‘Union’ Review: Amazon Workers Unionize (original) (raw)

Movies|‘Union’ Review: A Labor Fight to the Finish at Amazon

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/movies/union-review.html

Critic’s Pick

‘Union’ Review: A Labor Fight to the Finish at Amazon

As this documentary by Brett Story and Stephen Maing chronicles, the efforts to unionize a warehouse in New York were successful — but also a grind.

A group of people stand around a group of microphones. Behind them, people are holding signs that read “I support Amazon workers” and “Union rights for all Amazon workers.”

Christian Smalls, center, is a founder of the Amazon Labor Union, the group striving to represent the workers in the documentary “Union.”Credit...Level Ground Productions

Oct. 17, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET

Union

NYT Critic’s Pick

Directed by Stephen Maing, Brett Story

Documentary

Not Rated

1h 40m

When employees at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, the result was seen as a major victory for organized labor. A year earlier, the documentarians Brett Story (“The Hottest August”) and Stephen Maing (“Crime + Punishment”) got on the ground with the workers and the organizers; in their engrossing new film, “Union,” they show how the vote’s outcome was hardly assured.

The filmmakers introduce Christian Smalls — a founder of the Amazon Labor Union, the group striving to represent the workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center — as he grills food at a tent outside the warehouse. Even then, in 2021, Smalls is already, as a woman meeting him puts it, “low-key famous,” having been fired in 2020 after planning and attending a walkout over pandemic safety conditions.

“Union” is partly about the grind of organizing: of chatting with workers over burgers, of attending video meetings, of resolving petty disputes. Smalls’s leadership does not always command the group’s full confidence. Natalie Monarrez, an early ally, grows disillusioned as “Union” proceeds. “I can’t leave one boys’ club at Amazon and work for another boys’ club in the union,” she tells Madeline Wesley, an organizer and recent college graduate who becomes another compelling voice in the story.

Like Barbara Kopple’s organized labor documentary “American Dream,” “Union” is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well, as Smalls and company face daunting math and an anti-union campaign from inside, where the sometimes-tense footage, the filmmakers have said, was shot by the workers themselves.

Union
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.

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