THE STORY – “Get up, get down, New York is a union town!” Heard at strikes across the city, this is not simply a rallying cry for unionizing laborers, but also a testament to New York’s legacy as a simmering hub for grassroots organization. The film chronicles essential workers in New York City’s last-mile delivery industry amid an explosive resurgence of organized labor in the nation’s largest metropolis, interweaving struggles within UPS, Amazon, and the mostly immigrant app-based bike delivery workforce.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Barbara Kopple (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 106 Minutes
Imagine that you’re a delivery driver. You’ve been working for years, saving up money to support your family overseas. Imagine that one day, you got hit by a car while making a delivery. After time in the hospital recovering from multiple injuries, you’re finally ready to go back to work, but when you log in to the delivery app, it says that your account has been deactivated. With no explanation and no recourse. Imagine you’re a UPS driver, driving all day long in a metal box without air conditioning. You’ve put in years in those brown uniforms, delivering important packages in the worst weather imaginable, taking on more and more work as staff gets cut due to the declining number of packages. It’s time for your union’s contract to be renegotiated so that you can make more of a living wage, and on the news you hear the company’s new CEO talking about how robots never complain and can’t talk back. Imagine you work at an Amazon warehouse facility. The stories of people pissing in water bottles instead of taking a bathroom break turn out to be true. You hear talk in the break room of people organizing or trying to join a union to fight for everyone’s rights together, but signs posted everywhere tell you to report such activity to your manager.
Barbara Kopple’s “Union Town” follows groups of people in these three situations during one of the most eventful three-year periods for labor in the United States in decades. Kopple made her name with “Harlan County, USA”, a landmark depiction of the struggle for workers’ rights in America, and has always been at her best when following the plight of the worker. That’s the case here, too. “Union Town” may take place in New York City, the exact opposite of rural Harlan County, KY, but Kopple’s feel for the dynamics of these groups remains intact, and her political acumen has stayed sharp. Following three seemingly separate fights for workers’ rights that highlight different problems of modern-day blue-collar work, this galvanizing documentary understands – and takes great pains to communicate to its audience – just how interconnected these stories are, and how, without community organizing and collective bargaining, they would be lost, and if we’re not careful, we may be lost right along with them.
Kopple’s vérité style hasn’t changed much since her first feature, nor has it needed to. Form is very much function here; seeing things on the ground, as they happen, lends the film an immediacy it might not have otherwise, and making some grandiose intellectual statement would only detract from the plainspoken power of the language used by the film’s subjects. Every single one of them fully understands the camera’s power to connect with a mass audience and speak to it as they would to someone they care about deeply, fostering the very human connection at the heart of labor organizing. Kopple’s connection to her subjects has always been her biggest strength as a filmmaker, and she builds the film so the audience feels for them just as she does. It would take a deeply cynical, self-involved person to come away from this film believing that unions are evil, or that delivery workers (especially the illegal immigrants among them) don’t deserve to make a living wage; such is the strength of Kopple’s argument, buttressed by the film’s form.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that “Union Town” doesn’t include any insight into the corporate side of these stories. Given the subject matter, it would take a corporate stooge even more gleefully unctuous and prone to self-sabotage than UPS’s Carol Tomé, seen here bragging in an interview about having only Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” on her desk, to do such a thing. The corporate suits clearly have no time for their workers, so why should a documentary about fairness for workers give any screen time to the people actively fighting against it? Perhaps in a more traditional documentary, such material would be necessary. But “Union Town” is a piece of agitprop, meant to raise awareness and inspire people to action (which it does in a rousing fashion), not present an even-handed look at both sides of an issue. Kopple has no interest in presenting the corporate side of this fight, so she instead presents the workers’ view by giving space to criticism of the union.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes takes place at the Teamsters union meeting to vote on the contract with UPS, during which a younger female member speaks up to vote in the negative, despite all the incredible gains the union leadership was able to get, because the raise in salary for part-time workers still wasn’t high enough for them to live above the poverty line. The meeting devolves as insults fly and fists rise, but Kopple’s giving voice to the vanishingly small minority of workers who voted no on the deal with UPS speaks to her devotion to the human beings involved over any single cause. Her empathy for her subjects renders numerous scenes difficult to watch, especially when it comes to the undocumented migrants highlighted in the segments on app delivery workers. Their plainspoken, emotional pleas for understanding and fairness sting particularly sharply when the film reaches the time of Trump’s second term and the ICE raids that have terrorized the nation. Even before that point, though, Kopple makes plain through both new and archival footage just how dangerous and demanding this work is, showing first-hand and news accounts of bike messengers battling the elements, crowds, and even emergency vehicles as they race around with the over 300,000 meals they deliver across the city daily.
The easy response to all this is to ask why any of these undocumented immigrants would want to stay here and continue to work in these conditions, let alone come here in the first place. Kopple never directly addresses it, instead choosing to let the anguished, tear-stained faces of her subjects throw the question back at the viewer: Can you imagine how bad their lives elsewhere must have been that they are willing to knowingly suffer through all this? The film engages in many such empathy tests throughout its running time, doggedly but unobtrusively following striking Amazon union members trying to get those going in to work to join their ranks, capturing the pain on their faces as they protest that they can’t afford to do so. The stakes for the workers have been set up so thoroughly that you know exactly why so many choose to cross the picket line, even as you hope they’d join up and fight for themselves. It’s easy in theory to put aside individual needs for the greater collective good, but in practice, it’s far more difficult.
Kopple knows firsthand that the fight never ends, and while that knowledge threatens to put a damper on any sense of uplift gained from the real-life stories, the passion every single one of the film’s subjects exudes for the cause proves stronger. While “Union Town” isn’t uplifting in the most traditional sense of the word, that passion absolutely will fire you up to go support, join, or, hell, even start a union. That’s the kind of uplift this country really needs right now.
