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.
Kopple spotlights a push by the Teamsters union to unionise Amazon’s disparate workforce, which culminates in a paralysing six-day strike over the 2024 Christmas period (“You’re killing Santa,” a disapproving news anchor tells Teamster president Sean O’Brien). Along the way, the film collates a lengthy and damning rap sheet. We hear from the warehouse employees who pack boxes in 105-degree (40.5C) heat, the delivery drivers who sleep in their cars and earn $7 an hour, and the exhausted migrant workers who live under threat of being apprehended by ICE. Kopple’s fly-on-the-wall approach ensures that these invisible workers have names, faces and voices – and it’s only the bosses who refuse to break cover. The sole one we hear from is Carol Tomé, the grandmotherly CEO of UPS. She materialises on a TV business show to enthuse about the benefits of putting robots in the warehouse. Robots would be better, she giggles. More efficient; “No attitude.”
Union Town is keen to emphasise the positives. Solidarity pays dividends. David slew Goliath. “Jeff Bezos is Darth Vader,” says one Teamster. “And we’re the rebel army.” And yet the unavoidable takeaway of this bleakly potent picture is that this struggle is Sisyphean, with the membership split and confused and actively voting against their own interests. The Amazon drivers envy the UPS drivers; 60% of Teamster members support Trump. Outside the Amazon headquarters at night, the union’s Chris Williamson maintains what is effectively a one-man picket line after everyone else has gone home. He’s freezing his feet off in the New York slush and angrily, desperately calling for reinforcements.
