A coalition of the Service Employees International Union, the Strategic Organizing Center and the Amazon Labor Union staged a Ball Without Billionaires in downtown Manhattan on Monday morning, hours before Anna Wintour's Met Gala opened uptown with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as honorary chairs. [1] Workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, The Washington Post, Starbucks and Uber walked the runway as models, wearing pieces by ethically-minded designers.

April Watson, who works at an Amazon warehouse in northeast Georgia, modeled the event. "I want to raise awareness about our safety issues that we're having in the Amazon warehouses," she said, citing performance quotas she described as injury-driving. [1] Cindy Castro, a New York designer who immigrated from Ecuador, said the math was simple: "If there is that money to sponsor this gala, there should also be money to pay the workers fairly."

The event followed a month-long campaign by the activist group Everyone Hates Elon, which papered the city with posters reading "The Bezos Met Gala: Brought to you by worker exploitation." Subway ads from the same campaign referenced ICE data contracts and Amazon-warehouse bottle stories. [2]

The cross-thread is sharp: Bezos owns The Washington Post; WaPo's unionized newsroom workers were in the runway lineup downtown while Amazon's lead-sponsor money funded the museum benefit uptown. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had already broken decades of mayoral tradition by skipping the Met, citing affordability. The downtown ball is the labor side of the same refusal — a rare day when the Met Gala had to share the camera.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York