Yahoo Movies ‘If we can’t unionise at Amazon, we have no future’: the film about the workers who took on Jeff Bezos and won
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, US trades unions are among the many constituencies bracing themselves for impact. Cheered on by Elon Musk, Trump is expected to gut public regulators – including the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which enforces unions’ right to organise in America’s workplaces. Musk, who rejects unions as creating “a lords-and-peasants sort of thing”, had already joined a legal claim, alongside Amazon founder and fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, arguing the NLRB is “unconstitutional” and should be scrapped.
It is against this bleak outlook for US labour activists that a new documentary, Union, opens in the UK this week. It follows the David and Goliath battle of a ragtag group of workers at Amazon’s huge JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, to create a union from scratch, and force Bezos’s retailing giant to the negotiating table.
Workers told us about low wages and the physical strain but mostly they talked about automation and how alienating it is
The film opens with footage of a vast cargo ship stacked high with shipping containers making its stately progress into the port of New York. But the focus quickly narrows to the hard human labour required to pick, pack and parcel out the contents of those containers to consumers across the US. We watch as scores of subdued workers board a bus, making their way to their shifts at JFK8. Outside the warehouse’s inscrutably blank walls, on a wind-whipped approach road, a small group of union organisers hand out leaflets, chat to workers and huddle around braziers for warmth.
During the depths of the Covid pandemic, Union’s co-directors, Stephen Maing and Brett Story, heard about the efforts of this small crew to fight for better terms and conditions. The result is this intimately shot, sometimes almost claustrophobic film – the winner of a special jury prize at this year’s Sundance film festival – that charts the rise of what became the Amazon Labor Union (ALU).
“We had an opportunity to watch from the ground up, this process of workers learning to become organisers, and what it took to manifest that,” says Maing. “It was of great interest to get to feel what it was like: the exhaustion, the culture of fear that they were encountering, and then also, on the flip side, the determination that they were demonstrating to get this done.”
ALU leader Chris Smalls is the movie’s charismatic lynchpin. Dismissed in 2020 after he led a walkout over health and safety during the pandemic, he devoted himself full-time to trying to organise his former Amazon colleagues. Smalls hopes the ALU’s experience – which saw them win a historic union recognition ballot in April 2022 – will be an inspiration to workers across the US and overseas.
Related: Union review – fighting for your rights under the Amazon corporate jackboot
“The movie is only 90 minutes but I was out there for over 300 days, talking to workers,” Smalls says. “So, of course, you build relationships, you earn the trust of your colleagues. And you know that this is a marathon, not a sprint. There’s going to be days of setbacks and days of defeat, but if you guys just stick it out and band together, you’ll be victorious.”
Smalls sees the US as the ground zero for many of the practices adopted by Amazon and other global corporations. “We’re the country where billionaires thrive because they exploit the weak federal laws that we have, and there’s no accountability,” he says. “Bezos, Musk, all these billionaires are able to monopolise companies, exploit workers and get away with it. So, of course, they try to follow the same model in any country that they set up shop.”
Smalls spoke to the Guardian before the re-election of Donald Trump, but was already fearful about the impact of a second Trump term for low-paid workers. “All of the major unions have a sense that Musk and Trump are going to try to reverse the progress we made, and also change federal laws to set us back over 100 years,” Smalls says.
“It’s a real threat, and I worry, but at the same time I’m also hopeful, because no matter who’s the president, we have to continue to organise no matter what. And the best thing we can do is prepare to be strike ready, because that’s our only weapon to defend ourselves.”
Back outside JFK8, the film follows the ALU organisers as they gather signatures and chat to colleagues about their concerns over poor conditions and poverty wages. At home, Smalls talks tactics in Zoom calls as his children play in the background. The struggle is all-consuming.
For its part, Amazon uses every weapon at its disposal, from calling the police to disperse ALU organisers from outside the building, to bussing in managers to brief workers about the risks of union membership. “If you’re in the know, you vote no,” say posters plastered around the site in the run-up to the vote. And the ALU organisers have to do most of their work from outside, whatever the weather – standing in the cold, handing out burgers, and at one point “free weed and pizza”, to workers as they come on or off shift.
All of this – bar the free weed – will be intensely familiar to veterans of a similar tussle with Amazon in Coventry, in the UK, where the GMB union narrowly lost a ballot in July that would have given them formal recognition in a first for the company in the UK. Smalls has lent the Coventry workers his support, and followed their fight closely. “I was happy and proud to see that take off. I’ve been in conversation with them throughout the whole process, and I still am,” he says. GMB organisers will be among the guests at a screening of Union that Smalls is hosting this week in London.
They say it's impossible to just get through to someone on the phone to say: ‘My kid is sick, I need to come in late'
At times during their struggle, Smalls’ colleagues become exasperated. Some fall away or lose hope, others challenge the ALU’s direction in scratchy meetings whose awkward intimacy is captured on camera. But ultimately Union is a testament to the importance of solidarity in the face of overwhelming odds.
Maing’s co-director, Story, says the ALU’s experience has resonance far beyond Staten Island. This is “what contemporary low-wage work looks like; what the economy looks like,” she says. Amazon, and other corporate giants such as the retailer Walmart, are “not just important workplaces because they’re so large and have so much money, but because they’re defining the economy itself,” says Story. “They’ve restructured the economy. Labour organisers know this – there is no future for organised labour if we can’t organise a place like Amazon.”
Story argues that the way Amazon and other cutting-edge firms use technology to manage people has, in part, encouraged workers to band together. When the film-makers spoke to Amazon employees, she says, “people would talk about physical strain and low wages, but they mostly talked about this technological automation and how alienating it is. Like how they can’t get through to someone on the phone to say, ‘My kid is sick, I need to come in late.’ Or like when people are fired over an app. And that alienation has really motivated people – especially during the pandemic, when they felt so isolated – to find community among their co-workers and start conversations about how they might fight back.”
The climax of Union is the ALU’s extraordinary against-the-odds victory in the ballot among staff at JFK8 in April 2022 – a historic first that brought them global attention. Yet Amazon has still not come to the negotiating table, instead embarking on a series of legal challenges in the hope of overturning the result. Bezos himself doesn’t feature directly in Union at all, though at one point his strikingly phallic rocket New Shepard is seen blasting into space.
Smalls and his fellow activists recently signed an agreement with the long-established and powerful Teamsters union, in the hope that its formidable resources will help force Amazon into negotiating – though that now seems a more unlikely prospect, with Trump once again heading for the White House.
As Smalls prepared to fly to London for the movie’s UK release, he expressed the hope that the ALU’s story will inspire others – but admitted he does not especially enjoy revisiting it. “It’s a little traumatising,” he says. “As much as we love the film, we all have a hard time watching it as Amazon workers who organise, because we’re still reliving it, every day.”
Chris Smalls, Brett Story and Stephen Maing will participate in a Q&A at a screening of Union at the Curzon Bloomsbury, London, on 14 November. The film is on limited release in UK cinemas from 15 November and available to stream from 29 November
