The Nation reports:

The best thing about arrogant bosses is that they underestimate the intelligence of their workers. Leaked company documents, originally given to Vice, reveal what Amazon’s general counsel, in a meeting Jeff Bezos attended, said of the activist Chris Smalls, whom the company had just fired after he helped lead a walkout early in the pandemic over Covid-related health and safety issues.

“He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” declares Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky in notes from the meeting forwarded widely in the company.

Smalls never gave up. He’d been an employee at Amazon’s Staten Island facility, known as JFK8, when they fired him. Today, the independent union he founded, the Amazon Labor Union, won a decisive victory. Of the votes cast, 2,654 workers voted yes to unionize, with 2,131 voting no. In this hard-as-hell unionization battle, a yes vote margin of 523 is very impressive. This is despite Amazon’s spending $4.3 million attempting to prevent their workers from unionizing in 2021.

Today’s historic win took place in what Amazon calls a fulfillment center. Next up, workers in a nearby warehouse on Staten Island, called a sortation facility (known as LDJ5), will have the opportunity to join their newly unionized Amazon Labor Union colleagues. Nothing helps workers decide to vote yes like seeing other workers win—which is just one of many reasons this victory is so important. This time, the workers won. [Continue reading…]