NYC Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls arrested for jumping barricades at Met Gala
Published in Entertainment News
NEW YORK — Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls, who was famously fired after being arrested for protesting his company in 2020, was busted Monday for trying to storm the Met Gala on the Upper East Side, cops said.
Smalls, 37, was tackled by police after he jumped an NYPD barricade into the frozen zone outside fashion’s biggest night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park about 7 p.m.
Smalls was protesting the Met’s designation of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men, and his wife as honorary chairs of the gala.
Carrying an anti-Amazon sign, Smalls jumped a barricade as stars walked the red carpet in glamorous avant-garde gowns at the elite event, where tickets cost $100,000.
He was protesting with a handful of other demonstrators when he walked over to an SUV, then sprinted back to the Met and leaped over the barricades.
Cops took him to the Central Park Precinct, where he was charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of government administration, criminal trespass and failure to obey traffic signals.
Smalls was working at Amazon’s giant warehouse on Staten Island when he began fighting for worker rights. In 2020, he was arrested for organizing a walkout at the warehouse over claims of dangerous coronavirus conditions in the workplace. Amazon fired him a day after his arrest.
“They wrongfully terminated me,” Smalls told the Daily News at the time. “I feel like everybody knows that. I was not expecting it. It was a thought that never came across my mind.”
While Amazon insisted that Smalls was canned for showing up at the warehouse while under a 14-day paid quarantine ordered by the company, the ex-employee said the axing was clearly punitive.
“It cost me (my job),” he said of the protest. “But if I’m the sacrificial lamb and I get people out of that building, so be it … I don’t want to work for a company that doesn’t care about people.”
Smalls and the state of New York ultimately sued Amazon for unlawful termination. He also founded the activist group The Congress of Essential Workers and the Amazon Labor Union.
Over the next four years, he lobbied workers to unionize. While his group couldn’t get workers at the Staten Island warehouse to unionize, the workers at a similar Amazon warehouse at JFK Airport did.
During his crusade to unionize Amazon workers, he met former President Joe Biden. He and co-union leader Derrick Palmer were named two of the Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2022.”
Smalls lives in Lodi, New Jersey, officials said. Attempts to reach him Tuesday were unsuccessful.
His arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court was pending.
No other protesters were arrested at the Met Gala, cops said.
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