Chris Smalls Profile: Birthday, Early Life, Career, Personal Life

Chris Smalls Profile: Christian Smalls is an American labor leader who was born on July 4, 1988. He is best known for running the Amazon worker organization in Staten Island, a borough of New York City. Since 2021, he has been the president and founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

Smalls grew up in New Jersey and wanted to be a rapper. He went on a short tour with Meek Mill, but he quit to support his kids by working in stores and customer service. They hired him in 2015 at Amazon.

Chris Smalls Profile

Early Years

Smalls started his career as a youth when he played basketball, football, and track and field. He was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. He really wanted to play in the NBA, but he got hurt while working as a car driver. Bigs used to go to a Florida community college but dropped out to study sound engineering at the Institute of Audio Research. He quit music school to become a rapper, and for a short time he toured with Meek Mill. From 2012 to 2015, Smalls worked at Walmart, Home Depot, and MetLife Stadium, among other places, to support his children. He also worked in warehouses for FedEx and Target.

Career

Chris Smalls started his job in 2015 as a picker in New Jersey. He used to work in an Amazon warehouse. After that, he went to a warehouse in Connecticut and worked as an assistant manager there until 2018, when he was moved to the Staten Island warehouse (JFK8). Smalls said he was moved because of good work, but he applied for management jobs 49 times over the course of his career, which he thinks shows that he was discriminated against because of his race. After a very sick coworker was allowed to come to work with symptoms while waiting for the results of a COVID-19 test, he got in touch with local politicians, health officials, and Amazon’s human resources (HR). He said that HR didn’t do anything.

On March 30, 2020, Smalls and another JFK8 worker planned a walkout to protest Amazon’s safety rules during the COVID-19 outbreak and to ask the company to temporarily close JFK8. They questioned the company’s lack of social distance and personal rights, and they said it didn’t tell the rest of the staff about a worker’s COVID-19 illness. Jay Carney, the company’s senior vice president and former White House press secretary, said on Twitter that Smalls had broken the company’s rules about social distance. But if the company had started the lockdown during the time when Smalls was most likely to be exposed, it would have finished on March 25, 2020.

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The Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, said that Amazon fired Smalls without a good reason and later ordered an investigation into the issue. James looked into it and found that the company had fired Smalls without a good reason. He then asked for an order to make Amazon hire him again. The Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, and Senator Bernie Sanders both called the firing “disgraceful.” De Blasio asked the city’s human rights commissioner to look into why Smalls was fired, and James asked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to do the same.

Nine senators, including Elizabeth Warren, wrote to the company and asked for more information about why Smalls and three other reporters were fired. Some of the most important union leaders in the country wrote to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, and asked that Smalls be restored. In a blog post, Tim Bray, the former VP of Amazon Web Services, said, “I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both, right?” He quit because of the firings.

To Vice on April 2, 2020, a note from a daily brief with Bezos was shared. It said that Smalls was “not smart or articulate.” David Zapolsky, Amazon’s General Counsel, also said that it would be good for the company’s image to make Smalls “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” and “lay out a case” for why Smalls’ actions were “immoral, unacceptable, and certainly illegal.” Smalls said that the comments were “definitely racist.”

Smalls set up the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) on April 20, 2021, with help from his labor organizing group, TCOEW. He said that joining a union is important to protect your job, get enough money to live on, get paid time off, and take sick leave. Smalls said that two of the leaders have been living out of their cars because they work at Amazon. A representative for Amazon said that a union would make it harder for workers to negotiate.

Smalls, who used to work in an Amazon warehouse, says the company breaks up unions and holds meetings against them. A tent with the words “Sign Your Authorization Cards Here” was set up next to JFK8 so that people could sign up for a union authorization vote. Smalls said that Amazon is scaring and bullying workers and telling them about expensive union dues.

The ALU said on January 26, 2022, that they had enough papers to ask the NLRB to hold a vote. At the same time, in March 2022, there was a union vote in another Amazon factory in Bessemer, Alabama. The worker Jennifer Bates was in charge of that vote. The ALU backed another union vote on March 2, 2022, which came from the LDJ5 building on Staten Island.

People who worked at JFK8 voted 2,654 to 2,131 in favor of the union on April 1, 2022. On May 5, 2022, Smalls spoke to the Senate Budget Committee. Smalls met Vice President Joe Biden at the White House in May 2022. Time named Smalls and Palmer two of the 100 most important people of 2022.

In Smalls v. Amazon, Inc., a class-action case was made against Amazon, saying that it broke federal and state laws by putting warehouse workers at risk during the COVID-19 pandemic and firing him. They agreed to the move to dismiss, and Smalls then sent in an appeal notice.

In February 2021, Attorney General of New York Letitia James sued Amazon for reportedly not taking enough safety measures and punishing workers who complained, including Smalls. James wants changes made to Amazon’s rules and training, as well as money for Smalls and the chance to go back to work at Amazon.

Personal Life

Smalls has been married for seven years and has three kids, two sets of twins. People often see him wearing hip hop-style streetwear. He has said that comments about how he looks “really motivates me to keep dressing the way I do because I want y’all to understand it’s not about how I look” and that “If I were to run for president, I would look just like this… I’d walk into the White House with a pair of Jordans on because that’s who I am as a person.”

Smalls tweets about the ALU and other problems related to labor movement on X.

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