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Taking On Amazon
The Congress of Essential Workers takes the fight to Bezos
Christian Smalls was fired from a Staten Island Amazon warehouse in March, after leading a protest against their treatment of workers during the COVID pandemic. At the time, Amazon tried to downplay the situation, but workers claimed that they were dishonest about the number of COVID cases, and that they had “failed to notify workers or properly clean the warehouse,” as reported in The Verge.
In a leaked memo published on Vice, a plan to discredit Chris Smalls, and through him, the unionization movement as a whole, was described by Amazon lawyer David Zapolsky, who also referred to Mr. Smalls as “not smart or articulate.” A quote from Zapolsky in the Vice article reads:
“We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety,” Zapolsky wrote. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
This was followed by a public smear campaign on Twitter, carried out by two Amazon executives, one of the most vocal being Jay Carney, a former Obama press secretary.
