HFC at Doc Days ‘24: Union Review

If there’s one spark of hope in U.S. labor right now, it’s the growing power of unions. From workers at three Starbucks stores in Buffalo, NY, sparking a movement of 8,000 unionizing employees nationwide to the months-long SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, we’re in uncharted, promising territory—and ever closer to the dream of a general strike.

Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, which had its Texas premiere at the Austin Film Society’s Doc Days festival on May Day, takes us back to one of the first beacons of hope in the current unionizing moment. From summer 2021 to spring 2022, the filmmakers bore witness to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful organization of an Amazon warehouse. 

Images of ALU’s former president Chris Smalls in conversation with Biden and Bernie and outsmarting Tucker Carlson on Fox News went viral in the months leading up to and after the ALU’s vote to unionize. But in Union, Story and Maing dig into the man and his comrades behind the success story.

The film opens on a busful of workers cramming into the gray warehouse in the early morning dawn before cutting to footage from Jeff Bezos’ infamous rocket trip to space. This David-versus-Goliath setup would almost be too on the nose if it weren’t true to life. Throughout the film, we see Smalls and his fellow organizers hold strategy sessions against a multi-billion-dollar corporation via Zoom meetings and group huddles under a tent outside the warehouse. The question of “how do we even go up against all that money and all that power?” is one the organizers ask themselves repeatedly.

It’s a testament to Story and Maing that they manage to make a thrilling story from the mundanity of COVID-era organizing. In the background of the video calls, we see Smalls’ kids doing Zoom school on their iPads; in one scene, an organizer tries to phonebank from his bathtub over the voices of his roommates in a tiny New York apartment. 

These personal moments effectively communicate the tension of the organizers’ situations and the stakes of what ALU is fighting for. After secretly recording union-busting tactics during a staff meeting, Amazon worker and ALU member Natalie ends her shift and parks in an empty lot to spend the night in her car. Later, Smalls finds out that she’s been living there for three years. Organizer Angelika Maldonado shared in an after-screening Q&A that she would work 12-hour overnight shifts, take the bus home, get her son ready for school and drop him off, sleep, and repeat. She used this experience as a way to build solidarity and gain support for ALU, trauma-bonding with other moms in the warehouse dealing with similar situations.

That solidarity runs through the film like a spark. Watching footage of the organizers camped outside the warehouse offering pizza, soda, camaraderie–and at one point, free weed—to their fellow workers is galvanizing. Every small scene of an initially distrustful employee being won over by the spirit of worker power feels like a personal win. 

Story and Maing expertly counter those scenes with iPhone footage of staff meetings where union busters parrot party lines and of NYPD unnecessarily escalating peaceful organizing situations into arrests. We also see hints of what breaks leftist organizing movements apart: infighting that threatens to prevent progress, factions forming and splintering off, and the ever-present pressure of maintaining momentum before it runs out. 

The access Story and Maing get to their subjects is admirable, but one wishes their footage was tied together more tightly. The documentary flits from scene to scene and person to person without much of a structure or overarching storyline. While title cards split Union into the four seasons over which the filming took place, and blocks of text occasionally explain what stage of organizing we’re at, it’s still hard to ground yourself in what’s happening. That ultimately makes the pivotal moment—the organizers waiting outside the NLRB for results of the union count—somewhat anticlimactic. 

Despite these structural flaws, Union ends up being something special. Focusing on a small but mighty part of the broader labor movement makes the success of the story seem achievable. By taking a front-row look at the ins-and-outs of grassroots organizing, Story and Maing provide a toolbox of ideas for building solidarity and strong movements.