Chris Smalls. Photo: Kennedi Carter
On a spring evening last month in Manhattan, Beyonce was getting dressed for a big night out, donning an outfit with an estimated total value of $50m.
Elsewhere in the Big Apple, Indian businesswoman Isha Ambani was getting herself ready – in an outfit spun from pure gold and estimated to be worth more than the entire event that both these A-listers were attending.
The event was, of course, the famously opulent Met Gala – co-hosted this year by billionaire Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos.
Chris Smalls was also in Manhattan, getting ready. But not to attend the Met Gala – to crash it, in a high-profile direct-action protest against Bezos and Amazon, his one-time employer.
Smalls wanted to disrupt the gala to draw attention to the fact that Bezos runs what is now a $2.6 trillion company – and has a personal net worth of $250bn-plus – but refuses to negotiate basic rights with its warehouse workers, who make as little as $18 per hour. He also wanted to point out that Bezos and Amazon continue to invest in, and profit from, Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
Smalls, as a former Amazon warehouse supervisor, had already gone toe-to-toe with Jeff Bezos and won. He made history doing something that, until the moment it happened, seemed entirely impossible: on 1 April 2022, by forming the first ever Amazon Labor Union, he won a yearslong battle for workers’ rights against the second largest employer in the US and one of the most powerful corporations in history, leading Time magazine to name him one of 2022’s most influential people.
So when it was announced that Bezos would co-host this year’s Met Gala – which, with its unapologetic flaunting of wealth, is a perfect example of the growing divide between the billionaire class and the rest of us – it seemed like a perfect opportunity for Smalls to stand up to Bezos once again.
@trtworld “Billionaires shouldn’t exist, billionaires they’ve got to go” A video statement by former Amazon worker and labor organizer Chris Smalls ... See more
“Hey Jeff, remember me?” the 50-foot version of Smalls said, projected on to the side of Bezos’s apartment building as part of a protest against the gala.
At the same time, the flesh-and-blood version of Smalls was busy carrying out a disruptive and headline-grabbing protest: he was preparing to crash the Met Gala itself and confront Bezos face-to-face.
During the Met Gala, all surrounding streets are blocked off to mere mortals, so a taxi couldn’t get anywhere near the venue. Smalls knew that. So he hired a big black car, the kind celebrities travel in. They drove around the block a few times to see how close they could get, and then Smalls decided it was now or never.
“I thought to myself, I'm just going to have to jump out and do what I can,” he tells me.
New York police detain protestor Chris Smalls at the Met Gala, 4 May 2026, New York. Photo: Michael Buckner/ Getty
Smalls was violently arrested and police intentionally delayed processing him, Smalls says, leaving him in a cell for 24 hours.
But he wasn’t fazed. “We stole the headlines.”
And he did.
Smalls first began taking on Bezos’s empire when, as an employee in an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York, he witnessed firsthand how the company was endangering workers amid the early days – and explosive spread – of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He was a highly respected warehouse manager at Amazon, with the company praising his productivity and contribution to the company, and even assigning new managers to shadow him to learn best practice. But despite his documented success, he explains in his new book, When the Revolution Comes, he was flagged early on as someone who should be held back from promotion.
His official employee record, which he obtained after he was fired from Amazon and then successfully unionised its workers, includes this comment: “Christian is a productive employee. But we’re concerned that if promoted, he will side with workers over management.”
Bezos tried everything to shut Smalls down. The company retaliated against him for speaking up, then fired him, then ran an organised smear campaign against him, which, Smalls’s book says, involved buying Super Bowl ads to counter his message, hiring consultants to discredit him, apparently hiring private investigators, and even starting an entirely false rumour that Smalls drove a $300,000 car. It’s also worth noting that, before Smalls was fired for organising a walkout to protest against Amazon’s lack of safety measures against Covid-19, the company sent him home for – of all things – violating its Covid-19 social distancing protocols. But Bezos and Amazon entirely underestimated who they were dealing with.
I know how hard it is to make it in this world when you don’t have money. But I don’t buy into the idea that because you’re poor, you’re worth less
As someone who grew up with working-class parents who were, and remain, deeply committed to the labour movement, I’ve admired Small from afar for many years. We sat down together – virtually, him in the US and me in London – on a Saturday afternoon to talk about When The Revolution Comes, a memoir not only of Smalls’s journey taking on Amazon but also of his personal story, his childhood, and the many lives he lived before becoming an icon of the labour movement. Smalls is incredibly warm, kind and has one of those auras – evident even via video screen – that makes you feel instantly relaxed.
Smalls’s protest against Amazon began with his observations about how brazenly the company was endangering its workers at the beginning of the pandemic. He watched as those he managed – people he describes as extended family – were exposed to a deadly virus, tasked with packaging and delivering personal protective equipment to the world but not being provided with any for themselves.
But Smalls’s campaign against Amazon quickly became bigger than Covid. He saw, firsthand, how the company was exploiting workers, endangering them by forcing them to work in unsafe conditions, coming after workers – himself – for stealing two minutes of company time. Ultimately, he would see what he describes in his book as a business which aimed to “make as much money as you can off people’s labour while paying the labourers as little as possible”. In the same passage, he draws parallels with slavery: “The first revenue model in America was production with stolen land and stolen labour. The slave trade, taking place on plantations that had been gained in the genocide of Native Americans, created extreme wealth for a select few people.”
Chris Smalls addresses a press conference on the Freedom Flotilla ship ‘Handala’ ahead of the boat's departure for Gaza at a port in Syracuse, Sicily, southern Italy, on 13 July 2025. Photo: Giovanni Isolino/AFP
Becoming a labour organiser wasn’t always Smalls’s plan: “I never thought of becoming a union organiser as a kid, and for good reason – the history of the workers’ movement isn’t taught in schools.
“If you told me, as a kid, that I could look like this, look as cool as a rapper, and be a union organiser, I would have started doing it a long time ago,” he laughs. When Smalls says he looks as cool as a rapper, he means it – his outfit, his layered gold necklaces, his nose ring, his gold grills, his braids. He also is a rapper – but more on that later.
Smalls didn’t have an easy childhood. He was raised by a single mother in New Jersey because his father was in and out of prison for much of his life – for various offences, with Smalls describing him as “a stickup man”. He faced bullying and racism, and had to start working young. He shovelled snow, he worked at the big US retailer Target – where, while moving shopping carts across the parking lot, he was seriously injured when a white couple in a Mercedes hit him with their car. They stopped, got out of the car, saw Smalls writhing on the floor, and drove away. He was not yet 18.
“I've been at rock bottom in my life plenty of times,” Smalls tells me. “Growing up as a black man in the United States, facing trials and tribulations, facing discrimination, facing failure.
“And what you learn is that when you hit rock bottom in the US, there's nobody coming to save you,” Smalls said. “When I reflect back, I think about every time I have been knocked down in my life and how I was able to get back up – I didn't give up, I didn't give in.
There’s a saying in church that you come to church as you are. They don't care about what you're wearing. They care about your beliefs
“The government is not gonna wake up and save you,” Smalls continues. “Billionaires are not gonna wake up and save you. So our liberation is through fighting together, like our ancestors did.”
When he was younger, Smalls was a successful rapper. He had a promising music career, was friends with A$AP Rocky, and toured with Meek Mill. He was also a promising track athlete.
“When I was making music, 2008, 2009, social media was nowhere near where it is now. So in order for me to get people to come to my shows, I had to talk to people face to face. The local malls, mom-and-pop stores. That's where I would go to meet people every weekend, hand out my flyer to my shows,” Smalls says.
“That same skill-set that carried over when I was organizing Amazon workers. I was meeting people at the bus stop, having not one but several conversations over a long period of time. I brought my little music speaker out there pretty much every day, playing music for the people to uplift their spirits,” he remembers.
This is a running theme in our interview – that one of Smalls’s superpowers is his understanding that real change happens through human connection, through the power of community, in a world where the powerful profit most when they make us feel the most alone.
“I know how hard it is to make it in this world when you don’t have money; I see how everything is stacked up against you. But I don’t buy into the idea that because you’re poor, you’re worth less,” Smalls writes in his book. “That means I’m always going to be a nightmare for people with money and power who want to get away with abusing workers.”
Chris Smalls, founder and president of the Amazon Labor Union, centre, celebrates with workers following their vote to unionize, 1 April 2022, in Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Yana Paskova/For The Washington Post via Getty
And the feeling, on that April day four years ago, when they achieved their goal of certifying a union, when they succeeded in what will go down in history as one of the most successful union votes of all time?
“Next to my kid’s birth, that was the best feeling of my life,” he tells me. “We’d put so much blood, and tears into a campaign, taking on a $2.2tn dollar company. So when we were victorious that day … we cried like babies. Tears of happiness, of joy.”
Smalls lives rent-free in Amazon’s head. This became clear when Vice revealed that, before his union win, the company’s general counsel had penned a handwritten memo after a meeting attended by Bezos setting out a strategy to encourage people to see Smalls as the face of the Amazon labour movement – because “he is not smart, not articulate”.
“He was trying to project the idea that black and brown people are not smart or articulate,” Smalls said. “He wanted to make me the face of the movement because I look like what he would call a ‘thug’.”
But Smalls wasn’t fazed. In fact, he used it to motivate himself. “People look at me and write me off, but I’ve managed to manoeuvre through that – eventually people realise, whatever he looks like, he’s standing on business.”
Smalls describes the moment his lawyer emailed him the memo.
“I took that moment and said, you know what, fuck it. They're gonna come for me? I'm gonna give them what they want.”
“They wanna make me the face of the whole movement? That's a great idea.”
Smalls reflects, both in his book and in our conversation, about moments when he may have considered changing his appearance to “look the part”. But of course, as you will have sensed by now, this is not something that someone like Chris Smalls would ever entertain for very long.
“There’s a saying in church,” he tells me, “that you come to church as you are.
“No matter which god you believe in, no matter who you believe in, they don't care about what you're wearing. They care about your beliefs.”
“So that's the type of approach that I have: it doesn't matter what I look like, it doesn't matter how I talk. It doesn't matter how much gold I may have on” – he pauses to chuckle, “it’s not real gold obviously!” – “and no matter what I'm wearing, or how I dress, you shouldn't worry about any of that. You should always worry about the message that I'm delivering.”
Last year, Smalls was also violently arrested and detained by the Israel Defense Forces when he sailed on the aid ship Handala in July 2025 in an attempt to get food and aid to Gaza. He was locked in a cell for five days without any connection to the outside world, having no way of knowing what had become of his fellow prisoners. He was on a hunger strike, he was starving, he had no idea if or when he’d make it out.
After five days, he was pulled from his cell. “I was in the back of a van, travelling for an hour and a half, not knowing where we were going. And then I started seeing the desert and I thought: ‘That’s it. They’re going to kill me and leave me out here.’”
This was a realistic assumption on Smalls’s part. The Israeli army had killed 10 pro-Palestinian activists aboard a similar freedom flotilla bound for Gaza in 2010.
“But then they just let me go. They said we were at the border of Jordan. I didn’t believe they were letting me go as I walked away – and that was another way of them making it as psychologically difficult as possible,” he says. “It was psychological warfare.”
Smalls has been a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause for years. He tells me that he joined the Gaza humanitarian mission to “connect those dots that Amazon is invested in genocide”. He says he also boarded the Handala because he wanted to make the point that the struggles of oppressed peoples are intrinsically linked.
“We're trade unionists and our responsibility as trade unionists is to the entire working class, and that includes Palestinians,” he said. “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Once again, as he says this, it’s Smalls’s pure conviction and drive that strikes me most. He refuses to be beaten down, in body or in spirit. He believes fully in the fairer world he is creating and he is unflappable in his commitment to it.
As he writes in his book: “I know I’m dreaming about things that sound impossible. But you should know by now that when the revolution comes, it comes disguised as an impossible dream.”
When the Revolution Comes will published by Viking on 25 June