A raw examination of labor organization at its most powerful, pure, and fragile, “Union” is a look at union drama uncut and without any guardrails. Verité to a fault, directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story present the documentary with a detached remove that isn’t matched by the framing of the central conflict, and yet morsels of true inspiration still manage to tumble forth. Inspiring on purpose and insightful in spite of itself, “Union” sort of backs its way into a compelling story.
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The doc tracks the efforts of former and current employees of Amazon’s Staten Island, NY, fulfillment center as they attempt to organize a workers’ union. Chris Smalls leads the group from a makeshift canopy tent headquarters just outside the massive shipping complex, where he meets with past and present workers to discuss the logistics of their struggle. These people represent a culturally diverse cross-section of men and women whose motivations for the movement seem as diverse as their backgrounds.
This is understandable, because Chris’ leadership of the burgeoning Amazon Labor Union (ALU) highlights his own ever-shifting posture, goal, and reason to be as de facto president. When speaking to potential union members, Chris mentions that he started organizing after he realized Amazon wasn’t providing its workers with the PPE necessary to ensure their safety despite the company moving literally warehouses of that same material. In his private moments, however, Chris expresses more vindictive motivations, admitting that a genuine goal of his is to “punch them [Amazon] in the face.”
“Union” follows Chris and the ALU’s movement over the course of about a year, starting in the Spring of 2021, leading to the vote in March 2022 that saw the Staten Island workers form the first Amazon warehouse workers union. Maing and Story’s presentation relies on real-time testimonials from Chris and other organizers like Madeline Wesley, a college-educated ally who joins Amazon as an inside “salt.” Titlecards appear periodically to outline the different phases of the process, such as signature requirements, outside-union cooperation, and voting requirements for incorporation, which guide “Union” through and past its narrative signposts.
Watching “Union,” one gets the sense that this is all meant to be inspiring in a David versus Goliath sort of way, but what comes across is just how difficult large-scale labor organizing is and the admirable yet sometimes misguided nature of Chris and the ALU’s approach. Their movement is honest, straightforward, and simple enough for anyone to understand, yet it leaves no room for compromise, competing visions, or a broader appeal to other organizations that don’t see eye to eye with them. Worse still, the man leading the charge seems to be focused on his own personal retribution rather than the needs of his fellow members, saying at one point, “I hope I get the last laugh.”
On the one hand, Maing and Story should be commended for including these complicated and difficult moments to present the most honest picture of the events, yet their failure to probe the fascinating duality of this fight is borderline tragic. “Chris is going to do what he wants to do, period,” an Amazon worker remarks late in the film as she explains why she’s voting against the ALU. Madeline tries to parry this devastating feedback, yet the exhaustion on her face and lack of any sensible retort tells so much of the story here (and it’s one “Union” too often side-steps).
A few direct interviews with Madeline and Chris to ask them directly how (or if) their vision of organizing the ALU and their place in it changed over the course of the year might have provided some much-needed context for the events that transpire. If nothing else, it would have given voice to the drama only hinted at through the roughly 110-minute runtime (and would have been a far more interesting story than the straightforward A-to-B narrative presented here).
The visual components of “Union” work well, though not with any sense of subtlety. Images of Jeff Bezos’s rocket juxtaposed against Chris’ canopy or the B-roll footage of the shipping container-laden cargo ships spliced throughout the doc set the stakes and scale of the conflict well, even if the visual metaphors sometimes seem a little on the obvious side of heavy-handed. Hidden camera footage of life inside the Amazon fulfillment center and the company’s anti-union slideshows represent some of the best moments of the piece and ably frame the struggle for what it is: a fight for the basic professional protections entry-level workers rarely enjoy.
A fascinating look at an all-too-common struggle that has defined generations of workers fighting to balance the needs of individuals against the united protection of the many, “Union” sets out to inspire but ends up educating instead. In what feels like an accidental expose of the most difficult aspects of labor organizing by way of Chris, Madeline, and Staten Island’s ALU, the film should be used as an educational primer to outline not just the possibilities of inspired organizing but also its uglier, more complicated side. Content to tell just one story despite a far more interesting one just under the surface, Maing and Story’s honesty and remove from the filmmaking process has produced an unvarnished, raw document that offers up a slice of history: warts and all. With just a little more prodding, though, they might have tapped into something profound and special that highlights more than just one isolated, semi-successful struggle. [B]
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