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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘UNION’ REVIEW: DOCUMENTARY ALL-STARS STEPHEN MAING AND BRETT
STORY TEAM UP FOR A YOU-ARE-THERE LOOK AT THE FIGHT TO UNIONIZE AN
AMAZON WAREHOUSE  
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David Ehrlich
January 22, 2024
IndieWire
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_ A gripping film about the fight to unionize workers at an Amazon
warehouse in Staten Island might be an observational documentary at
heart, but this in-the-trenches portrait of grassroots organizing
doesn’t leave any doubt as to whose side it's on. _

'Union', IFC Center

 

'UNION' IS SCREENING NOW IN THEATERS AROUND THE COUNTRY.

Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s tough and gripping new film
[[link removed]] about the fight to unionize the
workers of an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island might be an
observational documentary at heart, but this in-the-trenches portrait
of grassroots organizing doesn’t leave any doubt as to whose side
it’s on. Indeed, few movies have ever screamed “fuck you, pay
me!” louder than “Union [[link removed]]”
does with its opening frames, which use footage of Amazon founder Jeff
Bezos blasting into space aboard his self-financed — and
unmistakably phallic — rocketship to set the stage for the struggle
he’s avoiding back on Earth. Watching a mega-billionaire
overcompensate on an interstellar scale would be damning regardless,
but in this context it makes it that much easier to appreciate how
cruelly his business empire is _under _compensating all of the
people who keep it in the blacOf course, the film’s sympathies go
without saying; if you want pro-Amazon propaganda, get a low-paying
and perilously unsafe job at one of their facilities so you can watch
the ghoulish anti-union videos employees are forced to sit through
during their shift breaks. But “Union” is all the more effective
because it doesn’t see the need to argue its case. Instead, the film
is free to focus its attention on how difficult and inspiring it was
and remains for the Amazon Labor Union to press that case into action
— and even just to exist in the first place. 

 
Maing and Story have both displayed their own rare talent for seeing
the urgency in narratives of futility and stagnation (he in police doc
“Crime + Punishment,” and she in her climate portrait “The
Hottest August”), and together they take us into the beating heart
of a union effort as it furiously tries to pump the blood required to
bring a movement to life. That starts, as any chronicle of the ALU
must, with union president Chris Smalls. A brash, passionate, and
relentlessly outspoken former rapper who lost his job at Amazon’s
JFK8 Fulfillment Center after he protested the lack of PPE given to
the workers who were risking their lives to ship masks and other
pandemic essentials to people all over the world, Smalls is both a
pissed-off renegade and a natural leader. On the one hand, he proudly
thinks of himself as the “N.W.A. of the organizing world” and
brags about how Amazon’s top brass has personally belittled his
intelligence. On the other hand, we’re first introduced to him as
he’s grilling hot dogs for hungry workers in the middle of a
freezing New York night, and for all of the conflict that his ego
cooks up along the way, there’s never any doubt about the courage or
sincerity of his convictions. 

Without Smalls, there would be no ALU. _Because of Smalls_, the ALU
might be too divided against itself to stand up to the shady
union-busting tactics that Amazon keeps using to break the
organizers’ spirits. If not for the corporate subterfuge, it would
probably be a lot easier for Smalls and his “comrades” to collect
the signatures they need in order to initiate a union election.
Forcing a vote only requires 30% of the facility’s workforce to
support it, and roughly 100% of the people who toil away at JFK8 —
who risk life-and-limb for a $31,000 salary at a dystopian nightmare
factory where they’re monitored by a snitching algorithm and an army
of inhuman middle managers — can appreciate the appeal of a
worker-led group that would represents their best interests. Alas,
getting _any _significant_ _percentage of the employees to sign on
is tough at a place with an annual turnover rate of more than 150%,
and the ALU is effectively forced to start over from scratch every few
weeks.

And it never gets less painful for Smalls and co. to watch Amazon’s
workers invest far more of themselves into the company than the
company has ever invested in its workers. “Union” takes a
frustratingly glancing approach to the other major figures among the
ALU leadership (many of whom are squeezed into the corners of the Zoom
calls that are so crucial to their organizing), but some of these
people don’t need much screen time to leave a strong impression. 

Among the most fleshed-out of the film’s conflicts is the one that
develops between Smalls and a worker named Natalie; Smalls is
sincerely outraged to learn that Natalie lives in her car despite
working a full-time job at the facility, but his concern for her does
little to mitigate _her_ concerns about him — specifically his
grandstanding and his hard-line approach, which prioritizes long-term
gains over short-term necessities. Maing and Story highlight other
internal frictions in the group as well, such as the disconnect
that’s revealed when one the group’s younger, whiter members
suggests that it might be a good strategy to let Smalls get arrested,
as if the cops would treat him the same way they would treat her. In
that case and others, “Union” is less interested in the details of
these rifts than it is in how they broadly reflect the difficulties of
focusing an entire workforce towards the same fight; it’s easy for
corporate overlords to agree on how to crush their employees because
every idea is a good one, but for several thousand people to push back
against the giant foot on their necks requires all of them to be on
the same page.

In spite — or because — of how eagerly this film throws us into
the frontlines and stays true to its on-the-ground perspective, a
compelling David vs. Goliath story naturally emerges from watching the
ALU race to become real. “Union” seizes upon and deepens our
natural sympathies with Smalls and his cohort, whose fight is our
fight whether you know it or not, and even viewers who’ve been
following this story in the press since the spring of 2021 will likely
find themselves on the edge of their seats as the documentary edges
closer to its climatic vote. 

Of course, that vote isn’t the end of this story, nor is it the end
of this documentary about it. On the contrary, the historic vote is
just the first formal skirmish in a war of attrition that is still
taking shape, and even the outcome of that skirmish is still in flux,
as Amazon has spent the last several years working the refs however it
can. It’s so odd that companies would rather pay several million
dollars to their lawyers than pay a living wage to their own
workers. 

However you slice it, there’s no avoiding the fact that this fight
is just getting started, and “Union” is wise not to manufacture a
false sense of resolution for the convenience of its own dramatic
structure, but it’s still disappointing that the film unravels to an
even greater extreme than the ALU when the group follows its first
major victory with its first major setback, and the documentary’s
concluding text — so optimistic about the ripple effect of the
ALU’s existence — is unsupported by the feeling of disarray that
Maing and Union leave us with in the end. And yet, in part because of
the empire-sized dauntingness of the ALU’s opposition, “Union”
perseveres as a vital and urgent portrait of labor organizing and its
enduring possibility at a time when the fight for workers’ rights
has never seemed more one-sided. To paraphrase Chris Smalls: Let
billionaires like Bezos have fun sightseeing in the cosmos — it
gives the rest of us a golden opportunity to reshape the Earth in
their absence.

______________________

_David Ehrlich is the Reviews Editor and Head Film Critic at
IndieWire. Based in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, their two
young children, and a crushing amount of anxiety that he treats with a
steady diet of esoteric ice creams, British reality dating shows, and
New York Rangers hockey games (which often have the unfortunate effect
of making his anxiety so much worse). He is responsible for overseeing
— and writing many of — the site’s movie reviews._

 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* Documentary Film
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* 'Union'
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* Organizing Amazon Warehouse Workers
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* Chris Smalls
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* Stephen Maing
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* Brett Story
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