When Amazon workers on Staten Island successfully voted to unionize in the spring of 2022, becoming the corporate retailer's first American workplace to do so, it was hailed as one of the most important labor victories in the United States in nearly 100 years.
For the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) to organize employees at the JFK8 warehouse to vote in favor of union representation was a David versus Goliath story for the age of globalization — and a rousing reminder that collective grassroots efforts can still succeed despite massive employer concentration, management intimidation, and other hindrances to building worker power. And that an independent, worker-led coalition led the drive at this 8,000-plus-employee facility, rather than an established union, made its victory all the more impressive, even as the vote to unionize brought organizers into uncharted territory and set up a protracted legal battle with Amazon, which has since refused to recognize the ALU or negotiate a contract.
Telling the story of how the ALU reached this historic moment, "Union," a new documentary co-directed by Brett Story ("The Hottest August") and Stephen Maing ("Crime + Punishment"), takes a detail-driven, ground-level approach, following current and former Amazon employees in Staten Island as they mount a grassroots worker-to-worker campaign, standing their ground against one of the world's powerful corporations all the while.
No talking-head documentary but a keenly observational chronicle of the unionization push and its aftermath, "Union" often plays like a thriller by virtue of its sharp, smart editing rhythms. Early on, Story and Maing juxtapose Jeff Bezos blasting off into space on a rocket made by his Blue Origin company and Amazon workers trudging wearily into work; it captures the unimaginable scale of the company's operations while foregrounding the human scale often concealed by breathless (yet inevitably compromised) reporting of Amazon's designs on empire.
Made over the course of three years, Story and Maing's film explores the human cost of the convenience economy and illuminates oppressive working conditions in Amazon's factories. From constant surveillance to high injury rates and a lack of breaks, the pressures of working in Amazon warehouses compound to create punishing environments for workers, ones Amazon has steadfastly refused to address or even accurately report. And the threat of retaliation against workers who organize is ever-present; in addition to pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into union-busting campaigns that include mandatory "captive audience" meetings (which have since been banned in the state of New York), Amazon issues warnings of possible termination to workers involved with the unionization drive.
Bookended by footage of vast cargo ships transporting goods, a reminder of the slow, perpetual motion with which the gears of modern capitalism grind on, Story and Maing's film is smart in how systematically its narrative lays out obstacles to the union's success. It also insightfully depicts ground-level dialogue between workers as a powerful tool with which to overcome them. Some of the most remarkable footage, inside Amazon headquarters, covertly films one of those captive audience meetings; here, the company's anti-union propaganda (One reads: "We're asking you to do three simple things: get the facts, ask questions and vote no to the union") is disrupted by ALU organizers, who successfully push back on Amazon managers just long enough to make their case to workers.
One of the ALU organizers, Chris Smalls, takes center stage in "Union," though the documentary largely sidesteps the temptation to cast him as a conquering hero. (That'd be an easy trap, given that he became the organization's public face across the period "Union" depicts.) Smalls, fired from Amazon after protesting inadequate PPE provision during the pandemic (and besmirched by the company's general counsel as "not smart or articulate" in an internal meeting of executive leaders), is a father of three who was moved to activism by the flagrant injustice of the company's abusive labor practices. As a leader, he's at once charismatic and hard-charging, dedicated to his fellow "comrades" but ever driven to push forward even in the face of inter-union dissent.
One of the film's great strengths is its ability to surface the multiplicity of tensions between organizers working toward a shared cause. Take the world of difference separating the experiences of two subjects: Maddie, a white college graduate using her campus activism experience to help the cause, and Natalie, an older Latina woman living out of her car for years. In one charged exchange, Natalie pushes back on the suggestion, made by white male organizers, that Chris intentionally gets himself arrested by New York police officers to draw attention to the unionization drive. Ultimately, Natalie's dissatisfaction with the ALU—due to her disagreements with leadership as much as her desire to wait for larger union support—leads her to leave the organization. It's a testament to the complexity of individual motivations and the absence of easy triumph in this type of effort.
"Union" documents the internal debates and disagreements over governance, organizing, and leadership strategies that divided the ALU before its successful unionization vote and were compounded by its subsequent failed attempt to unionize a second warehouse. Though Smalls' force of personality, passion, and determination fueled the fight to unionize JFK8, the film carefully depicts this as a collective victory. It rarely gives in to the temptation to single out Smalls for praise at the expense of others, and making it clear that his leadership style also contributed to internal rifts in the ALU that at various points may have weakened its ability to further the union's mission.
This becomes particularly important in the film's latter half, after the unionization vote, at which point the sobering realities of the long work ahead come more fully into view. The heroism of the ALU organizers will never be in question. But with only one battle won in the war for workers' rights, and Amazon continuing to contest or undercut its results by every means available, "Union" concludes on a note of weary fortitude rather than declarative victory. The film captures both the pain and the power of people at the base of a global infrastructure. By not departing from the frontlines of the fight against Amazon's labor exploitation, Story and Maing bring the true face of their struggle into focus.
"Union" will be self-distributed theatrically, starting on Oct. 18. This review was filed from the film's New York premiere at the New York Film Festival.
