Against Cult of Personality Unionism

Back in 2022, a small group of workers under the name Amazon Labor Union won a union election in an Amazon facility in New York. This one small victory, which was not backed up by a second and has never won a contract, was hailed by labor scholars and writers as the first step toward a revival of the 1930s organizing campaigns. Even me–a total grump often seen as such by other labor writers who tend to be juuuuuuust a wee bit too optimistic–was taken by what they could mean. But I also maintained my sanity and told everyone to chill out, it was just one win. And boy was I right about that.

Within weeks, it was clear that ALU leader Chris Smalls was a total fraud. The left wanted to make him a celebrity and he wanted to be a celebrity. He didn’t even show up for other ALU organizing campaigns, which they proceeded to lose. His former associates accused him of being an authoritarian and running the ALU for his personal benefit. He immediately decided to “write” a book with a ghostwriter. He took to the road, spending more time in Cuba than with Amazon workers. And the online left loved all of it. As criticisms of Smalls began to come out, his defenders online literally said that criticizing Smalls was racist and also a sign that stodgy old union people didn’t like Smalls’ fashionable clothes. He did all of this with a film crew around and now there’s a documentary telling a heroic story about him. Eventually, Smalls was evicted from the ALU, but he remains a superstar in leftist circles today.

He, with a lot of help from his fellow Amazon workers, won one fucking election vote. It was against Amazon, I grant you. But still…..

In Jacobin, Annie Levin reviews his book and pretty much says what needs to be said. An excerpt:

Presidents of union locals are rarely celebrities, but as the charismatic leader of the first union to win an NLRB election at an Amazon warehouse, Smalls was boosted to left-wing pseudo-stardom. A former party promoter, Smalls was entirely in his element as the much sought-after spokesperson for the ALU. In the year that followed the election, Smalls was everywhere: on picket lines, speaking at the Labor Notes conference, here in Jacobin, on the Daily Show, and being photographed with Zendaya at the Time 100 Gala. For a brief period, Smalls helped bring the labor movement into the mainstream. As someone who came from the working class and made organizing seem glamorous and thrilling, he seemed like the type of leader the labor movement had needed for decades.

His flashy personal style, pairing gold grills and chains with union merchandise and political streetwear, transformed the ALU into something like a fashion brand. Like a music act, Smalls and his ALU cohort toured the country, spreading the good news of worker organizing to Amazon warehouses and university campuses. In New York City in 2022, I saw him numerous times pull up to picket lines in a convertible, decked out head to toe in eye-catching ALU union drip.

During Smalls’s brief rise to prominence, however, it soon became apparent that all was not well within his union. After a new union wins its election, the race to contract bargaining begins. In strong unions, this involves what the late labor strategist Jane McAlevey referred to as structure tests. These include surveying membership to determine what is desired in a contract, developing new leaders, and organizing escalating demonstrations, up to and including a strike — all aimed at building supermajorities of workers who can bring management to the bargaining table, extract concessions, and build worker power.

At the ALU, during this vital period after the union’s initial win, Smalls was not in the warehouse poring over lists and preparing the Amazon workforce for battle against the boss. He was instead transforming into a celebrity and traveling the country, ostensibly to help other Amazon warehouses unionize. Then, LDJ5, the Amazon sorting center on Staten Island right beside JFK8, lost its own NLRB election. This was soon followed by another loss at Albany warehouse ALB1.

According to the New York Times, when McAlevey was leading trainings with JFK8 organizers, she brokered a promise from Smalls to pull back on traveling and backing bids at other warehouses and instead to focus on the contract fight at home. Smalls, the Times writes, almost immediately broke that promise by supporting an election petition in Los Angeles. Smalls told the Times that McAlevey’s experience was not relevant to Amazon workers. Connor Spence, then ALU treasurer, today union president, told Labor Notes that at JFK8 itself at this time, worker committee meetings had become few and far between and soon stopped altogether.

Within the year following the election victory, ALU organizers, including Spence, formed a reform caucus within their union and filed an NLRB complaint against Smalls for refusing to hold officer elections. While vague on details, the chapter in Smalls’s memoir that deals with these events, titled “No One to Trust,” shifts blame for the lost union elections at LDJ5 and ALB1 onto Spence and the caucus. He describes these “professional activists” who joined JFK8 specifically to unionize it as having a “white leftist mindset” and not understanding the mainly black and brown Amazon workers.

….

Smalls in 2026 is more of a left celebrity than a labor leader. He has continued to travel, admirably joining in left-wing coalitions on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza and the Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba. In just the last year, he was assaulted and imprisoned by the Israeli Defense Forces, detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and jailed by the NYPD following the Met Gala incident. I discovered the existence of his memoir when Smalls argued on X with YouTuber Jessica Burbank, who publicly thanked Ocasio-Cortez’s office for helping locate Smalls after his arrest by the NYPD. Smalls angrily snapped back that the congresswoman had nothing to do with his release and later posted a long thread berating democratic socialist elected officials. Here, too, he shows an individualistic, left-sectarian tendency to make extraordinary demands of popular democratic socialist electeds while defaming them at every turn. The X algorithm ensures that this practice draws plenty of engagement.

Smalls was a powerful force in the original unionization campaign at JFK8 and was by many accounts a fantastic grassroots organizer. He helped show the labor movement that it was possible to organize vast warehouses of high-turnover blue-collar workers. While unable to remain in the struggle with the ALU for the long haul, Smalls’s initial prominence shows how much the labor movement is dearly in need of the qualities he brought in.

Labor needs more charismatic leaders. Smalls isn’t wrong when he writes in his memoir that workers will not become labor organizers when they can’t tell the difference between the president of their union and the president of a bank. But workers will also not organize in their union when their union president is grabbing headlines instead of organizing at the job site.

Cult of personality unionism is disastrous, and yet the left LOVES its cults of personality, even if based on almost nothing. To take a guy with a promising start as an organizer and turn him into the biggest celebrity in the labor movement in a few decades is a big, big problem. In fact, one might note that he was the biggest labor celebrity since Cesar Chavez, if you want an example of why cult of personality unionism ends up being a complete disaster.