Same-Day Solidarity At Amazon with Chris Smalls
What A Day
What A Day
4.6 • 12.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, voted to form the company’s first union in the U.S. last Friday, making a historic win for labor organizers everywhere. The union earned recognition in less than a year into its existence, and it overcame multiple arrests as well as millions that Amazon spent on anti-union consultants. Chris Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union, joins us to discuss how it felt to win and what comes next.
And in headlines: Sacramento police arrested a suspect in connection to Sunday’s mass shooting in the city, the Senate reached a bipartisan $10 billion deal to fund COVID relief, and Elon Musk purchased about $2.9 billion worth of Twitter stock.
Show Notes:
Chris Smalls, President of the Amazon Labor Union – https://twitter.com/Shut_downAmazon
The Intercept: “New Amazon Worker Chat App Would Ban Words Like “Union,” “Restrooms,” “Pay Raise,” and “Plantation” – https://bit.ly/3NM8Qyy
Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/whataday/
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Tuesday, April 5th. I'm Gideon Rezik. |
| 0:07.6 | And I'm Josie Defi Rice, and this is What A Day, where we're hoping Sarah Palin becomes |
| 0:11.8 | the first former contestant on the mass singer to lose a race for Congress. |
| 0:16.1 | Yes, she entered into a special Alaska election last week. They said that if she loses it, |
| 0:21.0 | she has to keep doing the massed rap from the show in perpetuity. I don't know, it's |
| 0:27.7 | Alaska rules. I don't know. On today's show, two major international reports say that |
| 0:33.6 | now is the time to act on climate change before it is too late. |
| 0:37.4 | Spoiler alert. |
| 0:38.8 | Well, yeah. Plus Elon Musk buys billions in Twitter stock. |
| 0:43.4 | But first, we are going to dive deeper on the historic win that Amazon workers earned |
| 0:47.3 | last Friday at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York. The Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, is |
| 0:52.4 | independent, most formed by workers. It earned recognition for a union less than a year |
| 0:57.1 | into its existence, which is basically unheard of and without a lot of comparisons to draw |
| 1:01.9 | upon. So it has been an eventful time for workers there. And especially for Chris Smalls, |
| 1:07.3 | who founded ALU. Gideon, you got a chance to catch up with him yesterday, is that right? |
| 1:12.0 | Yes. So last Friday, when all of this was happening, actually marked almost two years |
| 1:16.5 | to the day, since Smalls was fired from that very facility after he staged a walkout |
| 1:20.7 | to protest health and safety measures that Amazon had taken, or rather not taken, as |
| 1:26.0 | the pandemic was bearing down on New York City. Not long after that, as I'm sure a lot of |
| 1:30.6 | people will remember, a memo leaked were Amazon's General Counsel David Sapolsky referred to |
| 1:35.2 | Smalls as, quote, not smart or articulate. Very, very cool thing to say. Yeah. Fuelled |
| 1:41.0 | in part by that and the initial defeat of efforts to unionize at a separate Amazon facility |
... |
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