On the Workplace Accident That Changed Amazon Union-Leader Chris Smalls’s Life

My mother didn’t have the budget for me to compete with the kids who had Jordans or AF1s or who rocked any of the more expensive brands. This was something I had hard feelings about when I was younger. Maybe that seems like a shallow thing to care about, but there was something deeper underneath. My friends and I based our self-worth on how fly our clothes were, because where else were we going to get self-worth from?

All of our parents, if we even had them, were struggling. We didn’t see people who looked like us on TV unless they were playing sports or rapping. We knew we couldn’t just walk into a random room and be respected. We saw how people treated us and talked about us. Cops and store owners; cabdrivers and school administrators. It was like being Black and working class was something that we had done wrong. So, without even knowing it, we internalized those feelings. There weren’t that many ways to get any power, any sense of self in the world. And that feeling when you walked into a spot looking good, the way people looked at you, the pride you took in yourself, that was an important feeling to have.

It wasn’t just the world that made me feel like I was less-than because I had less. I felt that way in my home too. Even though we were living in the same home, my brother Demetrice and I were living two different class realities. He had a dad who showed up and cared for him. I had a dad who, for the most part, was never around. He had clothes and shoes and money in his pocket. I had to make do however I could.

I’m someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time on self-pity. I may be upset or unhappy about something, but my attitude has always been that if there’s a problem, then let’s fix it. So, feeling like I had less than my brother, feeling like I had less than some people around me, didn’t just bother me; it motivated me. It lit a fire under me to find ways to close that gap between us. They say sometimes you have to make your own luck, and that’s what I tried to do.

My first real moneymaking venture was shoveling snow. Even though I always hated the snow, I couldn’t deny that it was good work. On a busy day, I could make between $200 and $300. It was nice being able to go to the mall and buy stuff with that money. But it made me hungry for more, and early in my sophomore year of high school I got my first real job: working alongside my mom as a dietary aide in a nursing home.

There, I did room service delivery as needed, putting together food orders, loading up the trays on carts, and delivering the meals to residents. It was an easy job, and I was happy to be getting a little money in my pocket. But this was a weekend gig and the snow shoveling hustle was seasonal, so I only worked, what, fifty days out of the year? I needed more.

I didn’t know what happened, but it was not like any pain I’d ever felt in my life. I fell to the ground instantly and looked up to see that a white Mercedes had hit me from behind.

I soon got a job working at the Target on River Street in Hackensack. It was not a bad job; the work was manageable, and it was walking distance from where we were living at the time. The tasks were simple: packing stuff, loading stuff, moving boxes around in a warehouse.

I was kind of an all-around employee doing a little bit of everything, but the main task I was responsible for was collecting the carts in the parking lot and getting them back to the store. This was before they had those motorized cart retrievers. You had to do it by sheer muscle, which is harder than it looks, especially when the weather got cold. Once you had a couple dozen carts in the line, it got pretty heavy, and one cart with a faulty wheel could make your life miserable. Plus, people drove like maniacs in the parking lot, especially on weekends and around holidays. But I tried to make the best of it. I would figure out little systems to help me do it more efficiently. I learned how to fix some broken wheels on the fly and figured out how to get the most carts returned as quickly as possible, including mapping out the quickest routes back to the store.

There was an older guy working alongside me, which was required for safety reasons, since I was under eighteen and working around moving vehicles. This arrangement was fine by me; I already knew the guy pretty well because he was a friend of my older brother on my dad’s side. But there were times when he either wasn’t on the schedule or wasn’t available, and the manager would send me out to collect carts by myself. I had a vague sense that this wasn’t supposed to happen, but I figured that since my supervisors were signing off on it, it must be okay. One particular day, he was off, and I was working the lot alone. It was about 7pm, sometime around late January.

It was already dark outside. I was moving a row of carts back to the parking area, pushing with my legs to get more leverage because they were heavy. Suddenly I felt a sharp, shooting pain in my right ankle and calf. I didn’t know what happened, but it was not like any pain I’d ever felt in my life. I fell to the ground instantly and looked up to see that a white Mercedes had hit me from behind. I was trying to deal with the agony, but it was intense. I was in shock. The car had stopped. A white couple got out; they were middle-aged, maybe late thirties or early forties. I remember the wife was driving. They stood on either side of the car looking at me as I lay writhing on the asphalt. Then, without a word, the two of them looked at each other, got back into the car, and slowly drove off, leaving me there.

There was a Mexican couple nearby who saw everything and started screaming for someone to get the license plate. Somehow, someone did. I don’t exactly remember who it was or how it happened. It might have even been me who got the plates. My brain was spinning with the pain; I felt like I might pass out. I somehow managed to remember that I had my radio on me, and I called in to the store for help. I remember going into an ambulance. I remember calling my mom, who was freaking out when I told her what happened. I went to the hospital.

Ultimately, we were granted a settlement of something like $25,000. Between the lawyers’ fees and other expenses, our take-home was in the neighborhood of $13,000.

My mother was adamant about getting an attorney involved. My thinking was more along the lines of “That’s fucked up, but shit happens.” But she was a union worker and saw it differently. She believed that some kind of workplace safety violation had to have taken place in order for me to be laid up like this, and she felt like there was a civil case, at the very least. She reached out to an attorney named April Gilmore, who was happy to meet with us.

Tests showed that I had several torn ligaments in my ankle. This meant I had to be on crutches for the rest of the winter. I spent the next three months navigating ice and snow on one leg and waking up early to go to physical therapy before school. I had to give up basketball, which broke my heart. Sports had become one of the things tying me to my performance in school. Sports got me out of bed in the morning, helped me struggle through tests and long homework nights. I loved competing, being part of a team, all of us lifting each other up, giving everything to achieve our one common goal of winning. Losing that was like losing a best friend, losing a purpose. I’ve heard professional athletes talk about falling into depression when they get injured, and I understand it. It’s not just that you miss playing the sport; it’s really that you miss the camaraderie, the community. You are suddenly very isolated and in pain, and you don’t know how long you’re going to be stuck there.

Nevertheless, something else kicked in. I started devoting myself to recovery. I made sure to make each physical therapy appointment, pushing myself through the pain. I trained at every opportunity I got, stayed in the weight room before and after school, treated rehab like a religion. I just wanted to get back out there. I didn’t want to be sidelined forever. It was not long before I graduated from crutches to a walking boot. As the months wore on, another motivation began to drive me: Even though I had been trying at my academics, I could not focus enough to get the grades necessary for a college scholarship. I had already been forced to go to summer school after my freshman year, and I was going to have to go after my sophomore year to make up missed credits. I had to admit that academics were not going to be the path for me. I had to make this sports thing work if I was to have any chance.

My coaches motivated me too. I think they saw that I was a good athlete, and they knew, as I knew, that sports were a net positive for me. Every day, it seemed, coaches were telling me to keep at it, reminding me that I’d be at full strength pretty soon if I just stayed focused. It was a difficult time, for sure, but I had a goal in mind: to play sports again at a high level. And I can be very motivated when there’s a goal in sight.

My body healed fairly well. Not 100 percent, but close enough for me to at least have a shot at athletics again. It definitely helped that as a sophomore I was young enough to regenerate cells quickly. Basketball was still too difficult with all of its quick cuts and lateral movements, but I was able to make the track team. Even as I began to enjoy some success at track, I faced occasional setbacks. My ankle would randomly swell up; I’d have to sit in the ice bath after practice while everyone else went home. The bigger picture started to become clear to me: I might be able to compete and win at the high school level, maybe even at the college level, but this injury would nag me for the rest of my life. I tried to put my anxieties about this out of my mind, but every swollen ankle would bring them back up again.

As the months dragged on, so did the case. There were motions and countermotions, letters and evidence requests, and so on. The wheels of justice grind slowly, as they say. We ultimately ended up in arbitration. It was a one-day thing. I sat in a conference room with my attorney, my mother, the couple, and their legal representatives. My mother was understandably on edge, angry, as any mother would be with someone who hit her kid with a car and just left him lying in a parking lot.

I remember jokingly asking her to make sure she didn’t start swinging on people in the conference room.

In the arbitration hearing, the woman who hit me was crying and very remorseful. Because there were so many witnesses, the police had apparently picked her up right away. It had been her birthday weekend, and she spent it in jail. I had some sympathy for them. I wasn’t angry; I just wanted to get compensated for the damages. But then their side tried to argue that since I had started running track, and even by that point had a few items in the local papers about my victories, I couldn’t have been that badly damaged. That was really the only part that pissed me off. I had busted my ass every single day to recover and build my ankle and my body back to competition level, and it had not been easy. I didn’t like that they were using my motivation and hard work as evidence against me. It would not be the last time this would happen in my life.

Ultimately, we were granted a settlement of something like $25,000. Between the lawyers’ fees and other expenses, our take-home was in the neighborhood of $13,000. It was not a lot of money, but at the time it seemed like a lot to me, a teenager making minimum wage. I also had the option to reopen the case in a couple of years if there were further medical issues. We had also sued Target, so along with the settlement from the couple, I got a modest workers’ compensation payout. It seemed to me at the time that things had basically worked out.

Once I could walk well enough to work again, I went back into the Target store to figure out when my return date would be and work out my schedule. But when I went in, I was informed that I had been fired. I can’t remember what reason they gave me, but it seemed to me that it had to do with me suing them.

If it was performance related, then why hadn’t they fired me before?

I didn’t know if that was legal or not. I didn’t know the first thing about labor laws, and Target was for sure not unionized, so I just accepted it. It did seem unfair that I got hit by a car while doing my job and ended up getting fired as a result. But that’s just how it is, I thought. I didn’t know you could do anything about stuff like that.

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From When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class by Chris Smalls. Copyright © 2026. Available from Pantheon Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.