‘Union’ Review: An On-the-Ground Look at a Unionization Effort at an Amazon Warehouse

Early on in Union, directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story include footage of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s first flight into space on a rocket created by his own Blue Origin company. Juxtaposed next to shots of workers filing onto MTA buses in the morning on their way to Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the implication couldn’t be clearer: Bezos’s head is too in the stars for him to care about the labor abuses running rampant at his workplaces. Even more than the specific anecdotes of such abuses featured throughout, that sly bit of editing is enough to clue us in on the pro-labor bias underlying the documentary—which is not to say that it doesn’t have anything valuable to say within that perspective.

Union chronicles the historic unionization effort at the JFK8 warehouse throughout 2021 all the way up to its successful vote in 2022. True to its observational approach, the film wastes little time setting up the personal, social, and historical contexts behind the campaign, assuming a certain level of foreknowledge. Instead, Maing and Story begin in spring 2021, with Amazon Labor Union (ALU) organizer Chris Smalls—a former worker at JFK8 fired in 2020 after protesting the company’s disregard for Covid-19 safety protocols—seen hunkering down with his cohorts in a tent pitched across the street from the warehouse, the campaign already underway.

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening. For one, Maing and Story present glimpses of Zoom meetings in which Smalls and his colleagues debate strategy as they try to garner up the 30% of signatures needed to file a petition for a representation election with the National Labor Relations Board. After the petition is filed, thanks to at least one Amazon employee taking undercover video inside the warehouse, the audience bears witness to the ways in which Amazon upper management throws the union-busting playbook at their employees, putting up anti-union posters and forcing employees into captive-audience meetings discouraging them from voting for the ALU.

In one especially tense scene, two security guards enlist the help of the NYPD in trying to throw Smalls and two of his colleagues off the premises, leading to all three of them getting arrested. That particular moment is enough to rattle one of the organizers, Jason, who in the next scene is seen railing against his colleagues on Zoom, claiming that they don’t support his emotional needs enough and threatening to quit the effort. But that’s not the only scene in the film that adds some intriguing complications to the film’s otherwise staunchly collectivist bent.

At one point, one of the white male organizers suggests that Smalls should drum up publicity by getting himself arrested, to which a Latina organizer, Natalie, understandably reacts with less than full enthusiasm. Natalie, in fact, proves to be the most film’s most interesting subject in that regard. A woman with an individualistic streak, as evidenced by her refusal to ask Smalls or anyone else for help even though she’s homeless, she turns on the ALU not only because of their refusal to wait for larger worker organizations to support them, but because of her skepticism of Smalls’s leadership and what she perceives as the group’s “boys’ club” atmosphere.

Smalls, of course, was the most visible face of the ALU, so naturally he gets the lion’s share of the attention in Union. In practice, though, this means that Maing and Story’s efforts at crafting a more nuanced portrait of the Amazon unionization effort only go so far, giving the film the feeling of a lack of balance that exposes the limits of its fly-on-the-wall approach.

Harsh reality, though, brings both Smalls and the film itself back down to Earth. Even though the JFK8 union drive was successful, a unionization attempt at another New York City warehouse failed soon after, and the filmmakers show further disagreements popping up among Smalls and other ALU higher-ups. Union ends not so much on a sense of triumph as on a note of cautious optimism. The fight for workers’ rights remains difficult against the forces of capitalistic exploitation, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the internal and external struggle.