The new documentary from Brett Story (The Hottest August) and Stephen T. Maing (Crime + Punishment) is an imperfect film, in that it often raises more questions about its subject than its observational mode can satisfactorily answer. And we will get to those details in a moment. But Union is a film uniquely poised to accomplish one very important thing. Unless you are a right-wing fanatic who believes to their very core that corporations should have more rights than individual citizens, and that billionaires like Jeff Bezos are Nietzschean supermen who cannot and should not be held to the same basic moral standards as the rest of us, then it’s very likely that after watching this film you will never order anything from Amazon ever again. As Union makes very clear, this is a company that holds its workforce in contempt, subjecting them to algorithm-driven supersurveillance, finding any excuse to terminate employees because rapid turnover and a sense of total isolation in a chaotic environment are fundamental to their labor strategy. Everything about Amazon represents end-times dystopian capitalism, and by supporting them, you are casting your vote for an ever-worsening world.
Having said that, there is a sense that Union understands that Amazon’s death-star status is self-evident, so much so that it fails to fully articulate the parameters of its subject matter. That would be the formation of the Amazon Labor Union at the company’s Staten Island sorting facility. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the irony that Amazon’s campus are officially called “fulfillment centers,” which is akin to referring to a prison as a “freedom curtailment zone.”) Story and Maing appear to be documenting the ALU’s grassroots organizing efforts almost from the beginning, and so much of what we see centers on the small inner circle of officers, most notably head organizer Chris Smalls who, in addition to being the prime mover of the ALU, also became the public face of the movement in the media.
Although several other ALU officers are seen participating in the efforts to gather signatures for a potential election or communicate their message to their fellow workers, Union puts Smalls front and center. This in itself is a problem that is addressed by other union members late in the film, when they are arguing for changes in tactics and feel that Smalls is shutting them down. But a documentary like Union ought to be able to offer an outside perspective on this very question. Is the ALU subject to, and potentially undermined by, a cult of personality? Instead of examining this very real issue, Union participates in it, taking Smalls’ absolute centrality as a given.
When one union member, Natalie, ultimately abandons the ALU because she feels marginalized as a woman, the film implicitly positions her as a turncoat, and her very real concerns don’t receive a fair hearing. Likewise, following a dust-up with the NYPD, a union member named Jason, who is coded as both queer and non-neurotypical, is understandably panicked. “This is what we signed on for,” he’s told, but there’s not much sympathy with the fact that he was unexpectedly traumatized at his place of work. To be clear, the core group of organizers are a multi-racial coalition, even though there is only one woman-identified individual among them. But anyone who has studied the history of labor movements, particularly in the United States, knows that there is a long history of women and gender-nonconforming folks being sidelined, their concerns deemed secondary to the workers’ cause.
It’s not that the ALU are actively doing this. Rather, it’s that they don’t appear to be actively working not to do it. Again, this is the sort of problem that a documentary ought to explore, since it has every relevance to the future success of a renewed labor movement. But like the ALU itself, Union is most concerned with being “effective,” and that means fighting on the terrain as it is found. The film rightly celebrates a glimmer of hope in an era of all-encompassing darkness, but with a bit more insight, it might’ve pointed the way toward future victories. That said, it absolutely conveys the deleterious impact of Amazon on the human condition, and that alone makes Union worth a look.
DIRECTOR: Stephen Maing & Brett Story; DISTRIBUTOR: Level Ground Productions; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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