NYFF: "Union" documents a worthwhile cause with insight and intimacy

by Nick Taylor

How is it that two of the year’s best documentaries currently have no major distribution team behind them? Actually, given the subject matter of both films, the logic for each case makes too much sense, but I’ll be using my little bully pulpit to rage against this. One of those films, the Palestinian documentary No Other Land, has already been covered by our beloved Cláudio Alves. The second film in this position is Union, Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s chronicle of the Amazon Labor Union’s grassroots campaign to be recognized by Amazon at the company’s Staten Island facilities in 2021. As an industrial giant whose tendons continue creeping deeper into every industry on the planet, it’s almost funny to watch them take such umbrage about this film when they might save more face by just letting it emerge into the world, rather than giving the ALU yet another chance to raise hell about Amazon silencing unions. In a very real way, the cooperative effort from so many of Union’s producers and backers to give it an Oscar-qualifying release mirrors the grassroots spirit of the film itself. Its release won’t be huge, but Level Ground is making sure it gets out into the world, and hopefully word of mouth praise for its timely subject should be enough to get butts in the theater.

If you want to hear more, join me under the cut . . . .

The nominal center of Union is ALU founder Chris Smalls, a former Amazon employee of eight years who was fired in 2020 for staging a walk-out protesting of the company’s abysmal lack of protection for its staff during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Smalls describes this walk-out as a culmination of years of mistreatment by Amazon HR, along with race-based discrimination that prevented him from ever getting a promotion to management. Now Smalls and several other lieutenants in this fledgling union of current and laid-off employees are working to start a union. They host barbecues on the corner outside the Staten Island factories and distribute literature, working a grassroots campaign based in the ground-level approachability understanding all of these exhausted storeroom grunts share. Reaching the minimum threshold of signatures required to force a vote - 30% of the total staff at a given factory - is gonna require a hell of a lot of elbow grease, especially when Amazon’s insane turnover rate makes it impossible to predict who will still be around in a few months to vote on a measure.

Union will automatically win points among certain viewers by forgoing talking heads to tell its story. The decision to film this as direct cinema makes Union feel akin to a narrative feature in its image-making and characterizations. We learn as much from dialogues and speeches as we do from observing these newly-drafted union lieutenants thinking about what they’re listening to, or preparing a statement in their head that may or may not be what they’re going to say. Roving camera movements and inclusive editing patterns work to make sure we grasp the general atmosphere of a given space as well as the individual impressions of key players. The film’s gutsiest footage, as workers with hidden cameras show us the union-busting tactics and disinformation campaigns used by Amazon to smother the ALU’s efforts, are worth their own weight in gold. More than that, it gives this film a very tangible sense of risk, so much so that we don’t have to spend that much time on the factory floor. 

Formally and structurally, Union embraces the stalls and surges built into such a gigantic effort, and spreads its interests across as many faces as it can. Your mileage may vary on how Story and Maing shape Union as an overall film, but the upside of this approach is the sheer number of memorable interactions that crystallize the different dynamics Union wants to show us about the labor and community of organizing. An interruption of an Amazon anti-union workshop is among the most stunning examples. There’s also a few instances of a camera operator interacting with their subject are genuinely sweet, rushing to help fasten a tarp or chilling out together with their plates of BBQ. As much as I love a fly-on-wall documentary, it’s nice to the filmmaker’s solidarity with the ALU manifest in these small, human-level interactions.

More than a story about waging war against Amazon, Union is about the strategizing, debates, and in-fights across ideological and personal strata that comes from doing so. This approach simply wouldn’t work without Story and Maing’s ability to evoke the different perspectives of the ALU lieutenants so sharply. It’s remarkable how the film manages to be “about” their distinctions across gendered, racial, and generational divides without going so far as to judge Union’s impressive ability to offer personal and ideological insights without hurling judgments against the clearly defined successes and failures of the ALU’s mission is perhaps most evident with Chris Smalls. He’s a fantastic, impassioned orator, able to speak about the ALU’s necessity with practiced skill. At the same time, his fervor turns defensive when other ALU members bring up different strategies for getting more signatures, as if critiques of the process are automatically a critique of him. It makes sense - Smalls has been running the ALU with no support from the Teamsters or any other major union league. He and his people are all he’s got.

Union sees all of this, and leaves it to us to see him beyond some binary of success or failure, impressive or frustrating, as personal fissures are forced to either sublimate themselves in the wake of a vote or make the Amazon workers rift even further apart. The final, pulse-pounding fifteen minutes show some pretty dramatic reversals of fortune, where victory and defeat are only marginally distinguished. For a film that's so embraced a loose, diaphonus structure, it ends on a hell of a gut punch. The ALU's fight is far from over, but Union helps to convey the sheer collective strength needed to get a ball like this rolling.

Union is currently receiving a limited release in New York and LA.

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