Martin DiCicco/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Union (2024)
Organizing a shop floor union from scratch, the grunt work involved in persuading your colleagues of its value when they may or may not be interested, is the topic of "Union" as it follows the birth pains of the Amazon Labor Union in 2021 and 2022, under the long shadow of Covid. Stephen Maing and Brett Story's film is observational and one-sided; apart from some covert first-person filming on the shop floor, usually catching some strong-arm tactic from the company, the film mainly puts you on the street outside with the workers trying to round up the support needed to get the A.L.U. off the ground. Workers and management play out the old struggle, updated only slightly by the sour modernity of fluorescent jackets and security guards with cameras pinned onto them. When management respond with antiunion posters and leaflets, one of the A.L.U. organizers says "They're hitting us with hundred-year-old-tactics"; the cajoling and oral presentations of a worker proselytizing for organized labor are older tactics than that, even when they take place over Zoom.