The co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, Derrick Palmer, joined in conversation by Anastasia Mann, discusses his book "Handbook for the Revolution: Building a More Perfect Union for the Twenty-First Century."
On April 1, 2022, the Amazon warehouse known as JFK8, in Staten Island, notched an improbable victory when its workers voted to become the company’s first unionized facility. Miraculously, a completely self-taught and worker-led union had defeated one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. In the aftermath, two of the founders of the Amazon Labor Union, Derrick Palmer and Chris Smalls, began traveling across the country to help workers at Amazon and other corporations form their own unions. Unsurprisingly, nearly everyone they met had the same question: How did they do it?
In "Handbook for the Revolution," Derrick Palmer, who continues to work at JFK8, provides the answer in the form of a how-to guide to organizing in today’s workplace while providing gripping, never before-told anecdotes from the ALU's fight and its plans for the future. Practical, philosophical, and full of personality, Palmer’s manual-cum-manifesto is an accessible step-by-step playbook for the often contentious and complex process of unionization, and a powerful call for equality—and greater understanding—through worker solidarity.
Full of hard-won lessons and personal experience, and written in the context of mass consolidation, fluctuating labor laws, and an ever widening wealth gap, Handbook for the Revolution is an invaluable resource for the modern labor movement, a thrilling chronicle of persistence, and an inspiring push for change in the workplace—and beyond.
About the Author:
Derrick Palmer is the vice president and co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, which, in 2021, successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse for the first time in the company’s history. In 2022, he was honored as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and, along with his cofounder Christian Smalls, as one of the Dynamic Duos on the 2022 EBONY Power 100 list. He lives in Staten Island, New York, and continues to work as an employee at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse there.
In conversation:
Anastasia Mann is a lecturer at Princeton University and the founding director of SPIA in NJ. Her work focuses on struggles for economic rights and racial justice by, for, and with communities on the margins of American society. Trained as a historian, Stacy’s interests include reparations and transitional justice, immigrant organizing, access to quality public services, social welfare and social control, kinship, leisure, and mutual aid. Her work is attuned to the ways that gender, race, class, and ethnicity shape structures of opportunity. Mann’s career spans academia (Northwestern, Princeton, Rutgers), research-driven nonprofits (the Russell Sage Foundation, New Jersey Policy Perspective), and the civic sphere (Princeton’s Human Services and Civil Rights Commissions, and the New Jersey Commission on New Americans). Her publications include contributions to The Encyclopedia of Working Class America (Routledge), Flunking Out: New Jersey’s Support for Public Higher Education Falls Short, Garden State Dreams: In-State Tuition for Undocumented Kids (both New Jersey Policy Perspective), and Middlesex County, New Jersey: Crossroads of the World (Rutgers, Eagleton Institute).