When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class

Activist Smalls debuts with a forthright memoir that details his role in founding the Amazon Labor Union. In no-frills prose, Smalls recalls his bumpy upbringing in late 1990s Hackensack, N.J., during which his father was in and out of prison and a schoolyard confrontation ended with Smalls sending a bully to the hospital. After a string of thankless jobs, Smalls took a gig at a brand-new Amazon warehouse in Connecticut in 2015, where supervisors dangled the promise of rapid advancement. In Smalls’s first two years on the job, however, he was never promoted, and the quotas he was expected to meet increased rapidly. Eventually, he was fired for two minutes of “time theft.” He eventually returned to work at Amazon, but tensions between Smalls and management came to a head early in the Covid pandemic, when he staged a walkout with a friend at their Staten Island warehouse. He then spearheaded a unionization effort, which, despite the millions of dollars Amazon spent in antiunion advertising, became the first successful Amazon unionization effort in early 2022. Smalls’s plainspoken narrative leans more toward personal history than political rallying cry, but it offers a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of American labor organizing. It’s an inspiring self-portrait. Agent: Jen Marshall, Aevitas Creative Management. (June)