Union, directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, documents the creation of the Amazon Labor Union as a grand drama full of conflicts and triumphs. The film had its international premiere at CPH:DOX 2024.
The real-life stakes are established immediately: Amazon, one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, makes billions of dollars while its workers receive little benefits and live in fear of layoffs. From this setup Union follows the Amazon Labor Union over a single year, beginning shortly after its creation in 2021 and ending with its historic victory in Staten Island. The ALU’s quest is to garner support for an upcoming election that will determine the fate of the union: a majority of the nearly 5,000 Amazon workers need to vote for the union, otherwise the ALU will effectively have to start from scratch.
Central to the documentary is founder Chris Smalls, and his natural charisma and unconventional approaches—the same things that make him a successful union leader—make him the perfect protagonist to design a narrative around. The movie more or less centers around his everyday union efforts, and these would mostly be rote without his natural screen presence and direct interaction with the audience.
Multiple conflicts arise out of the creation of the union and its pivotal election, and the movie shows the many hurdles that unionizers are forced to overcome. Their biggest opponent is of course Amazon itself—the company is happy to terminate workers who show pro-union sympathies, and Amazon workers get $20 an hour while union busters are paid thousands a day. Due to the election, they have also been holding “union talks” with workers, which are one-way dialogues designed to convince workers to remain nonunionized and vote against the ALU.
The documentary draws footage from a variety of eclectic sources, including secretly recorded footage from these meetings. As a result, the movie feels more all-encompassing than a straightforward talking heads documentary would. The audience is invited to live for a year with the union, and as a result every minor roadblock along the journey feels consequential.
Also used for footage are Zoom calls between ALU members, which involves the audience in the internal squabbles that rise within the union, due both to conflicts in ideology and personality. Chris Smalls becomes the center of many conflicts—as much as he has brought to the development and forward momentum of the union, his unconventional means and hardheadedness cause problems with other union members throughout the year. Because his primary goal is to progress the ALU as fast as possible, the union is not backed by other major workers’ unions, which creates problems for other members who want to take a slower and more secure route.
The documentary does a good job of pulling the rug from under Smalls’ mythos: though he’s initially presented to the audience as a messianic people pleaser, this falls apart as more and more ALU members turn against his ways even despite their victory at the Staten Island facility. The movie is openly pro-union but doesn’t hesitate to provide a candid look at how unions can be held back by petty conflicts, and soberly presents the reality of fighting against massive corporations.
The historic union victory—touted in the documentary as the largest workers’ rights achievement of the 21st century—is depicted in poignant scenes of celebration, but soon after tells the audience that reality is rarely so satisfying. The documentary’s ending scenes show that after the ALU’s victory, they were unable to secure further wins at other facilities, and presents the ultimate fate of the union as uncertain.
Union, by documenting the Amazon workers’ fight as a complex epic, poses strong questions about the strength of collective power in the face of overpowering entities like Amazon, and whether working with the enemy is necessary or exactly what the system wants. The ALU’s rise is portrayed as momentous, but its implied fall may be just as rapid—the union has set a historical precedent for global workers’ rights movements, but as a union may or may not last. But despite any uncertainty, the documentary’s resounding message is clear: the fight must go on.
CPH:DOX took place from March 13th to 24th, 2024 in Copenhagen, where standout films such as Once Upon A Time in A Forest, The Labour of Pain and Joy, and The Recovery Channel caught our attention.
