In February 2021, Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer took a road trip from New York to an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, where they hoped to learn how the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union had initiated a union election there.
Smalls, who had recently been fired from an Amazon facility on Staten Island in New York for organising a walkout over its Covid-19 protocols, thought that the professional organisers from RWDSU did not take him and Palmer seriously, as he later recounted in media interviews.
The RWDSU’s campaign lost that election by nearly a two-to-one margin, and the outcome of second election ordered by labour regulators is still too close to call. Smalls, however, managed to steer his upstart Amazon Labor Union to a decisive win on Staten Island, making the warehouse the ecommerce giant’s first unionised facility.