When Working Means Deadly Risk, Backlash Brews

On March 28, Chris Smalls felt like giving up. He’d spent days talking with co-workers at the Amazon.com Inc. warehouse in New York City’s Staten Island about how to temporarily shut down the facility, where many say management has been slow to disclose and address cases of Covid-19. They’d tried approaching managers with their concerns as a group, to no avail, he says. That morning, a Saturday, Amazon management told Smalls they were directing him to self-quarantine because of contact with a co-worker who’d tested positive, a move Smalls says was arbitrary and designed to shut him up.

For a while that day, Smalls sat at home with a co-worker, dejected. “I guess we’re just all going to get sick,” he recalls thinking. “Amazon wins again.” But he managed to rally and consider what else he hadn’t tried. By the evening, he was emailing reporters and contacting coworkers to drum up support for a strike. Workers strategized via a private Instagram group and spread the word with handwritten and photocopied notes left in the employee bathroom. Come Monday, some workers—Amazon says just 15, the activists say more than 50—walked off the job. Within hours, Smalls was fired.