When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class
When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class, an autobiography by Chris Smalls (New York: Pantheon Books, 2026)
Reviewed by Steven Packard
In March 2020, Jeff Bezos got a memorandum from Amazon’s General Counsel David Zapolsky advising that a troublesome warehouse employee should be discredited as “not smart or articulate”. That employee, Chris Smalls, wrote this smart and articulate book, an engaging autobiography of growing up in New Jersey with a single mother, a half-brother, and a father who was doing time more often than he wasn’t. A world of getting by, part-time jobs, and the detour of not quite realizing the dream of becoming a rap musician. (At age nineteen, Chris enrolled at the Institute of Audio Research after hearing early-morning radio ads, “I guess they figured if you’re listening to Hot 97 at 3:30 A.M., you probably have some questions about what to do with your life.”)
The jacket portrait exudes a self-confident energy that carries through in his writing, a voice that’s direct, unembellished, sometimes electric, and grounded in the lived experience he relates.
The exigencies of marriage and raising a family led Smalls to a series of jobs at Walmart and Home Depot, among others, until 2015 when he read that Amazon was opening a new warehouse in New Jersey and was attracted by the employee benefits. (A beautiful cafeteria, for instance, where, as he learned to his chagrin, prices send employees to the fast-food franchise across the street.)
After promotions and transfers (plus getting fired and reinstated), Smalls was working as an assistant manager at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse (JFK8) when COVID-19 hit in March 2020. Concerned that an ill employee was allowed to come to work and no action was being taken by HR, Smalls and a fellow employee organized a walkout on 30 March 2020. That same day he was fired by Amazon.
From there, Smalls’s narrative shifts from personal crisis to organizational improvisation, and we read his account of the efforts involved in organizing Amazon’s first union, originally The Congress of Essential Workers (TCOEW) which was reorganized as the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), even as he fought in court to be reinstated. His is not an objective history, but a genuine first-person account of his own involvement. Encountering a dissident faction within the ranks, Smalls offers a cogent and intelligent defense of his position. In 2024, the ALU voted to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to take advantage of its financial resources, with an agreement that the ALU would maintain its independence.
What’s important here, in my opinion, is the clarity of Smalls’s analysis of the success at JFK8 and why attempts at other Amazon warehouses had failed, and he builds this into a brisk, sharply reasoned argument that workplace power is the proving ground for larger political change. The book makes a valuable argument that workplace power – built at the specific site and controlled by workers – doesn’t merely win concessions, it trains and legitimizes a political force capable of expanding beyond one worksite. Attempts to organize at other Amazon warehouses, in contrast, fell short in large part because of the lack of site-based leadership. That insight sets up the book’s closing chapters, where Smalls broadens his focus from the particulars of Amazon to the larger question of how worker-led power might function in the 21st Century.
While Chris admits he came late to an understanding of labor history in the U.S., his background and experience gave him a remarkable perception of the relationship between boss and employee, wealth and politics. His book offers a fresh look at breaking through the moribundity of traditional labor unions in recent years and the way forward. Smalls ends with a blunt claim: that durable political power in the 21st Century will come only from workers who have already learned to exercise authority where they work. JFK8 succeeded because leadership was built at the site; other campaigns faltered because they weren’t. His closing chapters are clear and unsentimental, arguing that the workplace remains the proving ground for any movement that hopes to matter beyond its own walls. It’s a sharp conclusion to a book that insists the fight for broader political change still begins on the shop floor.
Reviewed by Steven Packard, a dramatist, photographer, and a translator currently living in his library on a hill in suburban Saint Louis. His plays include In with Alma, Prime Time Ago, and Amber Waves, adapted from the Russian-language Cherry Orchard. He is a member of Actors’ Equity Association and the Dramatists Guild of America.