When the Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to union in the spring of 2022, emerging as the first American workplace of the corporate retailer, it was one of the most significant labor achievements in the USA for over seven decades. In the spring of 2022, Amazon workers in Staten Island became the first group of employees of the corporate retailer that successfully voted for unionization and therefore it garnered praises and was labeled as one of the remarkable labor achievements within the United States in nearly a century.
It was a David and Goliath battle in the age of globalization for the Amazon Labor Union in its effort to get workers at the JFK8 warehouse to cast votes in favor of making unions a reality — and it was cheering that such organizing could active in spite all efforts of excessive employer consolidation, management coercion, and other barriers to enhancing working power. And that makes the success of both initiatives, one from the grassroots level and another one from organizational restructuring, all the more remarkable as this composition was headed by workers — not a union already in place, exposed to rather unsustainable changes which themselves led to the territorial and protracted nastiness with Amazon.
“Union,” a new documentary co-directed by Brett Story (“The Hottest August”) and Stephen Maing (“Crime + Punishment”) how tells the history of ALU to this watershed moment engulfing in conflict workers craftsmanship of storyizing politics brings Hanna’s dimension focus into the adopting detail-driven to the union’s activists, many of the current and former Amazon employees on Staten Island precisely because they did a worker-to-worker mobilization campaign against this terrifyingly one of the most powerful companies on earth.
More a journalistic account than an expository document of the unionization effort and its discontent, focused on striking image and sharp editing rhythm, “Union” is often like a suspense film. From the outset, Story and Maing cut back and forth between Jeff Bezos blasting off into space on a rocket manufactured by his company Blue Origin and Amazon Workers who are marching into work looking zombie like; it emphasises the ridiculousness of dry averagist reporting about the customer-facing aspects (and dreams) of the company aimed at empire building.
Over three years, Story and Maing’s film wants to highlight the price you said we pay for convenience and how bad it is to work in factories of ill reputation internet retailers. There are constant alarms in the warehouses, injuries are a common occurrence, there are no breaks, working conditions in Amazon warehouses are extremely stressful and very much abusive and as a soup sandwich, these are problems which Amazon has absolutely no intentions of getting rid of or even representing realistically.
The violence of some sort, physically or psychologically against the union supporters always looms large. Even other corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns to strip the people of everything including meetings known as captive audience which Japan has long banned; in the case of Amazon, aside from holding other anti-union meetings which include compulsory sessions called captive audience which are already outlawed in New York, workers are threatened with dismal consequences up to firing over their involvement in the union formation.
We are reminded, through Story and Maing’s film, of the ways in which the repetition of image of huge oppressive cargo ships filled with goods brings forth the crawling slow enduring movement of capitalism at large. One of the most excellent things about this documentary is how methodically it tells the story of the problem that prevents the unionized group from achieving its goals and how smart relief creates ground level dialogues in workers against all these barriers. Some of the most astonishing footage, filmed inside the walls of Amazon’s headquarters, secretly captures one of these captive audience sessions; here, anti-union sentiments including “We’re going to ask you to do three simple things: get the information, ask questions, and vote no on the union” are heard and ALU activists interrupt the management’s speech in order to address the purposes of this misinformation to workers.
Chris Smalls, who is one of the ALU organizers, features prominently in ‘Union’ although the makeshift of the film is unheroic biopic of Smalls.
(This would perhaps be a simple pitfall in the sense that he was appointed as the face of the organization during the timeframe of ‘Union’. Smalls, who was sacked from Amazon for calling for a better provision of masks during a pandemic, was derided by the company’s lawyer as ‘not smart or articulate’ in a meeting of the company’s top management, is a father of three children, who took off the blinders and saw blatant violence against labor in action. He can be both charming and extremely driven for action, protective of his fellows ‘comrades’ but insatiably striving towards advancement in the face of the dreaded sickness – sectarianism within the union. Smalls is a self-moored leader and his work in time caught the attention of ‘comrades’.”
One of the great assets of this film is that it allows the viewer to appreciate the many layers of conflicts existing among those people who collaborate towards the same goal. Take the world of difference separating the experiences of two subjects: Maddie, a witch is a white college graduate and believes she can bring some change on board using her campus activism experience, and Natalie, who is an old Hispanic woman living in her car for many years. In a heated discussion, Natalie takes issue with Chris getting arrested by New York police officers—an allegation made by White male organizers who suggest that Chris does this in an attempt to attract people to the unionization campaign. In the end, Natalie’s alienation from the ALU organization because of her relationships with the leaders as well as her hope for bigger union participation makes her quit the organization. It speaks to the individual clashing of ambitions and the insufficient resolution one can confidently call victory in the cases of this nature.
Its long title, “Union” details the tussles and arguments about governing and organizing, and who gets to lead, that split the ALU before vote in favor of unionization and later worsened following its unfruitful attempt to organize workers in a second warehouse. As much as Smalls’ personality, zeal, and resolve were factors in the transformation of JFK8 into a union workplace, yet the expertise of the film manages to portray this as a success of the group. It is hardly ever swayed to praise Smalls as the only one, rather than a fraction of the members, and more so, this leadership approach has been shown to create antagonisms along the ranks of the ALU which at some point hampered the pursuit of the goal of the union. This has particular relevance in the latter part of the movie, post the vote on unionizing the organization, when the stark realities of the long battle ahead dawns fully. How collective upsurges from the union’s workers, particularly the organizers, were not devoid of the aura of individual heroic acts will never be in question. But given that only one battle has been won in this long war for justice at the workplace even though Amazon is still finding ways about how to deny the benefits or turn the gains around, ending “Union” in a standing but minor note feels resigned chastity and strength in abject fatigue instead of claim victory determination.
It shows the soreness but at the same time the strength of the people who are at the bottom of the world order. As long as they remain close to the battle, and although Story and Maing do not step back, the fight’s true face comes into focus.
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