When the Revolution Comes
A Fight for the Future of the Working Class
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From one of the most electric and consequential figures to emerge from the contemporary American labor movement, the remarkable story of his battle to create the first Amazon union in the U.S. and a powerful call to arms on behalf of the working class
“With candor and fierce moral clarity, Chris Smalls takes readers behind the scenes of the most consequential labor uprising in modern history—and it’s one hell of a ride.” —Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, warehouse worker Chris Smalls and his colleagues continued showing up as the rest of the world was shutting down. A dedicated and experienced Amazon employee, increasingly frustrated by the inner workings of the retail giant, Smalls had already felt himself reaching a breaking point. So when coworkers around him began falling ill, and with no transparency or assurances of safety coming from those in charge, he made the only choice left available to him. He staged a walkout with friend Derrick Palmer, eventually finding himself on the picket line without a job. But what began as a demand to keep essential employees safe in a crisis would grow into a movement devoted to achieving dignity and security for the American wageworker, sparking a groundswell of organizers at the most notable companies across the nation—including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, and Apple—and leading to lasting change for labor.
When the Revolution Comes is the riveting inside story of how a young Black man from Hackensack, New Jersey with few to no resources, led a scrappy band of Staten Island warehouse workers in an improbable fight against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the United States, and won. This epic David and Goliath tale follows Smalls from a childhood spent navigating his dad’s stints in and out of prison, to his years of sacrifice and economic uncertainty as a father of three, to his ascension as the leader of a new generation’s labor movement.
A deeply personal and eye-opening account of the creation of the Amazon Labor Union, When the Revolution Comes offers both a searing exposé of what it’s like to be working class in America and inspiring evidence of what is possible when the overworked, underpaid, and disempowered join together, a movement born in community.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Activist Smalls debuts with a forthright memoir that details his role in founding the Amazon Labor Union. In no-frills prose, Smalls recalls his bumpy upbringing in late 1990s Hackensack, N.J., during which his father was in and out of prison and a schoolyard confrontation ended with Smalls sending a bully to the hospital. After a string of thankless jobs, Smalls took a gig at a brand-new Amazon warehouse in Connecticut in 2015, where supervisors dangled the promise of rapid advancement. In Smalls's first two years on the job, however, he was never promoted, and the quotas he was expected to meet increased rapidly. Eventually, he was fired for two minutes of "time theft." He eventually returned to work at Amazon, but tensions between Smalls and management came to a head early in the Covid pandemic, when he staged a walkout with a friend at their Staten Island warehouse. He then spearheaded a unionization effort, which, despite the millions of dollars Amazon spent in antiunion advertising, became the first successful Amazon unionization effort in early 2022. Smalls's plainspoken narrative leans more toward personal history than political rallying cry, but it offers a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of American labor organizing. It's an inspiring self-portrait.
