‘Union’ Review: A Smart, Compellingly Complicated Documentary About the Amazon Union Struggle

Daniel Fienberg
·5 min read
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There’s a simple David vs. Goliath story at the heart of Chris Smalls’ multi-year fight to unionize Amazon workers in Staten Island during the COVID pandemic. It’s a satisfying tale of one man taking on the wealthiest company in the world, and in broad strokes it’s an accurate story — hence the way it has generally been reported in news coverage and deep dives in places like Last Week Tonight.

I’m tremendously relieved that that’s not the version Stephen Maing and Brett Story present in their new documentary, Union.

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Without devaluing the heroism of Smalls’ crusade or underselling the general inhumanity of Amazon’s treatment of its lowest-level workers, Union sets out to be something closer to a warts-and-all process documentary. Using unobtrusive direct cinema techniques, the documentary takes us inside the fledgling union, capturing the frustration and elation of trying to do the right thing in an impossible historical moment. It’s a nuanced portrait of the challenges of leadership and a revealing celebration of the values of persistence, solidarity and free weed.

Some people looking for that David vs. Goliath version may be disappointed that Union isn’t as aggressively anti-Amazon as it absolutely could be. But I think it’s a much better and more universal film for the choices it makes.

Eschewing voiceover narration, clarifying talking heads and, for the most part, explanatory on-screen text, Maing and Story drop viewers into the lives of Amazon workers in the spring of 2021.

Like a scene out of Metropolis or a Soviet documentary about the nobility of labor, the documentary begins with the procession of sleepy, pale workers from different modes of public transportation to the Amazon fulfillment warehouses in the waning minutes before dawn. As the men and women of JFK8 are making their way to a job where they can be disciplined without warning and fired without evident cause, we see the launch of a Blue Origin rocket carrying, among other people, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos into space. The contrast could not be clearer: As unrest is building among his workforce, the richest man on Earth’s attentions are as far from ground-level concerns as the bonds of gravity would allow.

Across the street from the depot that brings the workers in and out each day, Smalls has set up a small booth. With a small crew of worker-volunteers, he’s giving out free hamburgers and hot dogs and, occasionally, free marijuana, and urging workers to sign union petitions in the hopes of getting the Amazon Labor Union to a pivotal workplace vote.

Inside the walls of the warehouse, where the filmmakers are occasionally able to take us thanks to purloined cell phone footage, new workers are being led into overlit, socially distanced meeting rooms where they’re led through the most predictable onslaught of union-busting propaganda. They’re told a union would get in the way of the nurturing and personal relationship between the company and its team, that dues would be onerous and that the whole operation — 10 people, a hibachi and a premium Zoom account — is designed to line the pockets of union leadership.

Smalls is still presented as the leader among leaders here, but the directors present him as imperfect. He’s occasionally dismissive and often talks over people. He plays to the media and laps up his every opportunity in the spotlight. He doesn’t always seem to know what he’s doing, almost as if he’s just a regular 30something guy living in a tiny apartment with three kids who got thrust into his position. It’s entirely reasonable to think that Smalls’ cause is righteous, but that his approach might not be the only and best approach to unionizing.

Many in his inner circle think just that, and Union does an exceptional job of showing how people who want the same thing can disagree and fight and still move forward. This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world, but hagiography is easier. With impressive access and occasionally uncomfortable intimacy, the directors and the filming team make the camera an equal partner in every debate, focusing on the grand pronouncements and the discordant reactions — every resigned sigh, set jaw and exhausted eye roll — equally.

By the end of the 102-minute film, Union has presented, without any exposition at all, at least a half-dozen of the organizers in ways that make them feel like complicated characters. Nobody is right all the time, but you come away understanding what drives figures like Maddie, college-educated and something of a newcomer in this circle; Natalie, living out of her car and wishing a larger national union would come and lend a hand; or Jason, who seems more vulnerable than the rest of the crew.

The documentary is a lot of talk, but the access puts the filmmakers in the middle of some intense confrontations, and there are set pieces here — a parking-lot showdown with the police, a heated exchange with union busters in one of the orientation sessions — that would be at home in a thriller.

Union stretches across more than a year of highs and lows, some of which will already be known by engaged viewers. Less engaged viewers might yearn for a little more hand-holding on exactly what things Amazon did that are so awful. For me, it’s a documentary about the fight, one that takes the necessity of the fight as a given. That’s amply inspiring.

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