The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really special episode for y’all today, which is a recording of a live event that I recently hosted at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse here in Baltimore. And for that event, I got to sit down in front of a big, lively audience and have a real deep and wide ranging conversation with Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Chris has a new book out called When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class.

And that book recounts the incredible story of how a young working class Black man from Hackensack, New Jersey led a walkout from his Staten Island Amazon warehouse during COVID-19 got fired and then with hardly any resources banded together with a scrappy group of Staten Island warehouse workers to form the independent Amazon Labor Union to fight this epic David and Goliath battle against Amazon, the second largest private employer in the United States and Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, and to win and successfully unionize the first Amazon warehouse in the United States. And the book also traces Chris’s life story before the Amazon Labor Union and his journey from warehouse worker and labor organizer to becoming this internationally recognized public figure and a human rights activist who has sailed with humanitarian glotilla missions to Gaza and to Cuba, even facing detainment and harassment from ICE and imprisonment and abuse from the Israeli military because of it.

I’ve done a number of events with Chris over the years. I’ve interviewed him outside of the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and I interviewed him as he was sailing to Gaza with the Global Samuel Flotilla right before they were captured by the Israeli military last year. I’ve seen both up close and from afar what he, his story and the story of ALU mean to working people out there, young and old people across this country and beyond. I’ve seen up close and from afar how the media’s good and awful and obsessive coverage of Chris and ALU, how that’s all affected Chris and different members and factions within ALU. And I’ve watched them all try to do their best to navigate a situation and a spotlight that I don’t think any of them ever expected to be in and that most of us will frankly never be able to fully understand from the outside.

I’ve seen and learned about many of the struggles that Chris has been through. I’ve seen and learned about the things that he’s done to help others. I’ve seen and learned about mistakes that he’s made and regretful things that he’s done and said. I know he’s a controversial figure to different people for different reasons and I know that he’s an inspiration to different people for different reasons. I know that he’s a complex and imperfect person, like you, like me, and like the hundreds and hundreds of working people that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years. And I’ve said from the beginning of this show that the whole point of this project was to honor the full and beautiful and complex humanity of our fellow workers to lift up the unheard voices of working class people and to help them and us and others see ourselves as full people with important lives and stories, not just stereotypes, not just name tags and job titles.

We’re so much more than that. And as a fellow worker, Chris is no different. And whatever your thoughts are about him, I think we all need to remember that because I see a lot of people forgetting that and that is not to excuse or downplay any concerns that folks have about Chris, ALU, or the complicated relationship between media celebrity and political movements today. And of course, no one is above critique, not public figures like Chris and certainly not journalists like me and anyone who is part of the labor movement must hold themselves and be held accountable to that movement. I know that and I believe that, but I also know that movements don’t move and history doesn’t happen without people and people are complicated. And if we don’t have a healthy way as working people of talking and listening to each other and working through our shit, if the world is burning all around us and we cannot find ways to work together or work alongside each other for our common goals and common good, even if we don’t like each other, then to put it bluntly, we’re cooked.

And so with all that said, it was in that full spirit and with that same mission that I’ve had since I started this podcast eight years ago that I sat down with Chris Smalls for this important conversation that we had at Red Emma’s in Baltimore. I hope you guys enjoy it and I want to know what you think, but please first take a listen.

All right. Well, thank you so much to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for hosting us for this great event. I want y’all to give a proper Baltimore welcome to Brother Chris Smalls, the co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union here with us tonight. So we are of course here to talk about Chris’s new book, When the Revolution Comes, the Fight for the Future of the Working Class, but we’re also going to talk about so much more. And by way of getting us into this discussion, I wanted to just roll the clock back a second, right? Let’s go back five years, 2021, right? Feels like forever ago, but let’s not forget how crazy of a year that was. We had all just watched the batshit January 6th insurrection still in the middle of COVID, no vaccines yet. And out of this dark swamp in time, an unexpected source of light emerged in worker struggles and a sort of revived labor movement.

Everyone was talking about the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama who were trying to unionize with the retail wholesale and department store union down there. I went down there. That was actually my first field shoot for the real news. And of course those workers lost that election and it was very heartbreaking for a lot of us and it was really incredible to see that heartbreak turn into the energy that we would see later in the year with the first Starbucks store to unionize in Buffalo, New York and the emergence of this ragtag group of badass workers from Staten Island who were trying to unionize their Amazon warehouse. And so it can be easy to forget all that we were going through in that moment. And so I wanted that to sort of be the start. And Chris, I wanted to ask you to take us back there.

Remind us who Chris Smalls was before COVID and then talk us through, because I think we need a refresher. Talk us through the incredible saga from the walkout that you led to you guys winning that first union election.

Chris Smalls:

And thank you all for being here. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Baltimore, so I’m glad and honored to be back and good company and some good comrades, familiar faces in the crowd. So thank you all once again for showing up and supporting my book and being here tonight. I really appreciate that. Yeah. As you said, we have amnesia in America. We all know that. One thing being a news cycle for a few weeks and then it’s always something else, especially under this Trump administration. And ironically, six years ago when I got fired from Amazon, that was also an election year. Trump was still in the headlines still. So we wasn’t garnishing any attention. As you mentioned, leading up to 2021, 2020, COVID was the peak at its peak, especially in New York City being one of the epic centers of the world.

Yeah, workers were afraid, workers were catching COVID. I remember walking into my warehouse and how seeing my comrades at work just really sick and not really themselves. So it’s a really eerie moment. But for those who don’t know, I was an assistant manager at Amazon for four and a half years. I opened up three warehouses in the tri-state area, New Jersey, Connecticut, Staten Island New York was my last building. People’s person always, the same way you see me today, it was the same way I went to work at Amazon. Definitely loved my people. I spent 70 hours a week with them. They were like my extended family. And when COVID hit, I definitely was afraid for all of us and I wanted to speak up on their behalf as well, which led to my firing after I led the walkout on March 30th, 2020, which once again was six years ago.

Seems like it was a long time ago, but it was six years ago it flew. It flew past. But just giving you a background about myself, what you’re going to read about in the book if you haven’t already, is that I’m just like anybody else in this crowd. I’m a single parent. My twins at the time was, well, damn, they were maybe eight or nine years old. And yeah, you can imagine how much time that I’ve lost spending with them over the last years, especially during COVID, the years of COVID, if I was lucky to see them half a year, that was a thing as well. And I love sports, grew up playing basketball, football, track. You going to see that in the book. I also was a rapper. I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Was going to say, don’t bury the lead. There’s a little juicy story about your rap history in there.

Chris Smalls:

Yeah, yeah. There’s a little rap stink that I had briefly after college, dropped out of college because I wanted to pursue music. I thought I was going to blow up overnight and then I got hit with reality getting back into the workforce. I got married and divorced at a young age, but I was married for eight years and during that hardship, working at Amazon was our main source of income for my household, one of them at least. And having healthcare as well. Healthcare Amazon provided for me and my kids and my wife at the time. So when I lost all of that during the pandemic, it really showed me how much the company didn’t really care about anybody. After I poured five years of my blood, sweat and tears into the company after I’ve done so much opening up these warehouses for them, training thousands of Amazon workers, hundreds of their upper management, the companies just say, “You know what?

We don’t care. We’re going to fire you. ” And not only fire you, they did it in a way that martyred me by Jeff Bezos, who was the richest man in the world, signing off on the smear campaign, which basically said to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against Amazon, which is a good idea. But at the same time, the racist part in the beginning saying that I’m not smart or articulate, something that they use in these corporate settings to put upon Black people and Brown people, saying that we’re not smart enough or we’re not articulate enough to even talk about anything when it comes to work related issues. So that was really the catalyst of a moment right there where I embraced it and I said, “You know what? Even though I no longer work for the company, I’m going to continue fighting for the workers inside the building.” Ultimately, for a whole year from 2020 to 2021, we traveled the country protesting in front of debt bases, mansions and penthouses while Bessemer, Alabama was trying their efforts and we all was paying attention.

My folks in Staten Island, we were paying attention, but we took it a step further. We did drive down there. We drove 16 hours from New York City down to Bessemer in a car, one car squished up and we stayed about a week connecting with workers there, connecting with the union, trying to figure it out because we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We wanted to do something, but we didn’t really have all the answers. But unfortunately, yes, like Max said, when they lost, it was definitely devastating for everybody. We felt that because of several reasons. Number one, that building investment Alabama has about 6,000 employees, five, 6,000 employees. Majority of them are black people. 85% of the building is black, 80% of the workforce there are black women. So when Amazon spent millions of dollars stopping that campaign, that was a direct attack on black and brown people and that’s something that we resonated with in Staten Island, New York where the demographics are similar to our building as well.

So the next day after the results came out, it just so happened to be our birthday, four 20, four / 20 / 2021 is when we started our campaign the next day after those results came out. We didn’t even wait.

And yeah, that year was like a blur as well, but it was 11 months, over 300 plus days I set up an encampment outside of the building that fired me at a public bus stop talking to workers every single day, rain shine, how to call night or day about why we need to start a union. And originally we sent out the Olive branch to the established unions. We wanted some support. We wanted some resources, some help, but we got nothing in return because a lot of people didn’t believe in us. A lot of people thought that it wasn’t going to work. Who are you guys to unionize when y’all don’t have any resources, y’all don’t have any knowledge, experience, et cetera. But one thing we did know is that we’re Amazon workers. Whether we’re fired or not, we know the ins and out of the company better than Jeff Basils.

So we felt that was the only way, and I still believe that till this day that the only way it could have been done was grassroots, gorilla style tactics in the trenches every day, meeting your workers face-to-face. That was the only way it was going to work. We couldn’t take the shortcut routes. We couldn’t do the traditional style organizing methods that most unions use. We had to think outside of that box and also sacrifice. Sacrifice was one of the things that we all had to do as a collective. And yeah, it was successful. 11 months, hard blood sweat and tears into the campaign and it paid off to become the first union in American history for Amazon workers. And still, till this day, that building is the only unionized building in this country and that’s what people got to understand. And it’s pro and con to that.

Yes, it’s great that we still are standing, but it shouldn’t take four years for us to have a contract. Keep that in mind that even when I was the president for three years, the first thing we did when we won was demand the bargaining order from Amazon, or at least from the National Labor Relation Board so that we can negotiate with Amazon. We didn’t hear anything under the Biden administration. I don’t know what happened, but there was some magic in the air. We got a bargaining order in April of this year, but Amazon has already appealed it because they’ve been spending millions of dollars holding things up for the last four years. So for those and everybody who’s been questioning like, “Why don’t you guys have a contract or you guys are not getting a contract?” It’s not because of us. It’s literally because the system is broken.

The system is not worker friendly. As much as these progressives and politicians say that the system are usher us to the system that’s supposed to work for us, it doesn’t. It’s not in our favor. So we have to continue to fight every step of the way. And actually when we won in 2021, that was just the beginning of the fight. This fight is a lifetime struggle and now the only thing that I can see that our union can do, and not just our union, because there’s other unions out here, Starbucks workers, all these other unions that emerge, they’re still fighting for contracts too and negotiating their way through it. But the only thing I can see that’ll work for all of us is if we withhold our strongest weapon, which is our labor and go on strike.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it was wild too reporting on Bessemer and then reporting on you guys and sort of seeing how the things that worked for Amazon Imbessemer weren’t working on Staten Island. I think that was a real sort of moment of insurgent energy because in Bessemer, when the workers brought in the RWDSU, Amazon did what union busting employers always do where they’re like, “Oh, this is an outside force that’s trying to come in and get in between our relationship.” They couldn’t do that with you guys because it was like, no, these are literally just the workers in the warehouse. And so I wanted to touch on that because it was such a big debate at the time because of Bessemer and ALU especially, but everyone was talking about, is it better to go the independent route like Amazon Labor Union, Trader Joe’s United, the Home Depot workers who tried to unionize in Philly, or is it better to go with an established union like the Teamsters of the RWDSU?

And so with five, again, like you said, five, four years of experience since we were having those debates, I think it’s important for us to sort of revisit and update that and you know better than us. I wanted to ask after all that you’ve been through in this struggle, where have you landed on the independent or established union debate, especially in light of the AOU affiliating with the Teamster?

Chris Smalls:

Yeah. I mean, I still stick by my original sentiment that there was no other way that we was going to get it done, not with any established union. Didn’t matter how long they’ve been around, how powerful they are. The way we organize is completely against any type of style. You can’t read about it because it hasn’t been done before. And yeah, I still believe that independent unions are something that we still need to push. Not saying that established unions can’t support, but what’s happening over the last few years, to be honest, after we won in 2021, well, let me take it to the day of. The day we beat Amazon, we had $2.50 in our account. Now it’s funny because we were broke as hell. We didn’t have dudes paying members. We still don’t have dues paying members. We don’t have a contract. So I can’t ask for workers who are making $20 an hour to pay union dues.

I wasn’t going to do that as the union president. The next day we had almost half a million dollars because the bandwagon came, the unions, “Oh yeah, we supported. Oh yeah.” But they really, really didn’t. Actually, there was a reporting that all the established unions combined only contributed after we all won, talk about Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Amazon, you name it, they only contributed 3% of their resources into these campaigns. And I can tell you we didn’t get one of those 3%. We got zero. Literally nobody offered us anything before we won. And after we won, the bandwagon came and everybody said, “Oh yeah, we had some resurgence in the labor movement,” which is great. It was. It was definitely headlines, it was definitely international news and resonated with millions of workers around the world. The problem is that established unions didn’t use that opportunity to double down and really invest into grassroots movements because they was embarrassed.

We weren’t the first people who tried to unionize Amazon. Absolutely not. Actually, established unions have been trying to unionize Amazon for over a decade, even before Bessemer, Alabama. And guess what? You guys never heard about it. I never heard about it. It was actually a campaign at GFK8 while I was working there, didn’t even hear about it until we started and that was ran by the established union of the Teamsters. So when it comes to which side do I really ride with, I’m going to say the one that works and I know that there’s pros and cons to everything. The thing about independent unions and grassroots efforts, as we all know, if you’re grassroots, it’s a struggle. You’re not going to have all the tools and resources given to you all the time. You got to scrap, you got to sacrifice, you got to crowdfund, you got to have mutual aid.

We literally had a GoFundMe, which it’s sad to say, but that was our only lifeline of how we were able to feed our comrades and our workers there. So the reason why we had to affiliate with the Teamsters, which I signed by the way, is because we’re going up against a $2.2 trillion company like Amazon that has all the money to hold things up in federal court for four or five years like they have it, which you guys are not privy to this all the time, but Amazon has million dollar lawyers and while I was the president, I’ve been to federal court against Amazon. I lost count how many times over the years and all they do every time we do something, they appeal it into a federal court to try to get it to a right wing Supreme Court and try to get us decertified.

That is their game plan. They’re not trying to come to the table. They still don’t even want to recognize that we won. So the affiliation with the Teamsters was so that my union doesn’t go bankrupt because if we don’t have dues paying members and people are not going to continuously donate, we have to give resources to stay alive and stay afloat. The Teamsters was going to offer that. The affiliation agreement that I signed was something that I and my executive board negotiated along with our legal counsel and it was one that we benefited from the most. We have full autonomy with our local ALU, IBT, local one, full autonomy, full jurisdiction on Amazon. And the most important thing that I got in that contract was they have strike benefits. They can offer the workers at JFKA right now a thousand dollars a week to go on strike if they wanted to.

I’m not the president anymore, but this is something that I set up to help them succeed in that journey. It’s up to the workers, it’s up to the current leadership of the union. It’s up to them to take that initiative and utilize it. And hopefully they do because the clock is ticking. Right now since we’ve been issued a bargaining order, Amazon has already appealed it, but the clock is ticking for them to come to the table. They have about a year to do so. Otherwise, the game plan that Amazon is going to run is going to try to decertify the union. So hopefully they get their stuff together and they get it done. I’m always going to support my union, whether I have a position or not. And that’s what we all have to do in solidarity. We all have a role to play because our fight is absolutely your fight.

A lot of people don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes at Amazon are within these campaigns. So the reason why we’re here today, the reason why you guys are picking up this book is because this book is also not just a memoir, but it’s also a how-to. It’s going to give you some tools on how we can all fight back against the system that’s oppressing us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah.

So I really want to talk before we get to Q&A about your life, your work, your mission beyond ALU. And the last time we did an interview, you were sailing to Gaza for Christ’s sake. So I want us to get there, but before we do, just to pick up on what you were saying there, I think it’s really important for us to in this space, model a real, honest, no BS discussion about what we can learn from the beautiful, complicated, heartbreaking, inspiring story of the first Amazon union. Because so many struggles before you and there are going to be plenty after you, you guys faced a lot of external pressure and internal debates, division. This stuff happens and you write about some of that in the book and there’s a time and place to talk about that stuff and it’s not here. We’re not here to sort of air dirty laundry and point fingers.

Everyone knows Chris isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. And that’s, I think the point is that whether you’re organizing your shop or trying to build a political movement, you can’t do anything without the messy realities of messy human beings who make the movement. So our humanity is always part of the story and none of us is perfect. And so I wanted to ask you, Chris, again, not for us to get sucked into the … She said … I’ve talked to other Amazon members who have different versions of the story and I always tell them, like I told you, I was like, “It’s not my place to pick sides here. I’m not in this union. I’m a fucking journalist.” And it breaks my heart when I see these divisions because I want the best for everybody, but life doesn’t work out like the fairytales in our heads.

So what can we learn from y’all’s experience that can help others out there who are going through these struggles and it’s getting tough and the company, the employers appealing every victory, it’s like one step forward, three steps back. You’re losing friendships because shit just gets really tough. You have no money. What can folks out there who are experiencing that learn from what y’all went through in ALU?

Chris Smalls:

Yeah, great question. I mean, once again, when you’re taking on one of the most powerful companies in the world, you’re trying to bring people together from all different backgrounds, all different creeds, you’re going to have disagreements, you’re going to have different political ideologies, you’re going to have infighting, every union, every organization does. We just were under a microscope because of our historical victory and the mistake that the media Yeah, sort of did was comparing us to established unions that’s been around for a hundred years. We weren’t that. We’re grassroots organizers. Most of them weren’t even organizers. They were just everyday civilians that were inspired, that were passionate, that wanted to do something. Even myself as the leader at the time, I didn’t have all the answers as well. I had to learn and I’m still learning every day. I’m a sponge. I’m learning new what’s going on overseas is affecting us here.

The things that I’m doing with Palestine, Cuba, wherever I’m going, it affects us here. I try to connect those dots. Some people just can’t think that big and unfortunately it leads to disagreements, but the disagreements are that’s a democracy. That’s exactly what a democracy is.

Unfortunately, the movement has its way of weaning people out. It’s not for everybody. It’s just real. A lot of people will see social media posts or see something happening, protests, whatever it is. Even going back to George Floyd days when there was millions of people taken to the streets in America. But where are these millions of people now? They’re back at work. A lot of people see things for the moment they get involved and then they get burnt out. They get weeded out or they realize this is too tough for me. And a lot of it is what happened to our union. A lot of folks thought that it’s a lot easier than what it is. Yes, I do make things look cool sometimes. That’s intentional because organizing is stressful as shit. I know we all know that. Organizing hard, stressful, tiring, exhausting, all of the above.

And I tried to make it as simple, as cool, as fun as possible because I know what workers are dealing with working at Amazon. That was one of my biggest things is making sure that everybody around me was always good in some capacity. Unfortunately, once again, the movement is going to be the movement. And for those who jump into this movement or this type of work or any type of work, you got to know what you signed yourself up for. This is a lifetime struggle. Our ancestors paved the way and not only that lost their lives, some are incarcerated right now as we speak so that we can have the right to organize, that we can have a reason to organize. So when these type of movements, you can’t have one foot in, one foot out. You got to be fully committed for the long haul and you got to be fully committed to sacrificing something because if you spoke out about Palestine, you lost something.

I know I did. If you spoke out at your workplace, you’re going to be targeted. If not worse, you’re going to get terminated. If you speak out against all of the injustices that we’re seeing right now in this country, you’re going to lose friends. You’re going to lose loved ones. I know a lot of us in here that probably when they started talking about October 7th, it was tough conversations in the beginning because I could tell you I lost 10,000 followers on Instagram instantly when I posted about Palestine over three years ago. And it was the same people that said in my DMs, “Chris, we supported you for Amazon workers, but this is where I draw the line.” What? In return, you know what I said? Fuck you.

Because if you can’t make the relationship between Amazon and genocide, then I can’t help you. And I don’t give a damn if you one of my organizers or not. If you fighting over some petty shit when Jeff Bezos is flying in space on the penis rocket, you missing the plot. So people want to attack the wrong things and that happens a lot on the left. We’re talking about the character, the person, the individual, how I look, how I talk, where I’m going, what headlines I’m gathering. Meanwhile, Amazon is firing 30,000 people next week. And that was what I always tell my organizers. We’re fighting about what we doing next when Amazon is winning. They are in the building union busting and y’all worried about the wrong things. So for me, the biggest lesson I learned is you got to stay true to the mission. And I don’t debate too much.

I mean, I do sometimes because I have to defend myself in certain cases, but I’ve never played into the naysay about myself or about my union because I let the work speak for itself. We made history, unprecedented history, and people that were there, they know. That’s all I care about. My day ones that walked out of the building six years ago with me, they know. Everybody else that came afterwards that’s going to jump on board later on, that’s going to look back, reflect back, that none of that matters. What matters is what are you willing to do to get Amazon to come to the table? What are you willing to do to liberate the people of Palestine? And more importantly, if you don’t get up and do the work, who’s going to do it because there’s no calvary coming for us?

Maximillian Alvarez:

One of the things that has sort of always colored the way that I have watched your journey is the fact that I always think that I was working in warehouses back in Southern California 15 years ago in the depths of the Great Recession. Our family was losing our house like millions of others. It was awful. And the thought of one of us having the cultural international statue that you do that one of us would be giving so much hope to people around the country and around the world is just mind boggling to me, but it’s also like that’s got to be a lot to go through as a working warehouse guy to then kind of be catapulted to that. So that’s not to excuse anything. It’s just to be like, we should give each other as much grace as we possibly can while holding ourselves accountable to each other.

Do our best. That’s the best that we can do for each other. And I say that to say by getting us to your activism beyond the warehouse, because what is it about your story, ALU’s story that has spoken to so many people around the world? And how did that lead you to becoming a global activist for human rights from Gaza to Cuba?

Chris Smalls:

Great question. I mean, well, number one, if you’d have told me that I could look as cool as a rapper, as a union organizer, I’d have been doing this shit a long time ago, would have saved you some

Maximillian Alvarez:

Years.

Chris Smalls:

I don’t look like your typical union president. My union doesn’t look like your typical union. My executive board didn’t look like your typical union executive board. So culturally, we gravitated to the younger generation. They looked at us and said, “Oh wow, they look cool. Amazon Labor Union, oh man, they’re wearing sweats and T-shirts and hat backwards and whatever else.” And we did something at a time where once again, the world was watching and we captivated that moment in time. But the international piece came when I got a passport because I just got a passport when I became the president three, four years ago. I didn’t even have a passport and 70% of Americans don’t have a passport.

I encourage you, number one, get one because since I got a passport, I’ve been to 45 different countries around the world and counted. And when I go to these countries, I’m not on vacation. I’m not on tourist trips sort of because I need to learn some things, I need to see some things, but I’m meeting with Amazon workers and I’ll give you the best example that I have as far as how much dedication or how dedicated I am to the movement. I was invited two years ago when I was the president still. I was invited to Paris by Pharrell and Rihanna to walk in the Louis Vuitton runway for this grand opening. And the same day I was invited to the White House again for the second time from Kamala Harris while she was running for president. I declined both of those and went to an Amazon warehouse in Canada, literally.

And guess what? I’m proud to say that that Amazon warehouse in Canada is the first unionized building in Canada’s history. So once again, people could say what they want about me. I know how I move. I know I’m very conscious about what’s going on, what’s being out there, what’s put out there and those around me, once again, they know if you’ve met me in the past, if you’ve been around me, if you hung around, what you see is what you get. I don’t really have to put on a facade and I think that’s what really resonates with people is that they can relate to me and that they feel comfortable talking and actually working alongside or working with me in some way. I think the international piece, the international solidarity that I’ve shown is also shown other people that what’s happening abroad is coming back home to roots, especially when it comes to Palestine.

There was several reasons why I got on that flotilla. Number one, I’m an Amazon worker, sure. Amazon has invested $7.2 billion into project numbers. The technology that’s being used to target and surveil and kill innocent Palestinians is powered by Amazon Web Services, number one. Number two, I’m a black man and I have kids. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where we’re watching, scrolling every day, seeing dead people. I don’t know about you guys, but that shit is enough, traumatizing. And number three, I’m a taxpayer citizen, American taxpayer citizen like all of us. We all should be outraged where our taxpaying dollars are going. And I could tell you what I saw in Gaza is there’s no comparison. Less than a hundred miles away from Gaza Strip. I’ll never forget before we got … Well, we were already intercepted, but I will never forgive me crying on the ship because I was so angry that we didn’t make it, but just knowing that we were so close, 60 miles away from Gaza Strip, our boat got swarmed with flies and I’ll never forget I asked one of my comrades, “Where the hell did all these flies come from?” And it’s because there was so much death and so much bodies under rubble, vermin, whatever you want to call it, that the flies flew a hundred miles away from land to find food from our garbage and we were swarmed and I said, “Whatever we’re seeing on Instagram, it’s actually just a glimpse.

It’s not even close to how bad it is over there.” And I hear testimonies from doctors all the time. It’s beyond what I could put into words and obviously what happened to me is just confirmation that Israel is a racist apartheid state. That being said, spreading awareness, going back to who I am and why I do what I do and how I move.

What other labor leader in this country that you know is banned from Israel for a hundred years? That’ll be me. When it comes to Cuba, I brought 25 people from the Amazon Labor Union to Cuba three, four years ago, first labor delegation to Cuba and we delivered humanitarian aid back then. We graduated from Fidel Castro University. We stayed in bootcamp. We were disciplined. We learned the Cuban way and I’ve never looked back, been to Cuba every year since. And you may have saw that I was detained two months ago. I took my phone and they worry about the 16 other people that they took their phones from. They gave them their phones back, but some of the comrades that I was with heard the ICE agents talking about, “Oh, that’s the Amazon guy. We got the Amazon guy.” So the target on my back is very much real and they’re detaining other people questioning about me right now as we speak.

It’s just happened. So I think it’s important and then I know y’all saw me crash the Med Gala. I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t invited to the Med Gala so I had to crash the party, but we crashing the Med Gala was the spread awareness and it worked because if I would’ve sat home 20 minutes away from where Jeff Babes was about to walk the red carpet, 40 minutes away from the building where they have a negotiated contract in four years, I’m doing a disservice to myself and to my entire union and the working class as a labor leader. I do the things that I do because I ask myself this question, if Chris Smalls doesn’t do this work, who’s going to do it? And that answer sometimes is very scary because the answer is nobody. And that’s the same question that each and every one of y’all got to ask yourselves.

If you don’t get up and do this work, who’s going to do it? And hopefully that motivates you to continue in doing what you’re doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Give it up for Chris. Well, and I think that’s a perfect lead into a final question before we get to Q&A, because your book is called When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. And I want to talk about what that fight like, what’s really at stake and how big it is because right now from the excitement we felt when you guys won to the depression we feel that you still don’t have a contract to Trump strangling Cuba, invading Venezuela, kidnapping its president, going to war with Iran, the climate spiralantic in control, we tried and we failed to stop a genocide. It feels so hopeles sometimes, but the fight is where we actually have the chance to change the outcome and it’s not just in our workplaces and it’s not just in Gaza, but I wanted to ask you what your sort of final message is for a working class struggle and movement that can actually turn this tide and bring us back to a future that we can give to our kids that’s still worth living in.

Chris Smalls:

Yeah. Great question. And I mean, when I say a fight for the future of the working class, I mean, we’re fighting for humanity right now. There is no Calvary coming to save us. I’m going to tell you now, politicians are not our savior and in the history of the human race, we never voted our way to liberation. We always had to fight most of it with our lives. And when I’m talking about the revolution, well, the revolution starts with yourself. The times that we’re in right now, as you mentioned, they’re terrible. Society, things that are normalized, being desensitized, all of these things that are happening real time in our faces. Every day there’s something new on the headlines distracting us from the bigger picture. The way we was able to beat this $2.2 trillion company because we came together for one common cause the same way that people were coming together for Palestine because it wasn’t like this three years ago until we saw the student encampments, the protests in the streets, the flotillas, all of the different things that we’re seeing because people are fed up, young people, young people are fed up.

I knew one day when I walked into a middle school and this 10-year-old kid said, “Jeff Bezos is a bad man,” I said, “I’m doing something right.” Because I couldn’t imagine myself at 10 years old and I encourage teachers and many educators in the room, “Bring some of your labor leaders. I’ll come to your classroom. I will definitely come out. I’ve been to elementary schools, you name it. I’ve been there. University, I will be there because I know the importance of getting to the youth. We don’t want them to continue to praise these celebrities and athletes and musicians. We want them to praise the people that’s actually doing some great work and that’s people right here in our own community and reminding ourselves where we came from because society has changed because of companies like Amazon who’s forcing us to hit one click buy. Stay home, stay isolated, just audio package.

It shows up to your door. You see one person deliver it, but you never see the 10 or 12 people that that box done touched before it got there. Six of them got injured. One of them possibly could have got killed, but you would never hear about it. And that’s the message that we all have to spread because somebody in your household, somebody in your neighborhood doesn’t know this, doesn’t know what’s happening at these warehouses, doesn’t know what’s happened with the Amazon Labor Union. As big as that victory was, you already know we in a country that is very, very retroactive and a lot of people here got amnesias are living worse, living in their own bubbles. That’s saying you’re in your own bubble, but that’s not a good thing. That’s up to us to find these people, to meet them where they at, mainly work and to get them organized because when I say a fight for the future of the working class, and I say the revolution comes once again, that’s everybody in this room coming together for one common cause for the greater good of humanity.

And I’ll give you this last gem.

The fight for Palestine is going to liberate the world, but the fight for black and brown indigenous people is going to liberate everybody.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Chris Malls, everyone. All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guest, Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union. Go check out Chris’s new book, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class. And thank you to Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Coffeehouse for hosting this amazing event. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’ve got an important follow-up to a story here in Baltimore that we reported on back in April. To refresh your guys’ memory on April 9th, nearly a year after workers voted to authorize a strike, non-union city and commercially contracted security officers in Baltimore walked off the job on an unfair labor practice strike against their employers, Abacus Corporation, Metropolitan Protective Services, and Urban Development Solutions. The strike involved security guards stationed at city and commercial sites around Baltimore, including Harbor East, the water treatment facility, the Able Woolman Building, police stations, and housing developments among others.

In what has been a protracted years long effort to unionize with the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, workers have been fighting for more job security, better pay, accessible healthcare, and safer working conditions. And in the episode that we published just before the strike, I got to talk about all of that with Laura Dixon, a veteran security officer and Abacus employee and Jaime Contreras, Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 32BJ. And today we’re talking about the latest infuriating update from this story. On Friday, May 22nd, I got a press email from SEIU Local 32BJ with the title, City Security Officers Fired and Threatened after going on strike according to labor charges filed against city contractor. Now, according to the union, quote, “Non-union security officers have filed unfair labor practice charges alleging their employer, city contractor Metropolitan Protective Services, fired and harassed workers following a lawful strike that took place on Thursday, April 9th.

NPS, which employs at least 70 officers who protect 10 public housing units run by the Baltimore Housing Authority, among other sites, receives $15 million from the Baltimore Housing Authority and $6 million from the Maryland Department of General Services. Starting the day after officers went on strike, NPS also stopped bringing paychecks to Baltimore from their Hyattsville headquarters and instead required officers to drive over 30 miles to Hyattsville, creating a new barrier between officers and access to their pay. Seven officers reported losing their jobs or being removed from their schedule for actions that MPS permitted prior to the strike, including Victoria Cox for simply eating lunch in her car after two years on the job protecting Westport housing in South Baltimore, where Cox dealt with domestic violence, break-ins, and shootings. After the strike in early April, an NPS supervisor interrogated an officer over union involvement and told the officer that he could lose his job.

Multiple officers also reported being interrogated by a supervisor after their participation in the lawful strike. So as part of my journalistic due diligence, I reached out to NPS for comment on these allegations and I received a reply from CEO and president of MPS, Derek Parks, which says in part, “Metropolitan Protective Services, Inc. Maintains that no employees have been terminated due to union involvement. We fully support our employees’ right to choose whether or not to join a union. Of our 175 employees, only six have been removed from the schedule or terminated all due to licensing issues or performance concerns. We find these allegations to be without merit and believe they are being used by the union to exert pressure on the company.” So I’ve included the full statement from NPS CEO and President Derek Parks in the show notes for this episode so that you can read the full thing.

But for now, as we always do, we’re going to take you guys to the front lines of this struggle so that you can hear directly from the working people at the center of it. And I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by Victoria Cox herself. Victoria is a former MPS employee who worked to get to the rank of Sergeant. And we’re also joined by Daril Riley, a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daril have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since the strike began. Victoria, Daril, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it and I really wish we were meeting under less infuriating circumstances and I want to talk about all of this with you in the short time that we have.

And to start, I wanted to just ask if you guys could both remind our listeners where this strike came from. What are the key issues that you and fellow security guards face on the job? Why have you been trying to unionize and why were you prepared to go on an unfair labor practice strike in April? I just want to make sure that folks listening remember before we talk about what happened after the strike, what this is all about.

Victoria Cox:

Well, for one, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out to hear us. We need to be heard. Enough is enough. Things need to be stopped. I’m a little emotional because we’ve been riding it out for a minute without pay. We got families, we got bills. I just bought a new car. We got bills and stuff to pay and we’re behind. So basically I’m just reaching out for help answers. The investigation being investigated too long. The reason why I’m low emotional because two years is coming up and I’m a sergeant. I’m not understanding why is this happening. I did overtime. I even did fire watch for them on my days off and the union has really stuck by me supporting me. I just need answers and why is this happening? Ever since we’ve been on strike, things has been really like hell, truthfully help for us.

Change has been like every day since we’ve been on strike, things has been like a change every day. Every day is everything. More has been added onto us and we obeyed it. When I did the 16 hours and came in the next day at nine o’clock, I think I was rightfully deserved, rightfully deserved a break. And I took my break at 11:30. As I took my break at 11:30, they came marching down like military people and asked me why was I sitting in my car on my lunch break and even lied to me and said in post orders, “I’m not allowed to sit in my car for a lunch break.” And I asked them to show me that in the post orders. They couldn’t. I pulled it up. It was nothing there. I screenshotted, sent Gmails no reply nicely. And it started off, I said, “Good morning and good afternoon.” It also ended with, “Thank you.

Can you respond to me to let me know what am I under investigated for? ” No response. So today I have gotten a Gmail saying, “Oh, it got moved to higher up chief. We need answers. We have bills. We have family. This is not fair.

We are not taking off the schedule. If you’re done with us and we’re fine, tell us that so we can move on and get unemployment and go further.” But they’re not responding and not saying nothing to us. Right now, we’re not getting paid, noth. And it’s so unfair. I just need answers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you so much for sharing that, Victoria. I really appreciate it and I completely understand why you’re feeling the way that you are. My heart breaks thinking about all the many working people I’ve talked to who are in situations like yours and just how callous these bosses are towards our pain, how callous politicians can be to that pain, how much the media can ignore it. And of course we’re doing our best here to sort of counteract that, but I guess I’m appealing to everyone listening to this that don’t let these stories and these injustices just fade into the background. Nothing’s going to happen here unless fellow workers stand up and demand accountability. And we’re going to talk more about that as this conversation goes on. And Darrell, I wanted to bring you in here and I wanted to ask if you could talk a little bit about what it was like working for you at NPS before the strike and then help remind our listeners why you went on strike and then we’ll talk about what happened to you after the strike.

Daril Riley:

Actually, before the strike, the job really wasn’t so bad. We didn’t have a whole bunch of rules or whatever. However, the job always been dangerous on most jobs is the police and then you. On our job, it’s us first and then the police. So we go into everything, like I said, head on, we get paid a little bit of money and we take all the brunt of the work. Like I said, we go in all kind of dangerous situations where it’s shootouts, where somebody got killed in the house, all that. We go first. The police is second to that, but we was really doing our job just fine basically until after the strike. So I mean, of course we want better situation because at the end of the day, we not the police. You know what I’m saying? But we acting like it, but we don’t get to pay that they get.

You know what I mean? So basically we was just trying to ask for better conditions for the job that we worked. I mean, we think we deserve it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I’m just remembering some of the things we talked about in that last episode. I mean, all the different things you guys have to deal with. And we also talked about the fact that it’s tough because most people don’t have good interactions with security guards. And so people tend to not want to sympathize with workers that they hear are security guards. But then when you listen to the kind of stuff that you guys deal with on your shift and the kind of pay that you’re getting and the kind of crap you got to deal with from your management, I think it’s really important that everyone hear that and consider the human being behind the uniform. And so talk to me about the strike itself. I mean, how were you both feeling going into the strike? And then let’s talk about how quickly things changed after the strike in early April.

Victoria Cox:

Well, wow. I’m going to take it a little bit and rewind it back and I apologize I didn’t bring this up. We also, me and my partner, which is Daril Riley was stuck at work for three days and they promised us that they were going to … I don’t know what the surprise was supposed to have been and we never got it. We stayed away for three days. They never called a checkup on us or anything. So we sucked that up, let it go, say, “Hey, well, we rolled it out. We still doing to do our job. We still was dedicated. I didn’t know it was going to go this far. We still continue to do our job.” But soon as when the union got involved, of course they said, “No, y’all don’t need no union, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” We said, “No, we need a union.” So of course I stuck out that sore thumb because I said, “We need this.

” So I made sure that I went up to a lot of the other officers. We got it done. Of course we go on strike and who faces biggest days on the poster mine. So of course I was a target. I was told by other officers that, “Oh yeah, we’re going to get her. She going to be the first one.” They were going after everyone that went on strike. But again, I kept a professional. Before I went on strike, I did. I told them I’m going on strike, but I have courage. And I did have coverage and I did the rightful thing. I just didn’t walk off the job. I didn’t abandon anything and I still did the rifle thing to protect my job and I still get treated like this.

I’m lost. I’m lost for words. So I just feel like they made it even worse. When we joined the union, it’s like, “Yeah, okay. Y’all not going to do what we say. We got something.” So it was like they was trying to find … I felt we were set up. They were trying to find something, something on us. So they said, “Let’s just pick with Sergeant Cox. She was sitting in our car, this just did 16 hours, came back nine o’clock. When all of us make 11:30, nah.” But I always cover myself by having proof. It was nothing said on the post orders. And then it was a smack my face the next day. The captain told me, “Hey, what so- and-so did 16 hours?” And I gave her 40 minutes and she went off post. I said, “I’m a sergeant, so what’s make her different from me?

” And she’s a new guard, so that’s why I’m hurting. I’m not understanding. I never have gotten written up either. I always was a yes or a person, even though when it was wrong, because at the end of the day, I have bills. I have bills to pay. I didn’t have a family to feed and now my family questioning me, what’s going on? And now I’m behind on some things. And I don’t even know, and I’m going to be honest with you, we even try to cash out with PTO. I don’t even know if they going to set that. And we’re in this interview right now and it’s crazy because I just got a call from Metropolitan and I got a text message from SOC telling me to call her. That’s what I wanted to bring up as well. I don’t know what this is about either.

What they going to say, no, I can’t get PTO now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So just to make sure that we’ve got it all clear here. So Victoria, we’re working at Westport Housing, you’ve worked there for a while. Like you said earlier, you’d never been written up, you did double shifts, you’re a team player, right? And then after working a 16-hour day, the next morning you come in and at 9:00 AM in the morning, you take your lunch break at 11:00 and you have your lunch in your car and then they use that to essentially take your shifts and your job and everything away.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. They literally told Fib and said, “Oh, you on your lunch break for a whole hour.” I’m like, “What?” And I’m not being funny because I have a monkey joke. Literally, they was walking down. I didn’t even really start my lunch this year. I was eating a banana and I continued to eat my banana as I was talking to them. But I also, when they were saying something crazy, I showed them a screenshot where the post order saying that I cannot leave the post or cannot sit in my car for a lunch break. They just had their head down. So they was really trying to find something on me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, this is just my ignorance of the situation. They’re trying to say that this is like a fireable offense.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. Under investigation,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yep. Yeah. I want to be careful for listeners because Sergeant Cox has not been fired, but is under investigation, has essentially been taken all off the schedule, which is effectively firing a person without firing them, but I want to be careful with the language that we’re using. And so Victoria, so they said that because you left your post to eat your lunch in your car, that’s why it happened?

Victoria Cox:

I have them laugh on this. I’m sorry, because it’s my nerves. I have to laugh on this because when they said I left the post, I swear if you go down there, anybody that hear this go down at Westport, they be like, “Wait a minute, I even showed pictures.” I did not leave the post at all where where I was at was right there that still said Westport. I was still on the property, still there. No restaurant carry out, nothing. I was sitting in my car on the side that still say Westport. I was still in … If that’s the case, if I was off the property, how did you find me?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And how soon did this happen after the strike? Oh,

Victoria Cox:

God. I’m going to say I’d say three weeks. Again,

Maximillian Alvarez:

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but from what you’ve been saying, it sounds like things were kind of getting noticeably worse

Victoria Cox:

Over the course

Maximillian Alvarez:

Of those three weeks.

Victoria Cox:

Yes. It seemed like ever since that happened, they would come down ain’t never their entire life because me and Corporal Riley kept saying, “Wait a minute, I’m Sergeant, you called. Why are they coming down here every day and they switch stuff up? All right y’all, y’all can’t be right here. Y’all can’t eat inside the building.” I said, “Well, I’m going to sit in my car to eat lunch.” Or, “I’m going to need y’all to start checking the front and unlocking it. I mean, making sure these doors unlock and lock.” It was things changed. It was changing every day, every day. And I even asked her when it’s pulled down raining, we said, “Yeah, I want y’all out here. Just keep walking, keep walking.” So if your legs start hurt, just keep walking or laying up against the fence. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse.

And now I guess they feel they won, “Well, yeah, we got her out of here on my lunch break.” And they also asked me why was he in his view? I said, “He’s not supposed to be alone. If something happened to him, then it’s not going to fall on me. ” So what is the problem? No one stands alone, correct? We supposed to be a team together and we were still on property. So if something did kick, we had the radios. We had to stop what we was doing and jump to it immediately like we always do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daryl, how about you? Can you talk us through what this was all looking like from your vantage point after the strike?

Daril Riley:

After the strike, basically rules we never even heard of before, never even seen was now a rule that we didn’t know nothing about, you know what I’m saying? It was all new. They was basically just doing everything off the cuff, you know what I’m saying? After that, it was just like whatever, we’ll just find anything or whatever. But before then, these same things and all that with never an issue was never talked about or whatever. And the thing about it is everybody anyway goes off a property to go take their 30-minute break. You call it into command that you taking your 30-minute break so they know it. You call it in and then you call it out when it’s over. So two days before that, our captain came and said that one of the people from the contract said that we left the site or whatever.

I said, “No.” I said, “I left the site.” I went to Popeye’s. I said, “I called in the 30 minutes to command and then when I got back, I called it back out. ” And he said, “Well, that’s for us. That’s not for them.” So basically he was saying, “Okay, it’s really okay for the company.” But he don’t want the contractors to know that that’s what it is. But basically we got in trouble anyway because of it just after that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, I’ll qualify this by saying that I’m drawing this comparison just as myself, Max Alvarez, a journalist who’s interviewed workers in different situations across this country, including workers at Starbucks stores that have been unionizing or trying to unionize or successfully voted to unionize. This is the kind of crap that those workers have been telling me for years. They say, “Yeah, man, all of a sudden managers are writing us up for things that they have never written a single person up for ever before. They’re saying that they’re not retaliating against us for union activity, but suddenly my hours are getting cut and now I’m losing my healthcare. I’m being assigned shifts in another store. It feels like blatant retaliation and punishment for protected union activity for everyone listening, that is illegal. Employers cannot do that. It is illegal for an employer to retaliate against you or any other worker engaging in lawful concerted union activity.

Those are your rights. And what it sounds like here is that we have another situation where workers, yourselves included, engaged in those protected rights to walk out on an unfair labor practice strike and then faced what sounds like weeks worth of retaliatory action culminating in these BS investigations and charges that you guys abandoned your posts and got taken off the schedule. So that’s again, just my commentary and observation, but the question I want to ask you both because it’s a significant one is do you suspect that you were being retaliated against for engaging in the strike?

Victoria Cox:

Yes, I know for sure. I’m telling you, I have gotten a lot of phone calls that was backing me up and saying, Hey, and I’m not even being funny, but they said, I’m just letting you know since you’ve been on that strike, you’ve been on the news and you posted up. The major came to them and told them, which is unprofessional, that I was on the chopper board. They want to make sure they get rid of me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Daril, do you believe you were retaliated against for participating in the strike?

Daril Riley:

Yeah, of course. I mean, because the company never wanted it to begin with. They made all kind of snide remarks and basically tried to put us against the union. They never wanted. And then once we went to it and then once it was over, then basically they showing us that they never wanted this. And so basically that’s what we’re going through now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about what you’re going through now. As much as you’re comfortable sharing, nothing you’re uncomfortable sharing, but I know I got to let you guys go in a few minutes. And with the little time that we have left, I wanted to talk about what this has meant for you and your families, like how this has affected your lives and where the hell things stand now with this investigation, your jobs, and what is the union doing to help and what can people listening do to help?

Victoria Cox:

Well, I have to say this, and I’m sorry I’m getting emotional again. The God I serve, I know he’s going to have an answer for me and they always say when one door is shut another one open and thank God that I have a good support system and my fiance has really supported me through it all. They told me keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting. So without her and family members, trust me, you just don’t know. I probably had a nervous breakdown, but like I said, the God I serve and thank God I have them in my life, I will be devastated with how y’all be out here doing things I ain’t got no business doing. So I’m just asking those that’s listening to keep us in prayer and keep fighting and fighting for us and we just want answers. We need your help. We out here and been out of work with no pay, no unemployment and not understanding why.

Why? We just need help and prayer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Darrell, please hop in here, but I just wanted to underline something that Victoria said for everyone listening in case we haven’t made it clear if you don’t get outright fired but you just get taken off the schedule, you can’t collect unemployment. So it’s like screwing someone over twice. They can’t work to pay their bills and they can’t collect unemployment to help with the cost of that. And that’s what Daryl and Victoria are dealing with right now. Daryl, please hop in here and whatever you’re comfortable sharing with folks, just tell us where things are for you, what the union’s doing and what folks listening can do to help.

Daril Riley:

Wow. I mean, basically the union has been great for us and very supportive and basically, I mean, I’m glad I’m with them and I mean, I’m glad I met those people. However, bills do still go on even though since pretty much now I’m at a standstill. I mean, I’m sure it’s fired because basically they saying that, but they won’t say that. So basically, like you said, I mean, no unemployment, can’t get my 401k out until something happened or whatever. So basically, I mean, I have a family, I don’t know how it’s going to be, really, really tough to support them. So I mean, right now, I mean, I really don’t know what. We just going

Victoria Cox:

To keep fighting. We just going to keep fighting. Like he said, the union has really, really has been reaching us even on holidays. They reach out to us to make sure that we okay. You need anything, let us know. So we just want answers and need you guys help. Don’t give up on us and we are not going to give up on you guys. We just going to keep fighting.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Victoria Cox and Darryl Riley. Victoria is a former employee of Metropolitan Protective Services who work to get to the rank of Sergeant and Daryl is a former MPS employee who’s been working there for 15 months and reached the rank of corporal. Both Victoria and Daryl have had their shifts taken off the schedule and essentially had their jobs taken away and they have both been put under investigation by NPS since they participated in an unfair labor practice strike in early April. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we’re talking about coal miners and workers in the coal mining industry and what the government is doing to help them or hurt them under President Trump. Mr. I love coal miners. It’s been a meme ever since the 2016 presidential election. Trump loves throwing on a coal miner’s helmet and lining up coal miners around him for the cameras. He loves talking about bringing coalback quote unquote. He loves talking about quote beautiful clean coal.

Trump and right-wing media are so obsessed with cultivating this image of him as the coal miners champion and this so- called blue collar billionaire who really gets the working class. And obviously the industry itself is all for it. Earlier this year, Trump was even crowned the quote undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal. And he was presented with this big stupid trophy by the Washington Coal Club, which is an advocacy group with financial ties to the coal industry. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s one video that the White House posted on Instagram in early February of this year.

President Donald Trump:

The most important people here today are those who get their hands a little bit dirty to keep America running at full speed. Our frontline coal workers.

Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford):

My name is Kayla Blackford. I work at the Bear Run Mine. I drive a haul truck and I think what the president has done for the coal industry is really important and we’re able to keep electricity prices down.

Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III):

My name is Vernon Roche III. I’m a coal miner in Alabama, Shoal Creek Min. We know that President Trump loves clean coal.

Coal Miner 3 (Drew):

Been in the coal industry for 16 years and the time with Trump being in office. It’s been a great deal for my family, from a small coal mining town in Southern West Virginia originally.

Coal Miner 4 (Scott):

Conveyor belts are the machines that we use to transport coal from 600,000 feet below ground to the surface where it goes to power plants that fuel America’s energy.

Coal Miner 5 (Matt):

We are thankful for President Trump’s commitment to coal to bring affordable energy to American people. It gives us the ability to sell coal to the power plants to get us to the extreme cold temperatures, the extreme heats in the summers when our energy grid would be struggling. It always has been and always will be affordable, reliable source for electricity.

President Donald Trump:

The really dependable form of energy that we have and that’s clean, beautiful coal.

Coal Miner 1 (Kayla Blackford):

Thank you, President Trump.

Child 1:

Thank you, President Trump.

Coal Miner 2 (Vernon Roche III):

For knowing the clean coal.

Child 1:

Clean, beautiful coal.

Coal Miner 3 (Drew):

Keeps the lights on.

Coal Miner 5 (Matt):

Keeps the lights on.

Coal Miner 4 (Scott):

Thank you, President Trump for knowing that clean coal keeps the lights on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. So now that we’ve got that Trump marketing machine BS version of reality, let’s contrast that with the shocking news about what the Trump administration is doing to protect those coal miners that they call brave and claim to love so much. And in her latest report for in these times, Kim Kelly writes, “On May 1st, International Workers Day, Trump administration officials targeted the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the FMSHRC, abruptly firing Commissioner Moshe Marvit, and closing down one of the agency’s three offices. In total, the FMSHRC lost 16 workers as well as the entire Pittsburgh office that day. Marvit has spent the bulk of his career, including 12 years as a supervisory attorney advisor at the FMSHRC unabashedly representing workers’ interests, both in court and as a freelance journalist for outlets like in these times, the Washington Post and dissent. The pro worker reputation preceded him when President Joe Biden first nominated him for a commissioner position back in 2022.

It took three tries to get him confirmed to his current role and he’s not giving it up without a fight. On May 7th, Marvit filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over what he calls his quote unlawful and unjustified purported termination, which has left a backed up FMS HRC even more shorthanded. The Trump administration’s war on coal miner’s health has become especially pronounced during the president’s second term, Kelly continues. The simplering Trump digs coal image the administration seeks to project is vastly at odds with the actions it’s taken to limit minor protections, endanger their health and exacerbate the black lung crisis consuming Central Appalachia, where one in five veteran minors has black lung and one in 20 has the most severe and totally disabling form of the disease. So to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined once again by friend of the show.

You love her, you know her. She’s the one and only. Kim Kelly herself. Kim, for those who don’t know and have been living under a rock, is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. She is a labor writer for in these times and regularly contributes to many other publications including The Real News Network, he first book, Fight Light Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and the Young Reader’s Edition, Fight to Win. Heroes of American Labor are both available from One Signal Simon & Schuster publishers. Kim, thank you so much for joining us against this. I really, really appreciate it. I want to just kind of jump in and toss it to you. Please pick up where I left off reading from your really important article, which we’ll link to in the show notes, but just break down for folks like what the hell is actually happening here with this little known agency that actually has really important consequences for the lives and health of coal miners and their families.

Kim Kelly:

So here’s the thing, the FMS HRC, I kind of think of it as like talking about a ship named after Hillary, the FMS HRC. A lot of acronyms. I mean, honestly, the acronyms of it all, that kind of plays into the issue here.This is a smaller, respectfully not that sexy little government agency that impacts a very specific group of workers and communities. And it’s being absolutely torn apart as part of this ongoing kind of Trump administration push to deregulate and de- skill and dethrone every possible government employee imaginable that isn’t expressly falling in line with their authoritarian project. I did get to interview someone with very deep knowledge of the agency. Obviously I had to keep their identity to ourselves because there’s only like 30 people left and he was just kind of saying it felt like the thought of someone in Trump world just kind of going down a list of agencies and like it’s their turn.

And this has happened to a lot of other like smaller commissions, boards, OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, their equivalent of this commission they got, got like the NLRB has gotten all types of jacked up.

It feels as if we’re in kind of a new stage of this dismantling. We had the Doge era where it was like really big, bombastic slash and burn Intel’s going through your computer, like lots of press coverage. And then Doge, it was KIA, took about back, shot, done with that. But this ongoing project has not ceased. It’s just become quieter and arguably more insidious because public attention has understandably shifted towards all of the other cataclysms that our country and our government is responsible for right now. But this came across my radar. Of course, we need to shout out Jordan Barab, the worker safety guy. He incredibly experienced runs confined spaces, fantastic publication. He reported on this first and that’s how it came to my attention. And honestly, the thing that stuck out to me besides the fact that it was about coal miners, coal miner safety is kind of my thing, but I recognize that name, Moshe Marvit, because I remember earlier fights to get him confirmed to this arguably pretty atypical, pretty non-controversial agency.

He’s a lawyer, he’s pro- worker, seems like a fairly inoffensive type of guy to end up on this type of agency that essentially deals with civil cases and worker discrimination cases, but he had a hell of a time getting confirmed and I think it is because he’s an outspoken worker advocate who’s written for lefty publications and was very clearly like pro- worker and he was nominated by Biden. It took forever for him to actually get confirmed and now he gets fired out of nowhere and it seems very clear that there is some kind of ideological purging kind of effort behind this and he is fighting back. The reason I wasn’t able to interview him personally, we chatted a bit, but I couldn’t speak to him on the records because he’s suing the government over this. I think Jordan mentioned that this was the first time in I think the 50 years of this agency’s existence that someone had been removed from the commission in this way.

And this commission was created as part of the 1977 Mine Act, which is really mostly one of our, I think, lesser known but more impressive pieces of labor legislation in this country is obviously coal miner specific, but it really did a good job of laying out very specific protections and building up agencies like MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. It’s a good law. It’s a good law. And this is something that obviously the people that run coal mines and make money off of coal mines and get their little clean, greedy fingers all over coal miners paychecks, of course there’s stuff in there that they would prefer not to have to deal with like safety regulations like worker safety laws, like union organizing rights. And something that stuck with me when I was talking to this anonymous worker at the agency, they were saying the fact that there’s three people left, one’s Republican, then there’s two Democrats whose terms end in August.

And with Moshi currently out of the picture, if they lose people, they lose the ability to have a quorum, which essentially means they can’t do anything. And I asked them, “Do you think more people will be confirmed? What do you think will happen?” And they said something that I thought was so interesting and terrible like, “Well, what if the reason that there isn’t a big rush to confirm even Trump loyalists is that they just don’t want to deal with enforcing this law at all What if they’re trying to kind of kill it by a thousand cuts by just chipping away at things?” And I thought that was a really astute and stressful observation to make because this is the thing, right? It’s not all like this onslaught against worker safety and human rights and every other possible decent thing that people are able to derive from this government.

So much of it has been big, bombastic, like big fights, but a lot of it has been happening behind the scenes in these little agencies, these smaller commissions, boards, federal, like places with beige offices that they’re not as exciting, they’re not as photogenic, they’re not going to get headlines necessarily, but they really have a very important role to play. There’s a reason they exist and they have an impact on people’s lives. For example, the FMS HRC, there are coal miners who are waiting for cases to be heard. There’s workers who have filed discrimination complaints over them being discriminated against for calling out safety issues at work. Those are people. There’s civil penalty cases in which MSHA has basically found that a mine is unsafe, that it’s engaging in unsafe practices or violating safety practices. Someone has to do something about that. I know it can be a little like red tapey and bureaucracy and all of this.

It’s a little convoluted reading up on this stuff enough to write a useful article took a little bit of time, but that’s almost kind of part of it, right? Like what they do in the shadows.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that work done in the labor done in the shadows in these government agencies that you’re talking about, it is such a shame that we have so little understanding of that and the media is as culpable for that as anybody, but your average citizen doesn’t understand that and thus can’t see past the word and the hatred for the concept of government bureaucracy. And so when these cuts from Doge or Trump or wherever they are, the firings from Trump, the cuts from Doge, people just see a sort of attack on that bureaucracy, but they’re not seeing the people who are responsible for resolving these disputes and claims that matter a hell of a lot to coal miners who are spending their lives underground and trying not to be taken advantage of for it. They matter to … I interviewed some whistleblowers who were both fired from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year or last year and they were whistleblowers talking about how that agency has effectively become defunct and like the people like them who were lawyers who were responsible for ensuring that like battered women and people in life threatening situations get the housing that they need, that they’re not being exploited by like landlords or anything.

These are real people in life critical circumstances that all of that, like you said, Kim, is now just being sort of hushed and silenced at the same time that the media industry and the whole media ecosystem is going haywire. And so it’s a real crisis, but you are one of, again, those sterling examples of like a committed journalist who has maintained through the chaos a commitment to the coal miners that you report on, the industry, the working conditions in this industry, the environmental conditions. You’ve been doing excellent reporting on the black lung crisis in this country. We connected and worked together here at the Real News for years as you were reporting on the Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama. So with all of that knowledge and firsthand contact with people in the industry, I wanted to ask before I let you go, what state was the coal industry and coal workers in going into the second Trump presidency and how has whatever the hell this administration is doing, like for all it says it loves coal miners, like is it actually helping coal miners?

Is it helping the coal industry? What’s actually happening here?

Kim Kelly:

It’s interesting. I think back to the beginning, I guess of this, not even this one, I think back to like 2020, 21 in the earlier days of these things, and I remember talking to a minor in Alabama who had said, “Just so you know, I’m a Trump guy and he brought coal prices have been super high since he got in. ” And I was like, “Oh, well, have you seen any of that? ” And he’s like, “Well, no ma’am.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And that always plays in the back of my mind when it comes to this reporting because it is I think a true thing that coal industry interests have found the Trump administration to be positive at the very least just in terms of skewing the playing field in their favor and trying to destroy previously approved and funded renewable energy projects.

They’ve been pushing this coal line incredibly strongly against anyone’s conventional wisdom or scientific wisdom, really just like a fool’s errand and that’s endeared them to the industry movers and shakers. But for the workers, it’s been bad. It has not been bad. Wages haven’t gone up. The jobs aren’t coming back. I think we’re down to about probably less at this point. I think last year, the year before, it was about 33,000 coal miners left in the country. If I double check the stats now, I’m sure it’s gone down. And some of the big worker safety wins that coal miners across any political persuasion, because it is not a monolith, it’s not just a whole bunch of white guys voting for Trump. I’ve met plenty of people that do not fit that description and have talked to union representatives for the UAW that are very aware that they have a pretty diverse coalition of, well, not even coalition, just a diverse group of people in their union.

Retirees are one thing, but the younger folks and other generations, you’d be surprised. But a lot of the work that has been doing around these sort of community issues like the black lung crisis, like worker safety, like pensions, like black lung payments out of this fund, the existing black lung benefits fund for workers and former workers who have been diagnosed and disabled by black lung. A lot of that work actually started bearing some fruit during the Biden administration because there weren’t as many roadblocks. The one thing I learned through reporting on agency doings that I hadn’t known that much about before I kind of dove in was how pivotal it is that there is a nominally at least pro- worker or not cartoonishly anti-worker at least a person in the executive chair and then the administration because a lot of the people, especially pre-Trump purges that work in these agencies are just trying to get shit done, but their ability to do so can be either helped or hindered by who’s in charge.

So for example, in 2024, at the very end of the Biden administration, minors and their advocates, because they did the real work, they finally got this new silica exposure rule basically approved. The process is a whole situation, but we’ll just say they got it, right? They got this new rule that was going to limit the amount of silica dust that coal miners could be exposed to during their work days. This is not a new thing since 1974. We’ve known that silica dust is toxic, 20 times more toxic than coal dust. It is the absolute biggest factor driving the uptick in black lung cases and severe black lung cases among coal miners, especially those that are much younger have much less time underground. We’re talking late 20s, 30s, 40s folks dealing with the most severe and debilitating form of this disease. Silica is the biggest reason.

And up until this rule finally got through, coal miners were legally able to be exposed to twice as much silica dust as any other worker in the entire country because silicate is something that exists in a lot of other professions. There’s construction workers, courts countertop workers in California that are dealing with their own silicosis crisis right now, but we know all this workers have been trying to do something about this for a really long time. Finally got to the finish line, 2024. It was supposed to be implemented April 2025. What happened between those two things happening, Trump got elected all of a sudden that rule very specific, very much not something the coal industry wanted to deal with because it required them to follow some more rules and maybe spend a couple more dollars on safety equipment and engineering controls and ate into their profits the tiniest bit.

They didn’t want anything to do with it. And so this rule that took decades of activism and law being organized and by coal miners and public health advocates and everybody who wasn’t a total thickhead were trying to get this through and it kept being delayed, just kicked down. At first, I think it was a three month delay. Then it was like a six month delay. It just kept getting delayed, the implementation and enforcement to the point where the most recent development is that it’s been basically pulled back for more judicial review, further study, more changes for essentially they’re going to make it easier for the coal industry interest to come in and weaken it and just chop it all up.This is something that should not be controversial no matter what values you have. Making it so that fewer people get black lung seems pretty infensive, seems like a decent win even at the point where some of Cold State senators like full on Trump zombies came out earlier during the Doge era when NIOSH and black lung monitoring services were getting slashed up.

They’re like, “Oh, wait, wait, maybe can we keep some of that? ” And the administration pulled back. So all that to say, things have gotten worse. They’ve gotten worse. It’s just as dangerous, if not worse, because there’s this emphasis on coal and this emphasis on trying to open new mines and new coal fired facilities. It’s not going to be good for anyone but the people who have been making money off of these workers, blood, sweat, tears, and lung tissue for centuries now. And it’s really disappointing. We don’t expect anything good to come out of the kind of people that Trump puts in charge of these agencies or Trump himself, but it’s like, what is the constituency for killmore coal miners? Who is asking him and them to make it harder for workers to have safety discrimination cases heard? Who’s voting for that? It’s not like these are big popular … No one’s like, “You know who really deserves a comeup into those fat cats at the FMSHRC.” It’s like, who is this for?

There’s like one cold guy somewhere who’s like, “Yeah,

We got them.” And it’s just unfortunate. And I’ve been reporting this for a long time. This is one of my things I report on. I ended up being that guy. And the one thing that … Well, there’s a lot of things that make me sad, but one thing that makes me sad and frustrated when I share stories on social media like, “Here’s this article I wrote, please clap.” There is always, always some people, some commenters who are like, “Well, they voted for this. ” Well, that’s what they get. Who did they vote for? Who do they vote for? And that has been a recurring theme ever since I first started writing about coal miners, gosh, almost like six, seven years ago. There’s a real lack of empathy and a real sort of spitefulness from some folks who just assume that coal miners are all the same, they’re all the same kind of person, they all voted the same way.

And it’s just disappointing to see because I guarantee you, no one voted to get black lung and lose the ability to breathe or play with their grandkids or their kids. People being sold a bill of goods, I don’t think anybody deserves to die because they voted for someone who lied to them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I wholeheartedly agree. And it’s like the exact same thing I say to people who say those exact same comments when I’m reporting from East Palestine, Ohio or that train derail. They’re like, “Well, they voted for that. They deserve it. ” I was like, “Are you kidding me? Do you see what they’re going through?” How could you say that on a video that is showing you that they’re dying? Have we lost so much of our humanity that we can’t even empathize with each other on that basic level? And again, I could talk to you about this for days, but I know I got to let you go. And I want to underscore for people that that is why Kim’s work is so important and why we work so well together with Kim here at the Real News is because if you’re not tending to that human stuff, then you’re not actually interested in the truth, right?

You’re interested in an argument about the truth and how you can twist the truth into something else for your own purpose. We are reporters who care about human beings. So we go out and get the truth wherever it lives in the complex lives of complex people, like the ones that Kim is talking about. And Kim, with just a two-minute maybe wrap up, I wanted to end on that note, not asking you to speak for anyone or any group of people, but just any points you want to impress upon people who are thinking that way, especially in an election year. Well, they voted for that. Why should I care about that? What do you want them to know about what black lung actually does to your body? What do you want them to know about what it’s actually like to work in a coal mine or live in a coal mining community?

Just anything you want to leave folks with before we let you go and wrap up.

Kim Kelly:

So years ago, I made friends with a retired coal miner named Danny Witt and he got diagnosed with black lung in 1988, that’s the year I was born. So for my entire life, his lungs have been struggling to function. He’s had a hard time walking. He had to stop doing a job that he works to care for his family and put food on the table and he kind of got off easy in a way, which is a wild way to frame it. But Danny’s lungs are full of coal dust. I’ve met people my age, I’m 38. I’ve met people my age and a little bit younger who have lungs full of silica and they can’t breathe on their own. They can’t really walk anymore. If you’ve seen photos of what a lung with black lung coal miners pneumoconiosis, it’s government name, it literally turns black.

There’s a man named John Moore, a black father of three in West Virginia who he wasn’t even a career coal miner. He picked up some shifts while he was doing other stuff. He had a wig shop, he does events now. He was all over the place. He was hustling and he’s dying and he’s 42 and I don’t think he deserves that. I don’t think he voted for Trump, but he might have. I didn’t ask. I asked what he was doing to take care of himself and how his daughters were coping. And I think there is so much humanity that is missed when we give into these kind of divisions and this manufactured tribalism. I know there’s people that I report on that probably think I am just the worst godless calmy piece of trash. And you know what? Join the club. I’ve been online for a long time.

Not everybody has to … You don’t have to like me. I still don’t think you need to choke to death. I might wonder why does some tattooed broad from Jersey going down to Alabama all the time talking to coal miners? Well, because they remind me of my dad. He works in construction. He has terrible political opinions, but there’s a lot of things we do agree on and I’ve been able to move him a little bit towards the way to seeing the world I see it. Not that it’s the right way, but it makes sense to me. I think we need to give each other a little bit more grace. And it is easy for me to say that I’m a whitebroad from Jersey. There’s a lot of structural things. There’s a lot of racist things. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t have to think about that other folks have to think about because of who they are Or how they’re born, where they’re from, how they identify.

And I understand why some people would be like, “Well, I don’t have any sympathy for these people. Why would I care? They don’t think that I deserve to exist.” And that’s fair. You’re allowed to think that. I get why you would. I would just ask if you have the time to think about it a little bit, maybe nobody should suffer. Maybe there’s some things we can sort out after the revolution. If we just have to ensure that enough of us make it there to have time to sit down and have those conversations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the indomitable Kim Kelly, freelance journalist and labor writer. Go find Kim’s book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and follow more of her writing using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network across all our different platforms. And we’re doing grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real news newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.