Barbara Kopple’s documentary about app-based delivery workers is a stirring, defiant, battle-hardened affair, swinging between the fraught picket line and the still more hazardous New York City streets. It’s a new film that feels old in the best sense of the word; a hoarse battle cry that summons the ghosts of The Grapes of Wrath and the New Deal, Eugene Debs and Woody Guthrie. That America is long dead and buried, a casualty of changing times, but Kopple sees no reason why it should not rise again.
Union Town, tellingly, is the third part of a loose trilogy which serves as an ongoing audit of US workers’ rights. This began with 1976’s Harlan County, USA, which tackled a Kentucky miners’ strike, and continued through 1990’s American Dream, which covered a meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. Since then, however, the culture has shifted, atomised, with the big corporations increasingly reliant on a shadow economy of undocumented workers. Kopple’s “deliveristas” ferry packages for the likes of Amazon and DoorDash but they are technically third-party contractors. That means if, say, they happen to be injured in the line of duty, they cover the hospital bills and repairs to the bike. It also means that they are likely to be fired while they’re laid up in bed.
