On Feb. 24, members of the Amazon Labor Union gathered inside the Hilton Garden Inn ballroom on Staten Island’s industrial North Shore. It had been two years since Christian Smalls, ALU’s first president and co-founder, led the movement of workers to defeat Amazon management and win the company’s first-ever union in 2022. Smalls, along with the union’s co-founders Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, Jordan Flowers and Connor Spence, were catapulted to celebrity status among labor circles.
Still, since that initial victory, efforts to bring Amazon to the bargaining table were no closer than they were two years ago. Morale had grown low among the rank and file, and at the hotel, only a few Amazon workers were present to discuss the upcoming union elections. Many of the chairs sat empty. One seat, however, was occupied by Michelle Valentin Nieves, the union’s former vice president.
Nieves had long grown frustrated with what she perceived as Smalls’ lack of leadership and commitment to the day-to-day function of building the union. Time and again she felt like her ideas and suggestions were often ignored or undermined outright.
While she arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn ready to discuss union elections and her reform slate, she says she was not invited to attend. Just months before, in October 2023, Nieves received a letter from Smalls that said her “employment with Amazon Labor Union as Vice President has ended effective immediately.” The letter made no mention of why she was terminated.
The news came as a shock. For a union officer to be removed from their position, according to the union’s own constitutional bylaws, they must be found guilty of wrongdoing. If accused of wrongdoing, they are entitled to due process. Charges are to be made in writing, and a trial board, formed by the members of the union’s Executive Board, is to convene with a report of the board’s findings and decision mailed to the charged party.
According to Nieves, none of that occurred, nor did the letter specify any charges made against her. Ultimately, she was removed from her position in what Nieves describes as retaliation.
Shortly after being removed, Nieves decided to run for union president under a newly formed reform slate called Workers First. The reform slate was made up of other disillusioned members who promised to put workers’ interests first, in contrast to Smalls, whose interests, she claimed, had seemed to wander toward new horizons as he frequently traveled the country.
“I’m not an employee; you can’t just fire the vice president of the union,” Nieves said. “They are basically trying to get rid of me because they can’t control me.”
Nieves said she made it a point to attend the Feb. 24 meeting so she could publicly confront Smalls for pushing her out of the union. After a shouting match erupted between herself and Smalls at the Hilton Garden Inn, the police were called, and Nieves was given two options: be escorted off the premises or face trespassing charges. Facing the possibility of arrest, she chose to go home.
“I have never gone through the amount of abuse and hostility with Amazon as I did my own union,” she later told Documented.
After repeated attempts for on-the-record comments, Smalls did not authorize any conversations with Documented to be published.
Union Trouble Brews
Nieves, a native New Yorker, began working in Amazon’s sprawling JFK8 warehouse in 2019 as a SLAM operator, a position she currently holds. She spends 32 hours a week operating the warehouse conveyor belt, scanning packages, and clearing jams caused by the never-ending stream of packages. Standing for hours on end, her feet ache in pain from the tediousness of the work. Owing to her background in left-wing political activism and inspired by the early organizing by Smalls, in 2021 Nieves decided to become involved with the ALU, serving as the organization’s inaugural Executive Secretary.
But since its historic victory two years ago, the ALU has not been without internal turmoil. While union leader Smalls rose to a celebrity status uncommon for a labor leader, appearing on the cover of New York Magazine and even meeting with both the president of the United States and the president of Cuba, the union struggled to consolidate its victory by securing a contract with Amazon. Several attempts to parlay their initial win at other warehouses failed to yield any success.
Just a month after winning JFK8 in May of 2022, the ALU attempted to unionize a second nearby warehouse but failed in a landslide vote. Another attempt by the ALU to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Albany in October 2022 was also unsuccessful. Several other efforts to organize Amazon warehouses in California and Kentucky faltered.
Increasingly, workers and organizers began criticizing Smalls for his lack of focus and leadership. In another setback, Palmer, ALU’s then-vice president, was forced to resign after a police body camera video surfaced of him allegedly admitting to choking his girlfriend last May.
Despite the union’s voting to affiliate with the Teamsters in June, the internal power struggles persisted.
By 2023, the first of the two dissident movements had emerged from members disillusioned by Smalls’ lack of leadership. The first was called A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus led by Connor Spence. The second was the Workers’ First reform slate led by Nieves.
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Last July, the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus successfully sued to force leadership elections. Although Smalls and the Reform Caucus eventually reached a court-brokered settlement plan in January to hold leadership elections this summer, in April, the union’s lawyers attempted to re-open the agreement in court to prevent elections.
The suit was ultimately unsuccessful, and the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus was able to win control of the union in a low-turnout election held in July. Spence, the leader of the A.L.U. Democratic Reform Caucus and the union’s former treasurer, replaced Smalls as the president of the ALU shortly after. After Palmer’s resignation as vice president, Nieves, then serving as the union’s executive secretary, was promoted to vice president.
“It was not a role I asked for, but I took it because I was a senior officer at the time,” she said. As vice president, she pushed aside her initial reservations about the direction of the union and said she was optimistic. That would soon change as she began to feel that Smalls and Bryson grew uncomfortable with her new role. “I felt micro-aggressions from the supposed co-founders,” she said about Smalls and Bryson in June.
Nieves Attempts to Assert Herself
At the time of Nieves’ transition to the role of vice president, Bryson, who was one of the co-founders of the union along with Smalls, Palmer, Spence, and Flowers, continued to serve an unspecified role with the union. On paper, according to an internal ALU report, Bryson was employed by the ALU as an organizer, but, as an organizer, he possessed keys to the union’s office, coming and going as he pleased.
Prior to the movement to build a union at JFK8, Bryson was fired during the early days of the pandemic allegedly for protesting unsafe working conditions at Amazon. Bryson then went on to form The Congress of Essential Workers (T.C.O.E.W.) in 2020 with Smalls before forming the ALU with him in 2021.
According to Nieves, Bryson and her would argue constantly. Arguments would frequently end with Bryson cursing her out before storming away. Nieves says the conflict with Bryson first began when Nieves expressed her concerns regarding Smalls’ lack of leadership.
She recalled how Smalls, even before winning the union, was already known for running late to meetings or failing to show up to an event after he had already committed to attending. But once the union victory caught the imagination of workers across the world, Nieves says the fame got to Smalls’ head. When it came to day-to-day organizing, Nieves said Smalls had all but checked out. “Chris was never around, and it was becoming a big problem,” she said in June. “Even if he wasn’t really around before, he is around less now.”
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With Smalls out of the picture, Nieves says she was left to shoulder much of the administrative burden of running the union. Nieves also says Smalls would blow off important meetings regarding the financial health of the union, and at one point he did not attend a single monthly financial meeting in five months. Reports began claiming that the union was running out of money.
“I was literally the one running all the meetings, keeping up the financial structure; I was meeting with all the donors,” Nieves said. “I was biting off more than I can chew and doing way more than I was supposed to.”
Smalls’ absences also had a detrimental effect on workers’ morale. “As a president, Chris is not performing his obligations and duties,” Nieves said then, a month before Spence became the union president. “The feeling of the workers is that they feel abandoned. They feel betrayed.”
Nieves recalled how the union used to have open office hours at their union hall located at an office park near the warehouse, but they abruptly stopped the practice without any explanation. When workers would attempt to visit the union hall to discuss grievances, the office would be closed, she said.
Chirmo Toure, 26, also grew concerned with Smalls. In 2022, Toure, an immigrant from Liberia, began working at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse where he was an enthusiastic supporter of the union and also wrote ALU’s newsletter. In March 2023, he began working at ALU’s office as the director of complaints and was enthusiastic about his work. That all changed after meeting Smalls for the first time. He says the meeting left him underwhelmed, and he felt a “weird energy” from Smalls.
“I was just thinking that he deals with so many people and I’m just one of those people,” said Toure. “He hadn’t gotten to know me, so I just gave him the benefit of the doubt, not thinking nothing of it.”
Soon after, Toure says he would see less and less of Smalls in the office, and he was pretty much left to his own devices to figure out his job. Like Nieves, Toure was feeling overworked. “I’m the only one in the office that really does the job,” he said of the paid position.
Nieves’ concerns about the direction of the union only grew over time. As a vice president, she attempted to take on a greater leadership role to fill the vacuum left by Smalls’ absence. Yet she said that she kept finding herself undermined by Bryson, who served no official leadership role, but whom she suspected only acted as Smalls’ eyes and ears in the union office.
“When I tried to actually assert myself and perform my role as vice president, I was met with so much aggression and hostility,” she said, referring to Bryson.
On multiple occasions, Nieves says she tried to persuade Bryson to talk to Smalls about his behavior, but to no avail. She said when she would ask Bryson for help picking up the slack, he would explode into a violent tirade of insults.
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“I tried to have a conversation with Gerald about Christian’s behavior, the fact that he is never around, that he’s constantly traveling,” she said. “I can’t get Chris on the phone.”
On multiple occasions, Nieves says Bryson would yell and curse at her to the point she felt unsafe returning to the union’s office. When she sought out Smalls for assistance, she claimed he dismissed her concerns about Bryson.
Things came to a head on August 2023 between Nieves and Bryson. After yet another argument over her concerns regarding the direction of the union, she expressed to Smalls via email about her repeated issues working with Bryson in the office. She alleged that Smalls ignored her concerns. Nieves claims that word got back to Bryson, and he stormed into the office swearing at Nieves.
Nieves says that Jordan Flowers intervened to physically restrain Bryson. “He came to the office anyway and started screaming at the top of his lungs,” she said. “He lunged at me a few times.” Shaken up, after the incident, she wrote in an Aug. 24 text sent to Chris that she no longer felt safe as vice president. She also filed a police report against Bryson the next day, and accused Bryson of “harassment.” Nobody was arrested, and the case is now closed. A subsequent internal ALU investigation found Nieves’ claims to be unsubstantiated.
“Gerald Bryson got too aggressive, so hostile, I don’t even feel safe going to the union hall anymore,” she told Documented in a phone call. “I’m not able to perform as vice president.”
In an interview with Documented, Bryson refuted Nieves’ account of what occurred on Aug. 23, saying that he was only in the office to get barbeque supplies for a worker cookout that they were planning to hold that night in front of JFK8, not to confront her. When he got to the office, he said Nieves picked a fight with him.
“She was aggressively trying to get me to hit her,” he said. “I told her that I don’t hit women and that she looked like a clown and this was a circus and I walked out.”
Flowers also refuted Nieves’ by confirming Bryson’s version of events. He claims that Nieves instigated the conflict and that he never had to hold Bryson back from hitting her.
“Yes, Gerald was behind me but the way she said that I had to hold him back is wrong,” he said. “I didn’t even have to lay a hand on him. There was no type of aggression towards her and there was no way Gerald could reach over me. There was an incident, but not the way she said it.”
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Bryson, who doesn’t currently hold an official leadership position in the union, claims that it was Nieves who was responsible for instigating the union’s internal turmoil. He also challenged whether she had any real leadership role with the union.
“When Michelle took the VP slot it was just to have somebody in the slot because Derrick was in his little bit of a problem,” he said, referring to the allegation of domestic abuse against Palmer. “But she is powerless.”
Bryson told Documented that he once had a cordial relationship with Nieves, occasionally driving her home after meetings. Once Nieves became the vice president, Bryson says she changed and became hostile toward him. In one encounter, Bryson claims that Nieves told him to give up his keys to the union office if he didn’t want to submit to her authority.
“She told me if I don’t want to do my job, I could turn in my keys,” he said. “I’m a co-founder, and no, you’re not going to talk to me like that.”
Again, text messages reviewed by Documented appear to show Smalls downplaying Nieves’ concerns for her safety. In one text exchange shared with Documented, Nieves describes to Smalls a violent encounter she had with Bryson in which she said Bryson called her a “fucking bitch” and slammed a door in her face. She was asking Smalls for help keeping Bryson away from her, fearing that things might escalate into physical violence.
Not wanting to make the union look bad, Nieves told Smalls that she would refrain from filing a restraining order against Bryson if Smalls agreed to keep Bryson away from her. Nieves saved the text messages from Smalls where he responded to her concerns on Aug. 24, and wrote: “Gerald don’t hit women so why do you believe he would attack you? Just because y’all got into a heated argument There was several witnesses that don’t say that’s what[.]”
Instead of addressing her concerns, Nieves says that Smalls turned on her, accusing her of being racist. (Nieves is of Puerto Rican descent, and Bryson is Black.)
“When I filed the report about the harassment, I was then placed in these meetings with an angry mob of union leaders,” she said. “They basically accused me of being a liar and that I was racist because Gerald Bryson is a Black man, and I filed a police report on a Black man.”
Afterward, Nieves decided to form the Workers’ First reform slate and run for president. Then, in a video reviewed by Documented, the police were called on Nieves at the Feb. 24 meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn, where she was ordered by police to leave the premises for trespassing.
Internal Investigation Launched
In the aftermath of Nieves’ conflict with Bryson, the ALU soon hired attorney Nicole Cuda Pérez to conduct an internal investigation. Following the release of the investigation’s report on September 18, 2023, on Oct. 9, Nieves was fired from her position as vice president. The termination letter cited the results of the investigation, but did not include details of what Cuda Pérez found. Bryson faced no consequences.
The internal investigations executive summary, which was completed on Sept. 18, 2023, and was reviewed by Documented, found that Nieves’ accusations regarding Bryson attempting and threatening to assault her were unsubstantiated but that the ALU does not currently have a workplace behavior policy in place that could have helped avoid such situations.
The report acknowledged that during an Aug. 23 group chat, Nieves and Bryson were arguing, for which he stated, “you’re messing with the wrong person, don’t get yourself flamed.” Nieves took this as a verbal threat of violence. She was so disturbed by the comment that Nieves filed a police report against Bryson the next day. The report investigator found that the comment did not constitute a threat of physical violence.
“Witnesses agree that they have heard that kind of language before and never in the extent of being a threat of physical assault,” the report read.
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Additionally, the report found that during the office confrontation with Bryson, “Nieves was the one to begin shouting at Bryson and Bryson yelled back and no assault by Bryson occurred nor any attempt to lunge at her.”
In regard to Bryson’s behavior, the report noted that “Bryson had cursed and yelled in the union office and in union online communications.” The report ultimately concluded that the “evidence shows that both parties acted inappropriately.”
Reviewing the internal structures in place that could have led to the conflict, the investigation found that the union suffered from frequent communication breakdowns and mistrust among the union leadership. It highlighted a “founders versus everyone else mentality” in the union, establishing a “dichotomy that fuels the mistrust and breakdowns.” Specifically, the report noted that several witnesses repeatedly described that “women of the union leadership are not always kept in the loop.”
To avoid further conflicts, the report recommended that the leadership acquire professional knowledge regarding management fundamentals, adopt equitable and inclusive practices, as well as find opportunities for team-building exercises such as executive coaching and leadership training among the officers.
Instead of Smalls heeding the recommendations outlined in the report, he sent a termination letter to Nieves, alluding to the results of the investigation report as the cause. Bryson received no such letter and was still employed with the union at the time of Nieves’ dismissal.
Nieves alleges that she was unjustly removed from her position as vice president because she confronted Smalls about his lack of leadership and for dismissing her contributions to the union.
Although Smalls did not respond on the record to Documented’s multiple requests for comment for this story, Spence, the newly elected president of ALU, told Documented that he is striving to build a democratic and inclusive union, pointing out that the newly elected slate is composed of many women of color.
“At the end of the day, if the union is actually democratic and not a one-man show, basically a dictatorship led by Chris, these problems would happen a lot less,” he said. “If you just have one person like Chris at the helm, then all of Chris’ flaws become the organization’s flaws.”
In the future, Spence says he hopes that the union could establish more democratic channels of communication that can mediate internal conflict. “The change we want to see in the organization is to create structures that allow people with different personalities and different perspectives and disagreements to come together, have those discussions, and at the end of the day vote or do what we have to do and still get the work done,” he said.
Since her removal from her position, Nieves has not only run for president but has continued to work at JFK8 and has continued to organize workers. As a leader on the shop floor, she has helped workers file unfair labor practices charges against Amazon, and she continues to fundraise for fired workers.
“I’m not like a famous organizer because it was not my intention to be famous,” she said. “The majority of my work has been internal.” With the new leadership in place, she says her focus will continue to be directed toward securing a new contract.
