The age old rule is: He who laughs last, laughs the loudest.
Christian Smalls has earned a good, long laugh at Jeff Bezos' expense.

I'll read you one email I got last night from a woman. I'm not going to say the building name yet, but in Sacramento, California, basically a 24-year-old woman emailed me last night and told me. She said...'You guys lit a fire under me. I want to unionize my building.'
We've been getting emails like that, you know, of course they're congratulating us, but most of them are saying: You guys motivated me. I want to unionize. How do I get involved? How do I start a new chapter?
So we have been contacted from over 50 buildings ... I'm talking about 50 different buildings all over this country and not just this country, even overseas in South Africa, India. Canada has reached out to us, the UK. So the world is definitely paying attention now and these workers are paying attention now, which is the best thing possible because that's exactly what we plan on doing. Just like the Starbucks movement, we want to spread like wildfire across the nation.

Chris Smalls was fired from Amazon in 2020, after leading a protest over fears working conditions could lead to a coronavirus outbreak. Which was what happened. However, the only thing that mattered to Amazon was crushing any semblance of worker solidarity.

Amazon formed a reaction team involving 10 departments, including its Global Intelligence Program, a security group staffed by many military veterans. The company named an “incident commander” and relied on a “Protest Response Playbook” and “Labor Activity Playbook” to ward off “business disruptions,” according to newly released court documents.

In the end, 11 vice presidents were part of the Amazon reaction team - more than the number of workers that attended the protest. Smalls was fired. Amazon’s chief counsel mistakenly sent an email to more than 1,000 people, recommended making Smalls “the face” of efforts to organize workers while calling him "not smart, or articulate."

Now, Smalls has a new job: president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

The union spent $120,000 overall, raised through GoFundMe, according to Mr. Smalls. “We started this with nothing, with two tables, two chairs and a tent,” he recalled. Amazon spent more than $4.3 million just on anti-union consultants nationwide last year, according to federal filings.

Much like the 2018 teacher strike wave that began with the humble origins of West Virginia, Amazon appears to be on the verge of a massive unionization effort.

This resembles the Starbucks Movement which started with a single store in Buffalo, and has now unionized 13 stores. More importantly, the union has won 13 out of 14 elections, with nearly 200 union elections upcoming.
That's not to say that Starbucks isn't playing just as dirty as Amazon.

Starbucks is favoring a particular method: firing union leaders. Workers at several stores say they have been terminated in retaliation for legally protected union activities. Early allegations came in Memphis, Tennessee, in February, when Starbucks fired seven workers after they announced their union drive. The company has said that the workers were fired on the pretext of workplace conduct violations, and while Starbucks Workers United has filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the company alleging retaliation, the understaffed NLRB has yet to make a judgment, and the workers remain without their jobs.

In recent days, with Schultz back at the helm — and, bizarrely, attempting to assuage worker unrest by announcing that the company is “going to be in the NFT business” — the firings appear to have accelerated. Several union leaders in Buffalo have been fired or forced out. Three workers have been fired in Overland Park, Kansas, where the remaining workers are now on strike. And on Monday, Laila Dalton, the nineteen-year-old Starbucks barista in Phoenix, Arizona, whose prior claims of retaliation were substantiated by the NLRB mere weeks ago, lost her job.

The only difference between Starbucks and Amazon is that Amazon is more arrogant. That hubris comes right from the top.

After returning to earth on Tuesday following the successful launch of his Blue Origin spacecraft, Mr Bezos thanked “every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this”.

That comment was right up there with "Let them eat cake." It's the words of someone who believes that they are untouchable. People noticed. One of those people was the aptly named Smalls.

According to multiple outlets, outside the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) office in Brooklyn, Smalls told reporters on Friday, "We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because while he was up there we were organizing a union."

So how did Smalls do it? He had no background in labor organizing, nor did he have the backing of a major union. Even the local politicians, like AOC, never bothered to show up.
It turns out that what originally appeared to be major handicaps were actually Smalls' secret weapons. Amazon and it's high-priced consultants used the standard playbook which has often worked or decades now.

The old anti-union tactics and arguments are not working — and are working least well with young workers. This anti-union “kryptonite” has served Amazon well for years. But not at Staten Island, where workers repeatedly challenged consultants in captive meetings and could be fired for refusing to attend such meetings even though speaking up at the meetings is protected activity. When the consultants’ distortions are challenged by knowledgeable workers, their credibility quickly crumbles. The old anti-union tropes about the union being an external third party that is only interested in workers’ dues money — which consultants have been using against organizing campaigns for half a century — rang hollow at Staten Island. The workers are the Amazon Labor Union in a very real way, as are the Starbucks workers who have formed a union with Starbucks Workers United.

The union isn't an "external third party" when the union are made up entirely of people that you know. And when Amazon's "captive audiences" don't back down then the playbook falls apart.
What also didn't help Amazon's case was their heavy-handed approach, which included arresting Smalls for talking to Amazon workers in the parking lot.

The ALU’s use of traditional media and social media was also outstanding. In the days before the election, it projected signs underneath Amazon’s name on the front of the warehouse saying, “They fired someone you know,” “They arrested your co-workers” and “Vote Yes.” All that was missing was a projected sign saying, “They made you pee in a bottle.” The campaign messages reinforced the theme that Amazon treated its workers as utterly disposable.

Now contrast this with Smalls' favorite method of having free barbecues near the bus stop nearest to the Amazon warehouse. Sometimes Smalls would bring home-cooked meals to share. All he wanted to do was to talk with them about how hard the work was, the toll that it took on people's bodies, and how disrespectful Amazon treated them.
This highly successful method of organizing can be, and will be, replicated.