Leaders of Amazon's National Labor Movement Give Advice to Northern Kentucky Air Hub Employees: "Be Creative"

KCVG organizers are demanding a $30 hourly wage for all of the Air Hub's 4,000 employees, as well as 180 hours of paid time off and union representation at disciplinary hearings. KCVG is the first Air Hub to publicly organize in the country.

ALU president Chris Smalls and vice president Derrick Palmer led the first-ever successful union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, which voted to formally unionize in April 2022. While Amazon continues to fight the win in court, Smalls and Palmer are helping Amazon facilities to strengthen their union drives across the U.S.


CityBeat spoke with Smalls and Palmer about what KCVG needs to do to make it as far as Staten Island did in 2022.

Q: What is your assessment of the KCVG union effort so far? How are they doing?

Smalls: I’m very impressed. They are way ahead of where we were when we started our campaign. They definitely did their homework and their research on what it takes to even get started. When we started our campaign we didn’t have nowhere near the resources they have or the support, so they’re already ten steps ahead of us. They have a headstart with a strong committee already with inside and outside support, which is great to have that community support. Their demands are straightforward and clear, they have a strategy and a good plan.”

Palmer: It’s pretty similar, but that’s why we’re going out there, to understand the dynamics of what’s going on. The workers, the ones who are actually working at the Air Hub, are the experts. We’re learning.

Smalls: There’s nothing in the Air Hub that you have to go to school for, the workers coming in there are still entry level, meaning that they have to get trained properly by someone else who also is entry level. It’s not managers that are training them, I guarantee that. Almost every job that Amazon provides is entry level, which is always trainable and the issues are really related because of the type of system that Amazon has. Most of it is ran off of metrics, it’s all numbers, and it’s always putting productivity above people.

Smalls: One area where I told them they could improve upon is to build a committee that’s willing to organize for the night shift. Without getting to the night shift it’s going to be very difficult to win the campaign. I worked the night shift [at Staten Island] for quite a while and most of the issues on night shift are ignored because there’s less management in the building, less leadership, so workers really run the building at night. A lot of the workers on night shift go through a lot of issues because their commute is different, their hours are different and they have less leadership, so their hardships are a lot more strenuous. If they can win the night shift, they win the campaign. I guarantee it.

Q: How important is it to have the support of local politicians during a union campaign?

Palmer: At the beginning of our union campaign we reached out to local officials, but people didn’t really take it seriously. We didn’t really get that support until after we won the election, that’s when we got the support. There are politicians that do support unions, you just have to really make sure they’re there for the workers and not just there to make themselves look like they care for the workers.

Smalls: We don’t want to put ourselves in a category, because we understand that not all Amazon workers are on the left or on the right. We don’t know what they are because they come from different places all over the country, all over the world. We’re talking about Kentucky, which we already know is a conservative state, it’s a Right to Work state, we can’t go in there with an agenda that’s political, we have to keep the issues work-related.