The Only Unionized Amazon Warehouse, Three Years Later

Chris Smalls won the first union election at an Amazon warehouse in April 2022. JFK8 on Staten Island. It made headlines everywhere.

Here’s the part that didn’t: more than three years later, it’s still the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. And it still doesn’t have a contract.

Two new pieces on Smalls landed this month — a critical review in Jacobin and a friendly interview in Current Affairs — and read together they tell the whole story.

Per Jacobin, while the post-election contract fight was the moment to organize the workforce, Smalls was touring the country as a celebrity. Two nearby Amazon facilities, LDJ5 and ALB1, then lost their own elections. Internal factions formed, a reform caucus filed an NLRB complaint, and by 2024 Smalls was out and the ALU had folded itself into the Teamsters.

In Current Affairs, Smalls tells his own version from an aid mission in Cuba. No regrets. He’s since joined a Gaza flotilla, got arrested at the Met Gala over Bezos, and is out promoting a memoir. His take on what’s left to do at Amazon: “the only option that we have right now is to go on strike.”

To me, this is the whole lesson of celebrity organizing in one career. A union election is the easy part. Winning a contract is the hard part — and it requires showing up at the worksite, not on the red carpet. Smalls got too big.

Charisma gets you a headline. It doesn’t get you leverage at the bargaining table.

Three years, one warehouse, zero contracts.