaders after his victory over Amazon, in which Biden said, “Amazon, here we are.”