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Just as the holiday season was going into full-blown commercial overdrive last month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters launched a nationwide strike against Amazon, primarily among its delivery drivers, that ended on Christmas Eve. Arguably, the roots of this labor dispute against the multi-trillion-dollar goliath can be traced back to 2021, when workers at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Staten Island, New York, waged a union campaign. Led by Chris Smalls, who had been fired earlier for protesting working conditions amid the COVID pandemic, the movement faced considerable headwinds – from Amazon, of course, which, through its anti-organizing efforts, had thwarted a similar effort in Alabama, but also from the national unions, including the Teamsters, who were slow to throw their support behind the nascent Amazon Workers Union (AWU).
As the Amazon Workers Union began to take shape, documentary producers Mars Verrone (Golden Voice) and Samantha Curley (Framing Agnes) sensed a compelling narrative, especially in light of a groundswell of labor movements happening in other sectors across the country. They reached out to Smalls about documenting the progress of AWU, and then contacted filmmaker Brett Story (The Hottest August; The Prison in Twelve Landscapes), who’s 2017 short CamperForce, which she made with Nomadland author Jessica Bruder, profiles a selection of seasonal Amazon workers. Martin DiCiccio, Story’s DP on The Hottest August, came on board to shoot Union, and is also one of the producers.
“I have a longstanding interest in labor,” Story shares. “My first film had been about a petrochemical town in distress. Then I made CamperForce. So I was very interested in the sort of insidiousness of Amazon as a particular kind of company that was taking advantage of crises, and also really taking over the entire planet.”
Story, who is based in Toronto, moved with her family to New York in early 2021 to start working on the project. But she had always thought of Union as a co-directing endeavor, for both creative and pragmatic reasons: The COVID pandemic was very much a reality, and the Canadian border was closed. She recommended Stephen Maing to producers, a New York-based filmmaker whose previous work, Crime + Punishment, tracked a corps of whistleblowers with the New York Police Department who were working to expose patterns of corruption with respect to profiling Black and Brown communities.
“It was very staggering how much similarity there was between the grievances of the whistleblower cops and Amazon workers,” Maing notes. “They were complaining about productivity quotas. They were complaining about this culture of fear and the retaliation they were experiencing, yet in two categorically different industries.”
Embedding with the AWU over the course of a year entailed a similar degree of trust-building and duty-of-care. The labor organizers set up encampments near the Fulfillment Center, often under both adverse weather conditions and the scrutiny of Amazon management, and captured footage covertly of mandatory “captive audience” sessions, designed by Amazon to dissuade employees from joining the union.
“At the core of all these movements are individuals who understand that surreptitious recording is the only compelling means to use the legal system and in evidence collection,” Maing maintains. “So with this idea of, ‘How do you be present and coexist and support, without interference or over-involvement, a project that situates itself in that space?,’ I felt much more primed after seven years of working with whistleblower cops. Amazon workers felt this very dire, existential squeeze; there was not much else they could lose. People always wonder, How do these grassroots movements emerge and generate so much momentum and energy? It’s that old adage that employers are the best organizers: You create harsh enough conditions and workers are going to fight back.”
Although the filmmakers had known each other for quite some time, Union became their first collaboration. And despite their distinct aesthetic styles, they developed a strong alliance.
“The things that are really similar about Steve and I are really fundamental — basic ethics and thematic interests,” Story notes. “From the very beginning, there was a lot of synergy in terms of what the film should be about, what is interesting about watching it, how it’s going to work on multiple layers, how it’s going to really be interested in this intimate fabric of these workers’ lives — but never losing sight of the structural, the systematic, or the institutional. And there’s a basic ethic: How do we want to work? How do we relate to our subjects? Why are we doing this work?”
“One of the ways our collaboration worked really well is that after a certain point, I had to move back to Canada,” Story continues. “I have a full-time job here, and the border was still semi-closed because of COVID. So I was going back and forth, but Steve and Martin [DiCiccio] were on the ground all the time, and they’d be sending rushes back to me. Even when I wasn’t watching footage, Steve and I were having conversations, and he would relay to me things that would happen. We’d have to talk through our disparate ideas. We could puzzle something out and have these two different proximities to it.”
“In some ways, it really mirrors the arc of a grassroots union campaign,” Maing adds. “It’s a durational endurance battle. Martin and I spent 300 days filming on the ground with the organizers; that was 600 hours of footage. So there was a tremendous amount to talk through. And I think that the idea of where the nuance of a really emergent union comes from is the debate that the organizers go through. Similarly for us, our stress test was talking about every frame of the film, and really inspecting it to its fullest to make sure that we were creating meaning. The whole idea of the observational mode is that it unlocks this kind of cinematic space that we don’t often get to experience in most films.”
Many legendary documentarians — Barbara Kopple; Julia Reichert, in concert with both Jim Klein and Steven Bognar; George Stoney, et al – have chronicled labor movements, capturing the against-the-odds struggles, the internal tensions, and the challenges of sustaining a long-haul energy and high morale. How did their work influence the Union team?
“There’s a long history of a particular kind of labor cinema that is incredibly inspiring to us,” Story maintains. “Julia committed her entire life to deeply understanding working-class struggle and bringing political cinema to an audience in a way that lets us see ourselves and also feel seen, and asks really necessary questions. We’re inspired by those films — their close observation, their commitment, their care for people. Julia’s loss [she passed away in 2022] was so devastating because she didn’t just model great filmmaking; she modeled a way of being a filmmaker. She would never say that she’s a neutral observer. She was clear about being in solidarity with working people.”
“You just think of a film like Union Maids,” Maing adds. “Nothing speaks to this idea of how powerful a passing conversation with somebody can be — this idea of an oral history being told at a kitchen table, and all the drama and electricity of a history and a personal experience that people might not otherwise imagine in that particular way. It was hugely informative because we were watching people basically sit at a campfire for a year next to a bus stop and talk about their work experiences in this behemoth, unforgiving warehouse across the street.”
Union Maids (1976) and The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009) both earned Academy Award nominations for Reichart, in her respective partnerships with Klein and Bognar, while American Factory (2019), directed with Bognar, won for Best Documentary Feature. Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1990) also took home Oscars. As Awards Season revs up into its final surge towards the Oscars nominations announcements on January 17, what’s noteworthy among the 15 shortlisted titles for Best Documentary Feature is the number of films, including Union, that have, by necessity, taken the self-distribution route, despite having earned considerable kudos on the festival circuit.
“When we didn’t get distribution out of Sundance, it was disappointing,” Story recalls. “But we always knew that there would be a community, grassroots organizing element to the rollout and impact campaign. Self-distribution was wrapped up in impact outreach work. It’s very labor and resource-intensive, but it’s also very gratifying. It’s all about building partnerships. We’ve really tried to be thoughtful about how to get this film to audiences and who our audiences would be. It is like organizing, with all the highs and lows involved in that — a lot of stress tests, a lot of travel, but also a tremendous opportunity to think creatively about how to organize screenings as community events.”
“Some people might think of what we’re trying to do as a bit of a fool’s errand,” Maing adds, “considering our limited resources, and how much money major streamers are throwing into this. It’s our responsibility to prove that the streamers and distributors are wrong, and show that films like ours do have popular interest and appeal, and that it is not a liability to create political cinema and observational cinema. It’s a project that we’re so proud of. It’s a nuanced political take on a moment that easily could have been a fly-by-night media headline, and yet really has seeded something far more meaningful in the history of our labor movement. ”
