Smalls was often asked how he had done it. Sometimes he focused on his team’s firsthand knowledge of the workers’ struggles. “We live the grievances, the reality of the warehouse,” he said. Sometimes he talked about the culture they’d built at the bus stop: the food, the music, the friendships.The truth, he’d realized as he prepared for the next warehouse’s vote, was that he’d been willing to spend 11 months at a dirty bus stop, fighting to prove himself to the workers.
In August, she moved north and got a job at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. Wesley knew that the poorly funded, worker-led campaign was a long shot. Smalls didn’t even have money to pay her. But she also understood that the payoff, if it succeeded, could be huge. The bad news was that they were up against a $1 trillion company, which had been surprised by the loss at the JFK8 warehouse and was already ramping up spending to counter the union’s message at the second facility.
When the meeting ended, Smalls lingered by the front door. His movement suddenly had money and momentum. But Smalls sensed that something was wrong. For the past several months, the union’s all-consuming focus had been winning the election at JFK8, which was five times the size of the 1,600-worker LDJ5 facility.
The NAACP invited him to Detroit. Another group was offering to fly him to Cuba. He appeared alongside actress Susan Sarandon at a rally in Manhattan. He was a near-daily presence on cable news. She returned to the conversation she was having with her co-worker about a manager who had criticized her hourly “rate” — the pace at which she worked — in front of others.After about 15 minutes, the workers climbed onto the S-90 bus headed to the St. George Ferry Terminal and were gone. So was Smalls.
Lately, though, the pressure was almost too much to bear. She had been sleeping only four hours a night and suffering panic attacks in which her heart would start racing as she was lying in bed.“All this responsibility, this early in life,” she said, “it’s a lot.” Both Wesley and Mitchell-Israel, 22, had backed the second presidential run of Sen. Bernie Sanders , believing he might be able to galvanize a working-class movement like the one they were now trying to build at Amazon. In 2020, Sanders’s campaign slogan had been: “Fight for someone you don’t know.” The motto, they decided, explained why Sanders had failed to mobilize people like the workers in their warehouse.“It should be fight for yourself,” Wesley insisted.
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