The key to worker power in America? Let a thousand Chris Smalls bloom | Steven Greenhouse

Labor leader and fired Amazon worker Chris Smalls says workers at 100 Amazon facilities have contacted him to set up a union. They need support

In recent days, Americans have witnessed developments on the labor front that could have scarcely been imagined just a few years ago. There was the landmark union victory at Amazon's 8,300-employee fulfillment center on Staten Island - at a corporation that many thought impossible to unionize. Then there's the flood of union wins at another iconic company, Starbucks, with the union victorious in 57 of 64 elections at Starbucks cafes, an extraordinarily high winning percentage. What's more, baristas have petitioned for union votes at nearly 200 more Starbucks, notwithstanding CEO Howard Schultz's fierce efforts to squelch the union drive.

At Grinnell College in Iowa, undergraduate workers voted overwhelmingly, 327 to 6, to form the nation's first wall-to-wall undergraduate workers union, representing everyone from dining hall workers to research assistants to library aides. At Dartmouth, student dining hall workers voted 52-0 to unionize. Workers at an REI store in Manhattan voted in favor of unionizing in an 88-14 landslide, becoming the first unionize REI vote. And now tech giant Apple is facing the first-ever union drive at its retail stores.

Steven Greenhouse is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer. A former labor reporter for The New York Times, he has covered unions for over 25 years