The union organizers have entered the TikTok stream with their own glimpses inside their warehouse fortress - and scenes of them chipping away at the company’s rigid structures with their own defiant mini acts of power-building. For others, it’s a glimpse into 10- and 12-hour shifts of monotonous tasks in a gig that starts at $17 an hour in Staten Island. Some commenters find them oddly satisfying videos of products being placed meticulously into a box like pieces of a puzzle. Other TikTok accounts have cropped up showing Amazon workers putting together packages and taping them up, generating hundreds of thousands of views. A recent video that showed ALU members being arrested for trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, followed by shots of a “people’s bodega” supplying free hats and books, set to a rap “Nutcracker” number. The TikTok account, with nearly 43,000 followers, remixes the grim adversity of the workers’ battles against authorities with the empowerment and DIY ethos of their scrappy self-organized campaign. To raise money as well as their profile, organizers have turned to TikTok, sharing behind-the-scenes video glimpses of the labor behind a largely mindless Amazon purchase that takes 45 seconds for a consumer to complete. Now I have a reason to get them.”Īny Union labor lawyers in NY that can assist please contact me ASAP! we’re ready to go! ✊□ Christian Smalls April 15, 2021 He’s lost count of how many tattoos he has, but it’s “quite a few, my kids’ names and stuff now. He’s got tattoos on his neck - “Daniel,” his middle name, is on one side, and a music scale with some notes on the other. His black ALU stamped face mask slipped as he talked with THE CITY earlier this month, revealing a set of gold grills. Smalls, who lives in Newark, cuts an unlikely figure for a union boss. So you just gotta keep the cool, calm and collected route,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “If you’re stressed out and on edge, you’re gonna make the wrong decisions. “I’ve been dealing with this machine for so many years, almost seven years now,” he said. ![]() Tall and slender, with a short cropped beard, Smalls is eerily calm about the union vote that runs through Wednesday at the JFK8 fulfillment center. ![]() That line of attack has no traction with the organizers of the grassroots Staten Island campaign. The Alabama unionization vote last year fell short after Amazon characterized the campaign, which involved the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union, as the work of outside interlopers. ![]() They’re seeking a $30-an-hour minimum wage and better working conditions, including two paid 30-minute breaks and an hour-long paid lunch break, along with transparent promotion policies. TikTok Union HallĪlong with his friend Derrick Palmer, who works at the JFK8 sorting facility, Smalls and a handful of others are now leading the efforts of the Amazon Labor Union, an independent group made up of current and former Amazon workers at the Staten Island facility. “It’s like they do all of these things to intimidate people,” said Smalls, a 33-year-old former Amazon supervisor at JFK8 who was fired in the spring of 2020 for allegedly breaking safety guidelines following the COVID-safety protest.
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