a woman's place is on the picket line

an exclusive interview with the women behind UNION (2024)

On July 20, 2021, the richest man on the planet flew his self-funded phallus to the “edge of space:” he would prefer we call it the Blue Origin New Shepherd rocket. On the same day that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took a joyride into the stratosphere, a small quorum of workers at a Staten Island Warehouse formally began the Amazon Labor Union. That day, then-unknowns Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Jordan Flowers, and Gerald Bryson began setting up a tent on the public sidewalk across from the JFK8 Warehouse, and there began the historic win and the media firestorm that the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) would become.

You remember this, don’t you—from your timelines and For You pages? Wasn’t there some big, Sundance-Fest-adored documentary about the whole thing? And hasn’t news on the development of the ALU gone a little...silent, for your taste? 

Yes, yes, and yes. Unfortunately, you may not have seen UNION (2024) yet for a billion-dollar reason. 

Despite thunderous applause at Sundance and an Academy Award shortlist, the documentary was not picked up by any distribution company—due, of course, to their business relationships with Amazon. Instead, the team behind UNION (2024) opted for a self-release, a summer streaming spot on PBS, and a screener offer in my inbox. (Hell yeah.) Having recently eased into a union job after a few years without protection, I couldn’t have been more excited to turn on my union brain to probe deeper into what makes the ALU so captivating. 

So I began where I always do: With women. Despite Smalls being the household name in this union fight, I wanted to explore the ways gender dynamics shaped and warped the process of the ALU campaign. Being a veteran of a nearly-all-women union, I know intimately how the unpaid work of labor organizing often falls to those already used to performing care work without compensation: parents, women, younger folks, you name it. Through my conversations with Director Brett Story and former ALU organizer Natalie Monarrez, as well as quotes from ALU organizers Angelika Maldonado and Chris Smalls, I came to understand gender to be equal parts opportunity and strife in the fight for a union at JFK8. Where some women experienced paternalism and disrespect in ALU, others found camaraderie, care, and opportunity to bloom in organizing on behalf of their fellow workers. 

Director Brett Story encourages viewers not to shy away from the contradictions within UNION (2024), just as I encourage you to hold multiple truths when going behind-the-scenes of organizing JFK8. “It relates to questions that many of us are continuing to ask to this day,” she says of her film. “About how to have and find power that is capable of challenging structures that can, at times, feel totalizing, and completely at odds with the wants, and desires, and needs of real people.” 

This film is not a hunky-dory union movie. UNION (2024) is a real-ass labor film, showing all of the joy, and hardship, and togetherness, and division which happens during a union campaign. We can only expect firecrackers from an organizing team capable of a labor-movement-shaking victory as that of the JFK8 Amazon Labor Union fight.

THIS UNION IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS

I first heard of Chris Smalls, Amazon organizing, and the later-named ALU while bargaining my staff union’s first Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). Being a social media worker at the time, I also helped run my union’s Twitter account, meaning it was my responsibility to stay abreast of any and all labor news. Beginning in 2021, the face, name, and lore of Chris Smalls continually made its way across my timeline—first through New York Times articles¹ and More Perfect Union Instagram posts. 

It started just with Smalls, but after following the story for a bit, any Amazon labor news got a retweet out of me. ALU was new, it was scrappy, and it was inspiring for the burnt-out nonprofit workers among me: racing to secure the waning unit spots under national unions. The post-lockdown rush to secure basics like Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) raises, Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) and COVID-test access, paid sick leave, and guaranteed remote work drove many workers to unionization. Even those typically unassociated with the labor movement, like small nonprofits, strip clubs, or Congress, tried to unionize. But unionizing at Amazon—the largest company in the world, owned by the richest man in the world—would be a newer, more uphill battle for workers like Smalls. UNION (2024) Director, Brett Story, told me that’s exactly what drove her to follow the ALU campaign.

“What was interesting for us was the opportunity to think about: What should a union look like in this moment of the globalized economy?” Story shared with me. “There's a particular union structure that can work when you've got lifers: people who are doing the job that they saw their dad do, their grandfather do, and they're being told that it's a job for life. Many of them are spending decades in that job.” Unions for coal miners, auto manufacturers, or teachers have longer histories in the United States, often associated with 20th-century communist organizing, “The Mob,” and top-down union structures involving an International, a National, a Local, then a Unit. 

 “That's very different from a place like Amazon,” said Story, “which deliberately recruits people on the promise that they're not there to stay.”

The ALU first stood out for its lack of membership to a Local or National Union, as most unions in the United States do (think: Teamsters, SEIU, SAG-AFTRA). But Smalls and the organizing team at JFK8 knew Amazon to be a beast beyond the understanding of the big, national unions they met with.²

Story is understanding of this. “When workers say, ‘Oh, I don't need to form a union. I certainly don't need to listen to some old geezer from a union that represents a different kind of worker, a different kind of workplace’? It’s cause they can't relate to it.” She hoped for UNION (2024) to capture a different kind of organizing story: not one with a solitary hero or a white-knight Local, but one getting to the truth of organizing a new kind of shop.³

“It was very important that these organizers came, first and foremost, from the shop floor,” Story shared with me, “and intimately understood what this work environment is like, and therefore, what people's grievances would be.” While some of said issues are like any other workplace—exploitation, low wages, long hours, racism, sexism, the works—ALU organizers were dealing with a different level of pain from their comrades. 

Speaking with organizing team member Natalie Monarrez, a warehouse worker at JFK8, shed more light on the load taken on by the organizers:

“We were dealing with nonstop melodrama happening inside and outside of the building, because that's just the nature of Amazon,” Monarrez told me over Google Meet. “The atmosphere is so extreme in regards to discrimination, and harassment, and even physical injuries and safety hazards.” She spoke of heavy lifting for 12 hours per day and minimal breaks, especially during prime and peak seasons. “People get hurt, people have died.”

It was this environment which drove Monarrez—underpaid, overworked, and living out of her SUV in the JFK8 parking lot—to join Smalls, Connor Spence, and Derrick Palmer in the young ALU. “I noticed the blue canopy up across the street from the JFK8 building in April of 2021. I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”

Director Brett Story sees the organic development of ALU, including Natalie’s joining, as a strength. “It's crucial that it was Black- and Brown-led, and worker-led,” Story said. “It was not an outside union coming in and saying, ‘Here's a model we're gonna apply to this work for this workplace.’ This is a group of workers saying, ‘We're gonna figure out a new path based on what we know about this working environment.’” 

Where labor films like Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983) drove a younger Monarrez to want to make workers’ lives better, Story’s UNION (2024) hopes to coax a new generation into joining the picket line.

UNION AS MATRIARCHY

The timing behind ALU’s organizing is central to its story, because the unionization effort at Amazon began smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. While scared people across the world turned to Amazon for quick-shipped hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and KN95s, the workers supplying these essentials were increasingly treated as subhuman by their employer. Natalie Monarrez was on the “skeleton crew” created by Amazon in 2020 and 2021, or the small quorum of essential workers who risked their lives to work 60-hour-weeks through the U.S. lockdown period. 

“Everybody was so sick that we were literally passing out at work, having trouble breathing, having trouble walking up the stairs, gasping for air,” she told me. “And at the same time, trying to work as hard as we could because we knew the world needed the masks and the gloves and the cleaning pods.” 

Despite attempting to muscle through, Monarrez couldn’t shake the constant death which surrounded JFK8. “You're working so hard—10 or 12 hours a day—literally killing yourself and getting sick, and watching your coworkers dropping and fainting and getting sick. They're coming into work every day saying that their family members have just died the night before, their neighbors have just died the day before. They're finding out classmates just died the day before. Very suddenly, people were going to sleep and not waking up.”

Coworkers tried to support each other, but the Amazon corporation—ever fearful of litigation—met COVID-19 with more work intensity, fewer resources, and siloing workers. Despite filling PPE orders for the rest of the world, the workers supplying them didn’t have the bare necessities needed to stay healthy. “I had actually gone to HR multiple times to ask them for the N95 masks, because I knew they had them. Some of the managers saw people wearing them at the front of the warehouse,” Monarrez told me. “They told me no, even after I asked for some senior citizens that had medical conditions, and they said they have to get a doctor's note. At that time, nobody was open. The doctors in Staten Island were not taking patients in. That's when I realized, oh man, we are really expendable. They really don't care if we live or die.” 

By late March of 2020, then-JFK8 warehouse worker Chris Smalls was organizing fellow workers to protest for PPE access and hazard pay. It was barely two weeks into our state of national emergency in the U.S., and Smalls led more than 60 JFK8 workers in a walkout following several coworkers contracting COVID-19. By that following Monday, Smalls was fired for his role in organizing the walkout. Director Brett Story saw this as evidence of Amazon’s worker-disposability mindset:

“Chris led a walkout, then was fired from the company he had been at for five years,” she said to me. “He had tried to be manager multiple times, and the company said over and over and over again: ‘You're just another Black working class man. You have no value to us. We don't care about you. We'll fire you in a minute.’” 

Amazon, according to Monarrez and Story, clearly hoped that Smalls’ firing would quash any remaining organizing. “The managers remind you every minute of every day that you could be fired any moment,” Monarrez said. They clearly hoped this chilling effect would go beyond JFK8, too, considering the high-profile unionization effort brewing at in Bessemer, Alabama. 

By 2021, the Bessemer Amazon Warehouse workers put the union to a vote, and Story had already started following Smalls, Bessemer, and the prospect of an Amazon union. “All eyes were on it, all the politicians were there,” she told me. “It was like, finally! Someone's gonna unionize Amazon! But unfortunately, that resulted in defeat.” Story, Smalls, and Monarrez each circled the Bessemer aftermath, sensing a mission formulating. 

“I had heard rumors that Derek and Chris had gone [to the Bessemer Warehouse] to check out what they were doing,” Monarrez told me. She was right; according to Story, “Chris and a small handful of [JFK8] colleagues⁴—that were then being called the Congress of Essential Workers (COEW)—decided to start their own unionization effort.” That’s when Story determined the parameters for her film, and found the beating heart underneath it: the motivated, exhausted people who gave their non-working hours to fight for the humanity of their fellow Amazon workers.

“There's something very unique about the kind of alienation that happens through automation and an Amazon workplace,” she told me. “A high turnover rate is built into the company's business model, and it is also part of the union-busting that the company does. It says, ‘This isn't your career. This isn't your identity.’” In the process, per Story, a worker like Smalls or Monarrez is actively dehumanized—given minimal breaks, few promotions, and an arguably violent work environment. The ALU, from Smalls’ first protest, has been a reassertion of that humanity. 

In UNION (2024), I found the ALU to operate less like the Russian-nesting-doll of your typical trade union, and more like one of the oldest power structures: matriarchy. I borrow from writer and activist Nergiz deBaere when I liken the ALU to a cyclone, spiraling through the Millennial-grey, top-down structures of the Amazon corporation. At ALU’s center? The most vulnerable: the single parents, the food insecure, the COVID-sick, the homeless, the disabled, the young, the immunocompromised. 

C/O Nergiz deBaere & Chix Magazine.

Where Amazon forced its workers to survive on Kraft Mac n’ Cheese cups and defunct Tylenol, Smalls and his friends at the ALU tent offered baked ziti. Pizza. Free weed for Christmas, at one point. Monarrez told me that Smalls was grilling up some burgers and dogs when she decided to join the ALU:

“I was physically assaulted in the warehouse [that day] because I had to use the ladies room, and I had a male supervisor literally physically push me back from the ladies room, saying that I wasn't allowed to go after already [working] for six hours,” she said. “That was the breaking point. That's when I literally walked out of the building, badged out, walked right across the street to the guys.” Monarrez was introduced to Smalls, as well as organizers Derrick Palmer and Connor Spence, and offered her skills to help with the campaign.

“When I first met them, Connor and Derrick both said at the same time, ‘Great! We really need one woman!’” She told me. “And I started laughing, I said: ‘No, women.’ From that point forward, Monarrez grabbed a stack of brochures, marched back inside, and dedicated herself to organizing the diverse workplace of JFK8 for the next year. With a background in worker’s compensation and a level of comfortability with other women workers, she knew she could provide vital support and care to the most vulnerable. She thought of those who needed to file HR claims, who didn’t speak English, who were pregnant or parenting, who were recent immigrants, or who didn’t have family support close to them. 

“I wanted to stand up for the women workers, especially,” she shared with me. “After spending a lifetime of dealing with discrimination, and retaliation, and sexism, harassment, all of it... I had gotten really fed up. It was time to take some action.” 

As ALU grew, however, Monarrez was far from the only woman involved. Angelika Maldonado, a night-shift worker and single mother, joined the union effort one day after a grueling twelve-hour shift. According to Director Brett Story, “She passed by that tent a dozen times before she sat down and said, ‘Okay, what are you guys really up to?’” That fateful interaction grew previously-shy Maldonado into the labor leader ALU needed. “She just really bloomed,” Story said of Maldonado, affectionately referring to her as Angie. “This is because of the support of her comrades, who told her and reminded her that she's smart, and strong, and capable, and can start a movement and win.” 

The stories of Maldonado and Monarrez’ involvement in the ALU illuminate something genius about their organizing. By centering the basics—food, warmth, and connection—otherwise-dehumanized warehouse workers are given a space where their badge-in time isn’t tracked, their bathroom breaks aren’t revoked, and they can’t be fired at a moment’s notice. The ALU tent represented a place where even the vulnerable can be fully human. 

“I noticed that, each month that went by, we were adding more and more chairs to the area around the canopy—especially when it got colder,” Monarrez said to me. “We started having little campfires at night, and more and more people were gathering around and just wanting to talk about issues at work, how we could make things better.” 

Director Story knew how important the tent was to the story (ha-ha!) she was telling, because it provided a physical space for connection on an Amazon campus—a place intended to be anything but. “These are glimpses into the first lesson of organizing, which is that we are indivisible from each other.”

ORGANIZING AS CARE WORK

Viewing the ALU within a matriarchal structure opened me up to seeing UNION (2024) as a documentary about more than unionizing an Amazon warehouse. Through the scenes of Zoom rooms and campfires, I saw the organizers of JFK8 to engage in true care work⁵—from deBaere’s framework, the ALU demonstrated consistent community, reciprocity, gift economy, and the centering of mothers.

Director Brett Story, a new parent herself, is particularly proud of this aspect of the ALU journey. “There's a lot of mothers in our film,” she tells me excitedly. “There's a lot of men that are raised by single mothers. Chris was raised by a single mother!” Story sees this as evidence of the care work necessary to create and sustain a union; “Caring is work, and keeping each other alive is a practice—and women are really well trained in it!”

As the first woman to join ALU, Natalie Monarrez took on the challenge of caring for her many colleagues. “Every day I was helping people file work comp claims, sign up for state disability if they had a personal injury outside of work,” Monarrez said. “Unfortunately for the HR department, they got used to seeing me almost every day.” She laughed loudly here: “Walking in there, they would say, ‘You need to leave. Go.’ And I'd say, ‘No, I have an issue. I need it addressed, and I'm not leaving until we address it.’”

Monarrez credits her energy for this kind of work to her life experience, being twice the age of most of her coworkers and fellow organizers. “I immediately took on an aunt or a motherly type of role with all of them,” she tells me. “I felt like it was my job to protect them, whatever they were going through.”

This protective energy reciprocated throughout the ranks of the ALU, a result of the culture of care developed by early organizers like Smalls and Monarrez. Story was taken with the true recognition of each others’ experiences and feelings as she delved deeper into the filming of UNION (2024): 

“Sitting in on some of those early Zoom meetings, [I saw] people just show up and say, ‘I heard about this, I don't know what's going on here, but this thing just happened at me at work and I don't know what to do.’ Then hearing Chris or hearing Derrick say, ‘I got you. I've been on that shift. I know what that's like. You came to the right place.’” She smiled as she told me this: “This is about how, in the organizing space, people feel valued; people are producing for each other, reminding each other that we have value, and that we make value. Not just for the company, but for each other.”

In UNION (2024), moments of intense organizing are juxtaposed with corporate stagnance. A cargo ship foghorns lazily. An empty room full of Amazon bots sort bubble-mailers. A company bus breezes by. The genius of these moments is their loneliness. Where ALU is warm and energetic, these cut scenes—often interspersed with deeply depressing statistics regarding Amazon’s exploitation of their warehouse workers—inspire an uncanny-valley-chill inside the viewer. While those of us who haven’t worked at Amazon or any equivalent job may never fully understand the dehumanization of the worker, UNION is a valiant effort in helping Amazon customers to understand the desolation inside its warehouses.

About halfway into the documentary, ALU organizers were able to use projectors for an action outside the JFK8 warehouse. This is the point where I broke down crying, and the below photos will demonstrate to you why better than my words could:

Amazon tries to force their workers into silence, submission, and exploitation. ALU met that by reasserting the inherent value—unrelated to one’s labor—and dignity in every warehouse worker. Story told me this is exactly what she loves about union organizing: “I feel it in my own life, when you meet other people that understand your desire for a better world, and are there to tell you, ‘You are capable of something more than what the powers that be tell you you're capable or not capable of.’”

The problem with union organizing, however, is that it requires risk—especially for those who are the most visible or vocal within an organizing team. Chris Smalls became a household name after his firing, which only accelerated as the JFK8 campaign became more public. Members of the new union (including Smalls) often disagreed on how best to wield that celebrity, but Monarrez always put Smalls’ safety first.

“Especially after meeting his family, and seeing the way his kids interacted with him, and seeing his mother stepping up, and knowing that she had always been very protective of him...” She shook her head as she continued: “I always wanted him to do well, but more so, I wanted him and everybody else in our group to be safe.” 

Such differences in approach bred the moments of conflict in UNION, which would typically involve Monarrez at odds with Smalls, Spence, or one of the salts.⁶ These moments reveal where care work and strategic organizing are forced to diverge over the course of a hard campaign. Per Story, a union can be a way of achieving a myriad of goals: better working conditions, of course, but also an opportunity to make care work a political practice. Under a U.S. culture of individualism, where we’re discouraged from looking beyond our immediate families, we’re forced to see those we work with as expendable, too. They’re faces and names we pass at the bus stop, tiptoe by in the lunch room, or smile at in the bathroom mirror; especially in an automated workplace like Amazon, that’s expected to be the extent of your interactions. ALU organizers like Smalls met that mentality with reciprocity, determination, and joy.

The ALU resisted Amazon’s culture at every step of their union campaign, but even the organizers got frustrated, ignorant, petty, racist, sexist, and dehumanizing to one another over the course of the campaign. Monarrez acknowledges that this is the name of the game: “I think labor organizing is probably the hardest type of organizing there is,” she tells me. 

“I had some people stop being friends with me and stop talking to me and I was okay with that. I was like, ‘I'm not here to be friends. I'm here to unionize.’”

MATRIARCHY OR TOXIC MATERNALISM?

Spoiler alert (sorry, it’s necessary): Natalie Monarrez would quit the ALU before the union ever came to a vote, even actively opposing the effort in their final hours. This moment in the film was heartbreaking not only for me, but also for Director Brett Story and Monarrez herself. Despite being the first woman organizer in the ALU with decades of experience, she found herself slowly ousted from the inner circle of the organizing team—apparently along the lines of gender, race, and class.

Story, like Monarrez, was quick to acknowledge that this experience is quite typical of a union campaign, given the wide range of experiences and contexts of each individual worker in a staff union. “People don't all become one just based on, ‘Now we're all organizers and workers, and these differences don't matter,’” she told me. “They do matter, and you see them matter in this film—especially at moments of high tension and high pressure.” Story mentions that, while race and class define and organize our lived experiences, they can also have a disorganizing effect upon our movements. 

I’d posit that losing Monarrez—a talented organizer and experienced Amazon worker, outspoken on behalf of women from New York to Palestine—toward the end of the campaign is a prime example of said disorganization, on both Monarrez and the ALU’s part. In my conversation with her, Monarrez told me she began to feel unseen and unheard once the makeup of the organizing team began to change: younger, Whiter, more male, and more interested in the public-facing aspects of the ALU campaign. 

“The workers were young enough to be caught up in their own stuff about what was going on, and they had their own vision of being powerful, and getting money on the GoFundMe page, and wanting to have fun wherever they could have fun,” she told me, prompting me to consider the time a 23-year-old version of me spent an hour greenscreening a Saweetie meme for my union’s Twitter account. (Oops.) “A lot of them were more interested in having an instant family or set of friends—almost a cult, which I hate to say, but that's really where the situation went over time. We had a lot of groupies tagging along.”

To be clear: Numbers in a union campaign is never a bad thing. But Monarrez started noticing more conflicts as the campaign continued, namely when the salts were brought in to help with the union effort. The salts arrived with different skills and different perspectives, and Monarrez agrees that there’s no way JFK8 would have voted to unionize if not for them. “They brought in the computer skills, they brought in the knowledge from all their social justice classes they had taken, some of them had some experience with canvassing... So they knew how to talk to people one-on-one, to have those important conversations, to get those signed union cards.” 

Story felt a measured representation of the salts’ role in ALU’s victory was a vital part of her documentary. “You could say that they're acting as race traitors,” she tells me. “These are folks who are college-educated, who come from some privilege, and who might be able to get better, salaried work, and have chosen instead to commit themselves to a struggle.” That struggle, of course, involves overcoming blind spots, and Story would agree with that assessment: “Learning how to become a labor organizer through books at college is different from learning how to be an organizer [through] watching your mom hold down three jobs, and helping taking care of all your younger siblings while she does so.” 

A major moment of conflict in UNION (2024) was a campfire conversation, discussing whether Smalls should engage in a planned arrest outside the JFK8 building. Monarrez was immediately protective of Smalls, reminding salt Madeline Wesley and a newer member of what may happen if Smalls, a Black man, is arrested in Staten Island. She asserts that they suggest such things because they are White, and the newcomer retorts by citing “MLK organizing strategy,” which included planned arrests. Monarrez shut him down sarcastically: “I love how you’ve been in this group a month, and you’re already ready to put his life on the line for this.” 

“I don't know if you noticed during the film, but Chris was always wearing a bullet safety vest,” she told me. “Right after he got terminated in April of 2020, after the protest, he actually got death threats from white supremacists. He was concerned enough to start wearing that vest every single day when he was out there.” Thinking of the organizing team as her little brothers and sisters, Monarrez consistently tried to center physical safety, especially for Black and Brown workers, even if it made their actions less splashy. This repeatedly caused her to clash with Smalls and Spence, as well as salts like Wesley.

“It became very apparent that they didn't wanna listen. They thought they knew everything already, especially the salts that were involved.” she said. “Sometimes, because of other people's backgrounds or cultures or even education, they tend that they know everything and they don't want to hear about other ways of doing things.” Where I would define ALU as a matriarchy, perhaps Monarrez would call her time organizing something closer to maternalism⁷—or simply, paternalism in Mrs. Doubtfire’s clothes.

Story, however, situated Monarrez’ experience in the complicated context of union organizing: “There are cliques, there are friendship groups, there are egos,” she told me. “That's what happens, especially when you've already got a lot of fragile, complex people, and you have people coming to these spaces—who have already been hurt by so much in life—and get hurt again by their comrades. [They] try and express their opinions and their differences and [end up] not getting seen.” 

Despite Story’s heartbreak in losing Monarrez from the ALU campaign, she found her reaction to changes within ALU quite relatable. “She felt gaslit, and then raged and screamed and threw something at the wall. And that thing she threw at the wall was a Vote ‘NO’ sign.”

As I said to both Monarrez and Story in our conversations, the relationship breakdowns in UNION (2024) are what felt the most real to me. I saw a version of myself in each of them; after all, I was only 23 years old when I ran for my bargaining committee, and by the time we got our first CBA ratified, my frontal lobe still hadn’t fully cooked. My time bargaining on behalf of my union—a feisty, special, incredible quorum of baddies dedicated to gender justice—was as frazzling as it was life-giving. I am able to speak truth to power because my comrades encouraged me, a young woman at the near-lowest rung of the organization, to turn my camera on, look our COO in the eye, and say she didn’t pay me enough to survive. And still, I had as many tense disagreements with my co-organizers as I had heart reacts in our Signal chat—that is to say, a fucking lot. 

There are a lot of things I said or did in an organizing context that I would not have now, but there are a lot more things I am proud of us as a team for achieving on behalf of our fellow workers. In a very labor movement way, even if we don’t talk all that much, I know that I will always have their backs. That’s what camaraderie is all about.

In her conversation with me, Monarrez sees her own comrades similarly:

“We're all humans, so none of us are perfect. We were in a very stressful, tense situation and dealing with the craziness,” she told me, referencing barbed wire fences, constant video surveillance, phone tapping, and being followed by black SUVs. “It made me realize that every single organizer is bringing their own perspective to our group, and some of them—fortunately for them—had never had to deal with this type of discrimination, this type of danger before. I think it was a learning experience for them as well.”

In watching Monarrez’ journey in real-time alongside her ALU comrades, Story was able to get a bird’s eye view of how people’s experiences interact in the labor movement context. “You feel them in these ways that are really hard to just describe, because they're sort of psychosocial,” she said. “Someone says something in a meeting that makes another person not feel respected, and the reason that they don't feel respected is because they might be a woman, a single mother, a Black mother of low income who has never been respected by a racist economy, a racist set of institutions, schools, workplaces, and so on.” Story understood why Monarrez felt leaving was her only option: “This happens when people aren't given the space to be in the movement.”

Even with the myriad of triggers which may have led to Monarrez leaving (more on this in the section below), she hopes her comrades still think of her positively, despite the relationship breakdowns. “I looked back and I'm like, ‘Ugh, I probably could have handled that a little better.’ But I think that they realized in time that I was there to help. I wasn't there to hurt anybody.”

A WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN ALU

“I wanted to be apart of other organizations that actually appreciated what I could bring to the table, instead of constantly feeling like I was being fought with every single day, or ignored, or dismissed, or disrespected. I can’t leave one boys’ club at Amazon and work for another boys’ club in the union. I can’t do it.”

Natalie Monarrez’ reasons for opposing the ALU were vast. She didn’t believe ALU could win against Amazon without the backing of a big, national union. She felt ignored in organizing circles. And she felt, in the end, it was just as much a boy’s club as their bosses. 

I understood Natalie’s frustrations, to some extent. But the union organizer in me felt a deep betrayal when I saw her makeshift “Vote NO!” sign; it was an all-too-familiar, attempted upset in the final hour of a union campaign. I wanted to say to her: I know guys can be dicks, but can’t we have this discussion once we win ourselves hazard pay?

Furthermore, Monarrez was not the only woman organizing with the ALU, and other women like Angelika Maldonado remained on the organizing team until ALU’s victory in 2022. Monarrez’ experience does not speak to the reality for all women on the organizing team or at Amazon, but it does point to a greater question within the labor movement: What do we do about the sexism and the racism in our unions when we are organizing ourselves primarily around class? Do we treat them as disorganizing axes and push toward victory, or do we take our (nonexistent) time to unpack what is happening between our members?

There is no fast and loose answer to these questions...though I know I’d rather men disrespect me (as they will, regardless) with a thousand more dollars in my bank account. However, the experiences which pushed both Monarrez and Maldonado to join ALU point to a serious need for women—especially Brown and Black women like Monarrez and Maldonado—to have a strong union behind them. 

Monarrez knew this from the jump: “For the women especially,  they go through a lot more problems than the men do inside [Amazon warehouses] for sure, because most of the management is young males.” For someone like Monarrez, protecting her fellow women workers was her priority, given the additional weights of caregiving and childrearing women often have to bear. “The women have a lot to juggle and the women have a lot more to lose.” 

But the resilience of her fellow women is what motivates her to keep bringing women to labor organizing, which she does now throughout New York and New Jersey. “We’re used to multitasking. We need to find our voice and be supportive of each other.”

Maldonado, on the other hand, found her place in ALU because of her mother. As told to Jacobin, “I’ve never been a part of a union before, but my mom has been a member of 1199SEIU for as long as I can remember,” she told journalist Eric Blanc. “So when I heard Amazon could get a union, I knew from experience how much that would benefit all the families and all the people who worked there.” Maldonado, now the chair of ALU’s Worker’s Committee, will focus on lowering the cost of health care for Amazon workers, especially parents, once the corporation voluntarily recognizes ALU and bargaining can begin. (No word yet on when that will be...despite the NLRB already having its day with Amazon in court.)

Maldonado is right in that unions benefit families; in her situation growing up, her health insurance was completely covered due to her mother’s union membership. Furthermore, research shows that unions are, quite unilaterally, good for women. Women in unions, regardless of race, make 21% more per week than their counterparts without unions. Furthermore, Latinas like Monarrez and Maldonado experience a particular pay bump when in unions: a 27% increase compared to Latinas without unions. Unions also offer women more health care benefits, paid time off, retirement savings, and workplace protections than workplaces without a union. Considering women are up against the wage gap, high costs of living, and to be frank, the high costs of surviving⁸—and I’m not even getting into the financial, professional, and social ramifications of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—women need unions now more than ever. 

Monarrez’s leaving, to be clear, did not alienate her from labor organizing or her love of unions. Despite still seeing ALU as a “boy’s club,” she is grateful for the perspective time has brought her and her comrades alike. “I saw a handful of them at the union screenings last year and doing Q and As, and I did have a handful of them—very nervously—come up to me and say, ‘You were right about this,’ or ‘As time went on, I now understand why you told us this or did that.’” (To be fair: Said perspective is easier to come by following a victory.) She hopes only good things for the women, like Maldonado, who remain active in ALU:

“I would love to see the women have their own workers committee,” Monarrez gushes to me. “I would love to see the women step up and be shop stewards for each of the locations at Amazon. I wanna see these women running for all the office positions in the union: President, VP, Treasurer, Secretary. I wanna see women get more involved because, unfortunately, we have a lot of male, self-appointed people—not just in the ALU, but across the country.”

Story, too, hopes documentaries like UNION (2024) demonstrate that a woman’s place is absolutely in her union. “It is ironically how we're trained into our genders, but women especially make great organizers,” she said. “Women are coached from day one to think relationally, to take care of each other, to keep alive.” If we think of a union as a matriarchy, and we know reciprocal care work is required to keep a matriarchy alive, then women of varied backgrounds would be very strategic choices for union organizers. “Care-taking isn’t weakness,” asserts Story, “it is strength.”

When asked for her message for women reading this article—those who may not have been in a union before, or who may assume a union is not for them—Monarrez lit up. “I tell women: Don't be shy. Just go on the Internet, look for these groups, and get involved.”⁹

1U, FR

I wrote this article about the women behind UNION (2024), but true matriarchy should and can transcend gender. The easy¹⁰ thing to do would be to reach this point, then blame Chris Smalls for the gender trajectory of the ALU campaign. But we don’t do easy shit around here, do we?

The truth is: To blame Chris Smalls is to play exactly into Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s narrative trap. From the beginning, per a leaked Amazon Board memo, the corporation hoped to frame Smalls as the face of the movement, naming him “neither smart nor articulate” in a (racist) company document. But in Smalls’ own words, the Amazon Labor Union is not him: “The union is y’all.” The union is not and cannot be a person, but rather, a system of support.

This is where the Amazon corporation fundamentally misunderstood labor, itself. It’s quite authoritarian and individualistic to assume that unions can be taken out by individual character assassination, as unions are meant to be collective spaces. The Amazon Board thought, by demeaning Smalls, they could snuff out any interest in unionization at Amazon warehouses across the country. This is pitifully naive. Trying to take out a union leader only emboldens tens more to take her place—that’s what makes the labor movement, and a leader with deep organizing relationships like Chris, so threatening to the status quo.

When Smalls announced his joining of the Handala—a freedom flotilla traveling from Sicily to Gaza on July 13, 2025—I saw him as doing the same kind of reciprocal care work done while organizing JFK8. But this time, it wasn’t burgers: it was formula for Palestinian babies. It was mechanical limbs for Palestinian amputees—the same people banned from the United States by the Trump Administration only two weeks ago. In the same way Story saw the salts giving up their privileges for the struggle, Smalls forfeited the (relative) safety of New York shores to help breach the beaches of Gaza. His organizing work continues to spiral the most vulnerable—right now, that’s Palestinian children—and continues to land him on the opposing end of state violence, whether that be the NYPD or the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF).¹¹ Unfortunately, the Handala was intercepted by the IOF on July 26th, Smalls was taken into Israeli custody, he was imprisoned, and he was submitted to severe physical violence by seven uniformed individuals. 

When I spoke with Monarrez—decked out in four separate pro-Palestine buttons—Smalls was an active prisoner of the IOF. She worried, as always, for his safety. “Knowing how racist and violent the IDF is, I was concerned. I've met his mother and his three children, and his mother is extremely protective of him. I'm sure she's worried sick.” Monarrez even detailed for me her research on how long the IOF typically holds activists: she hoped he’d be back within 96 hours.

“My heart sank when I read about how they had singled him out and had assaulted him,” she told me, referencing Smalls being the only Black man onboard the Handala, and the only activist beaten by the IOF. Furthermore, Monarrez felt the labor movement was largely silent in response to his abduction and imprisonment, bringing back up her concerns for his safety during the ALU campaign. “I'm pretty devastated that more government officials around the world are not speaking up about this,” she told me, referencing supposed friends of ALU like Senator Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, even the Amazon Labor Union itself.¹² “I just hope that the organizers can put their differences aside and be supportive, so hopefully he makes it home along with everybody else from the Handala.”

Smalls did, thankfully, make it home on July 31st—he was one of the final two activists to return to their home countries.¹³ He is now using the momentum and press coverage garnered by his time on the Handala to continue organizing across borders...as well as, literally, suing Israel. His work for Palestinians hasn’t stopped, but his work for Amazon workers everywhere hasn’t stopped, either. He continues spiraling his energies inward and outward, hoping to create a truly better world for the most exploited and forgotten. This is exactly what unions and matriarchies alike are meant to do.

There’s a sign-off/saying/hashtag in the labor world that I’ve always really liked: 1U. “1U” is a simple way of saying “We are all one union”...but it’s not a We Are The World situation. 1U is shorthand for the transnational organizing practice behind the labor movement. It’s an understanding that every rank-and-file worker, and every union, is fighting for the same thing: not only bread and roses¹⁴ for us, but bread and roses for everyone, from JFK8 to the beaches of Gaza. I see Smalls’ mission on the Handala as a true example of “1U,” and Monarrez saw it as a version of the energy needed to tangibly achieve what “1U” stands for.

“It's wonderful to see millions of people marching and protesting and standing up for the Palestinians. But again, it all goes back to organizing,” she told me. “You can't just wish for something better. You have to do it.” I’d say Smalls did a fantastic job at just f*cking doing it.  

In the end, UNION (2024) Director Brett Story hopes for this film to inspire more Chrises, more Natalies, more Angies, and more Bretts to begin considering what could come of organizing their workplace. “We aren't as powerless as these our leaders want us to believe,” she said. “This was a group of people that was told, even from the labor movement, that they couldn't succeed. And mud is on the labor movement’s face at this moment because the ALU—the scrappy under-resourced group of worker-turned-organizers—formed the first-ever Amazon Labor Union in American history.”

ALU Organizer Natalie Monarrez agrees, attributing their victory to the sheer amount of folks involved. “You literally need an army of leaders when you're gonna take on an employer like [Amazon], especially a billionaire—at the time, he was the richest person on the planet,” she told me. “Sometimes I still shake my head that they pulled it off.” 

I bet they do too—the ALU win was part-grit, part-heart, and, yes, maybe a bit of a miracle. But the strategy of the ALU, as demonstrated in UNION (2024), is repeatable everywhere. It’s possible at your restaurant, at your clinic, at your Sephora storefront, at your nonprofit, at an Amazon warehouse, and yes, in the backs of Ubers, and Lyfts, and Doordashes, or whatever new gig economy job is created to keep vulnerable workers exploited, exhausted, and alone. There is no workplace where a union does not belong and would not help its workers—not a hospital, not an abortion fund, not even Congress. If you have more than two, non-supervisory employees, then let the Natalie, the Angie, the Brett, and yes, the Chris out from within you. It is in your power to unionize your workplace, and UNION (2024), luckily, draws an effective roadmap to what you may encounter along the way.

Here’s the deal: Conflict and hardship is unavoidable in a union campaign. You don’t always come out friends. You delete some of the numbers in your phone and unfollow some of them on Instagram. But in true labor fashion, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies once you’re in a union. There are only comrades; those who will stand beside you, regardless of the petty shit, and demand bread and roses for all of us. UNION (2024), its cast, and its crew bring us to that truth in a way only labor organizers could. 

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* You can stream UNION (2024) on PBS through August 31. If you’d like to request a screening of UNION (2024) at your club, your organization, your school, or even your union, please reach out to the team at www.unionthefilm.com. *

* Interview subjects were chosen per the schedules of cast and crew members, thanks to the coordination and kindness of the POV and UNION (2024) teams. To encourage more conversations with even more movers and shakers, read and engage with this article to sustain my work <3 Thank you! *

1. Girl, unsubscribe.

2.  At the time of this writing, the Amazon Labor Union has joined with the Teamsters. The ALU at JFK8 and any other Amazon Warehouses have been housed under the International Brotherhood of Teamsters since June 2024, but the ALU at JFK8 was still unaffiliated during the filming of UNION (2024).

3. Shop = workplace (in Union speak).

4. According to Monarrez, Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Jordan Flowers, and Gerald Bryson were the creators of the COEW.

5. Care work = the tasks and activities involved in providing personal and relational support to individuals who need assistance for any number of reasons (age, illness, disability, language, or other needs).

6. Salt = A union organizer or pro-union employee who applies to work at a non-union company with the express purpose of unionizing the workforce from the inside. Typically paid by a national union. Extremely cool job. (If a national union is reading this: Hit my line for all your salting needs. Anytime.)

7. Borrowing from Dr. Kim Hong Nguyen’s definition of toxic maternalism, an aspect of “Global Mother Feminism,” in her book Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss (2024).

8. Americans: How much was your last health insurance bill?

9. Monarrez recommends the United Association for Labor Education’s classes, which run typically $10-$15 per class. They actually have a Women’s Summer School program to teach women workers the skills needed to organize our workplaces. I would also recommend any programming by WILL (Women In Labor Leadership) Empower, who actually did me a massive solid back in my early union days and were very nice to me.

10. Lazy.

11. Better known as the IDF, but I use IOF because I don’t see that shit as defense.

12. At the time of my conversation with Natalie on July 30, 2025, none of the referenced individuals had spoken up publicly about Smalls’ imprisonment in Israel.

13. A big ‘ol Alhamdullilah here.

14. “Bread and roses” is a common union saying, coming from Rose Schneidermann’s 1912 speech (based off a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim). She recited it during a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Her exact words were: “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” (Baddie shit.)