UNION is this year’s most popular documentary you’ve never heard of. Despite winning a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing could not find a distributor for their documentary about a ragtag group of workers’ fight to organize Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, and have instead opted to release it independently. Maing told the Hollywood Reporter that some distributors told him they had to turn the film down for fear of risking their relationships with Amazon, which is the second-largest private employer in the U.S. and the second-largest company in the world by revenue. This shows you just how important the film is.
UNION opens with Chris Smalls, the highly charismatic, highly controversial founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). Smalls, a father of three, was fired from JFK8 for organizing a walkout protesting the site’s lack of proper protective equipment early in the COVID-19 pandemic. From there, he brought together employees from Amazon, Target, and Walmart to form The Congress of Essential Workers, which later grew into the ALU. Two years later, workers at the JFK8 warehouse center voted to recognize the union in an National Labor Review Board (NLRB) election, marking the first ever union win at an Amazon warehouse.
As one organizer notes early in the film, most Amazon workers have never participated in a union. This is also true for most workers in the United States, as union density has dwindled from roughly 20 percent in 1983 to around 10 percent nationwide in 2022, with the most devastating losses occuring in the private sector. The filmmakers, however, seem to assume that viewers will know what an independent union is, and how the organizing process works from start to finish. (A friend who watched the film with me felt she walked away with as many questions as answers.) What UNION most effectively demonstrates is what organizers already know: that union organizing is one of the hardest undertakings imaginable. Hard because you’re working with other people, who are, by nature, complicated and often illogical, but much harder still because our labor laws are so stacked against workers.
To file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), 30 percent of workers must sign authorization cards. Filing at only 30 percent, however, is a recipe for disaster, as the union’s list of employees rarely matches up with the employer’s list for a variety of reasons. Organizing at Amazon, where the turnover rate is so high that those who quit each year outnumber all of the company’s total warehouse employees, is a particular challenge. All of this combined with Amazon’s endless resources, which allow the company to union-bust with abandon, makes Smalls and the ALU’s victory even more unbelievable.
Smalls is the hero of the film, holding organizing meetings on Zoom while helping his kids log in for virtual school, then FaceTiming them from the Amazon parking lot, promising to come home soon. Any union organizer who has spent time on the road—sleeping in sterile hotel rooms, eating cold pizza, drinking too much booze—will feel their heart break during these scenes. And watching a young child tentatively say “ALU” into the megaphone is equally touching, a reminder that long days of organizing are in service of something bigger than ourselves. The endless Zoom meetings; the hours spent in the blazing heat and freezing cold pitching workers on the union as they clock in and out; the unfair (and probably illegal) write-ups, terminations, and incessant surveillance—it’s enough to break anyone. But Smalls and his crew persevere.
Their fight, however, is not without setbacks and personal tensions. Throughout the film, an uncomfortable truth rears its head: Smalls thinks very highly of himself, and less highly of the other workers around him. When Justine, one of ALU’s “salts”—union-speak for someone who enters into a workplace with the intention of organizing—disagrees with Smalls’s strategy on when to file for the union election, he talks down to her, as though she knows nothing about organizing. Smalls also yells at Madeline, who moved from Florida to New York to salt at the facility, telling her he’s sacrificed more than anyone else for the union fight. Later in the film, Nat, a worker previously involved with the ALU, calls the union “a boys’ club,” and points at Smalls, who is clearly running the show. (Smalls departed ALU leadership earlier this year amid internal tensions; in June, the membership elected a reform-focused slate led by Connor Spence into leadership.)
But UNION shows that while union organizing is incredibly difficult, it is also beautiful. In one scene, worker-organizers present one of their fellow workers with a birthday cake, who then shares how his life has changed through organizing. In a large and atomized workplace, the ALU does something Amazon could never do: It brings people together. The act of building a union also builds trust, and allows people to be vulnerable with one another. In one scene, a seasonal worker FaceTimes with Smalls after being fired for the third time due to overstaffing. because she was a seasonal worker and Amazon was “overstaffed.” In another, Smalls is told that a worker is homeless, and he vows to help her (although whether he does is never shown).
At the film’s climax, the ALU secures a stunning upset victory at Amazon. While one worker makes a point to call the victory “not a miracle”—as that framing ignores the discipline and determination of the organizers—it may as well be, given the uneven playing field between Amazon and its workers. But winning the union election is only the beginning of the ALU’s fight: Two years after their win, the workers of JFK8 still do not have a contract ratified with Amazon, while NLRB elections at two other Amazon warehouses have resulted in losses.
The ALU’s win at JFK8 is not easily replicable. To do so, the labor movement will need to fight like hell for the PRO Act and other labor law reform. That is why Amazon and other media conglomerates do not want you to see UNION. Even despite their challenges, unions are the only thing that can actually deliver on the promises made by candidates in every recent election: well-paying jobs, protected health care, and the community that comes with building them.