On April 1, 2022, workers at the JFK8 Fulfillment Center in Staten Island made history by voting to form the first union within the corporate behemoth of Amazon. The Amazon Labor Union is a completely independent, worker-led effort, unsponsored by any established national labor union and their victory represented not just a win for workers at this particular site, but also for a labor movement trying to reconstitute itself in a global economy rapidly transformed by the tech industry and gig work.
Filmmakers Brett Story (The Hottest August, 2019) and Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment, 2018) were there from the struggle’s early moments, filming as organizers (including Chris Smalls, whose wrongful termination lit the match of the unionization effort) built power, disagreed over tactics, and continuously committed to the tireless day-to-day work that made their David versus Goliath achievement possible. The resulting documentary, Union (2024), arrives at an exciting point in the ALU’s struggle since they officially affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters this summer, who will give the ALU much more support in pressuring Amazon to bargain with them.
Opening on Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos literally blasting off into space, Union establishes the chasm between the C-suite and the shop floor from the jump. There are a few remarkable scenes of internal mandatory “captive audience” meetings secretly filmed by workers, capturing the corporate union-busting tactic wherein employees must listen to or watch presentations that discourage them from organizing or joining a union. (This practice has since been banned in New York state.) Besides these scenes, the focus is rarely on Amazon itself.
The bulk of Union is spent with workers meeting outside the fulfillment center, serving people food on their lunch breaks, and talking with them. Or, in their after-hours meetings on Zoom or each others’ homes. It’s these intimate interactions between comrades that are the most compelling parts of Union. Story and Maing show both the enriching role that the union has come to play in the organizers’ lives and the solidarity they have built alongside the very real frustration and discord that develops along the way.
Woven throughout the film is quiet footage of transportation. Workers commute from all over New York City to the the northwest side of Staten Island to clock in at the fulfillment center, while cargo ships circle in the nearby waterway, carrying goods from all over the world. This footage silently conveys the vast scale of global commerce against which a small group of people are trying to carve out better lives, but also the fact that it takes a tremendous amount of everyday people’s labor to make society run.
I spoke with Brett Story, one of the co-directors of Union, about what it was like capturing such a historic effort and how she and Maing approached this compelling narrative while also filming the particularities of labor organizing with honesty.
Stephanie Monohan: How did the project start? In the film it appears that you guys were there with Chris Smalls from almost the beginning.
Brett Story: Yes, we were filming with Chris before they decided to even start a union effort. We were in development on the film and then Chris and the folks he was working with—a very small group of people who were still working at JFK8—decided to form a union. At that point we decided to skip to production and really start filming.
The origins of the film are that our producers, Samantha Curlry and Mars Verrone, independently of each other, reached out to Chris in 2020 when he was in the news for leading a big walkout at this Amazon facility in Staten Island to protest the lack of Covid precautions. He was still working at the company then and, at the time, a lot of attention was being paid to the plight of essential workers and the problem of front-line workers not having protection and getting sick. He led this protest and was fired for leading it. And in the wake of him being fired, there was a leaked memo in which top company executives dismissed him as an activist and not worth being taken seriously. They used the phrase, “He’s not smart or articulate,” which I think most people can read as a racialized dog-whistle. That made Chris even angrier and more determined to fight.
Samantha and Mars both contacted him thinking maybe there could be a film here. I’d made a short film about Amazon called CamperForce [2017] for Field of Vision that was in collaboration with the journalist who wrote the book Nomadland, so they reached out to me. It was as we were talking about what a potential film might look like that there was a big, high-profile unionization attempt in Bessemer, Alabama. There was a lot of media and political attention on it. It was really significant for the labor movement and also for the ALU even though it didn’t exist yet. It’s very clear within labor movement conversations that Amazon is the frontier of new organizing. If organized labor in America is going to rebound in any significant way, it has to unionize places like Amazon.
So far, after 30 years of Amazon existing, that just had not happened. But then there was this high-profile attempt in Bessemer that resulted in failure. What was really surprising and interesting was that in the wake of that failure was when Chris and Connor, and a few others, said, “Let’s start our own attempt. We actually feel like we understand what they did wrong and we think we can do it better.” That’s when we started filming.
I moved down to New York for a few months with my family, started filming in earnest, brought in a DP, and then after a few months realized that this was going to have to be a long-form observational film. To our minds, what was most interesting was the dynamic between this group of people trying to take on this massive company.
I reached out to my friend, Stephen Maing, who is an incredible filmmaker and cinematographer, whose last film was a 7-year epic about whistleblowers in the NYPD [Crime + Punishment, 2018]. I invited him to join as a co-director, knowing that this kind of film was really going to require people on the ground in a sustained way to film this kind of story with the intimacy that it deserved.
SM: A lot of political organizing is building trust with people, which I imagine is not too different from what you had to do during production. How did you build trust among the ALU members and how hands-off were you while filming these conversations, some of which can be sensitive considering the looming threat of the company itself?
BS: We had the privilege of having the full trust of the organizers. There was nothing that they didn’t let us film. I think part of that was them knowing that we were politically on their side. We weren’t trying to pretend that we had no political opinions; we were firmly on the side of workers’ rights.
We were also showing up like they were. They were at the tent every day and every night and we were there as well, demonstrating to them that we were also committed. The story that shadows this one is that this is a group that was underestimated on every front. They were underestimated by the company, they were underestimated by established labor unions, and they were underestimated by mainstream media people in the wake of the Bessemer defeat. We were taking them very seriously.
In terms of being “hands off,” we had a very small footprint. It would often be our DP Martin [Dicicco] or Stephen, sometimes me, on the ground, hanging out with them, being as unobtrusive as possible. It was really important for us not to interfere with their actual organizing work, which is a lot of conversations.
That’s what the work looked like—they were just approaching workers one-by-one-by-one at this bus stop, having conversations with them about their situations and why a union would be good for them. We understood that this is a company that operates on fear and it's a highly technologically surveilled workplace. In that context, we didn’t want to add to a sense of people feeling like they were being documented and surveilled by us too. We had full access to the ALU, but we were very careful with the workers that the organizers would be in conversation with, always making sure they knew who we were, that we asked permission before filming them, and that we never butted in on any of these conversations without the transparency of what we were up to.
SM: How aware was Amazon that you were filming?
BS: There were lots of moments where they made it clear that they knew we were there. But I have to expect that maybe in their underestimation of the ALU, they also underestimated this team documenting their struggle. Maybe they just didn’t worry about it too much, or thought that this effort would just dissipate, that no union would come of it and thus no film would come of it.
It was only after the ALU was victorious that we realized that Amazon was very aware of our film crew. One of the things that happened in the immediate wake of the victory was that Amazon filed a series of objections to try to overturn the election. In one of their objections, they cited our film crew a number of times and accused us of being a propaganda unit of the ALU, or interfering with people’s voting practices and so on. None of it had any kind of legal weight, but it made clear they knew we were there and that a film was coming.
SM: I love how much the film digs into the very unsexy side of activism—the day-to-day organizing and how much of it is one-on-one phone calls and making yourself available all day, every day in some capacity. Chris is outside Amazon all day talking to people in person or on the phone, and then the group is on Zoom calls at night or meeting at each other’s houses, and then back out early the following morning waiting for workers arriving on the bus. It shows how much labor goes into the labor struggle. How did you go about showing all of these moments interweaving and also telling a compelling narrative with that?
BS: It was a challenge. I think if there’s one benefit to people with organizing experience making a film about organizers is that we know what the work is like. I’ve been an activist in one way or another in my own life since I’ve been a teenager. I know that the grunt work is actually everything. It’s where it all happens. There’s no magic formula with one brilliant strategy like you see in some fiction films that seals the deal. It’s also always a collective effort. There’s this kind of romantic archetype of the leader-activist in mainstream media that wants to pluck out a hero and say, “This person did it.” But anyone who’s been involved in an organizing effort knows that it’s a group of people and it’s very unglamorous work, but it's in those supposedly unglamorous and unspectacular moments that some really interesting stuff happens. That’s where you get to see people take care of each other and show up for each other.
I think that there’s a question of “why do people become part of these struggles?” It’s not just because the workplace is bad. If that was it then everybody would be part of a struggle. So who joins an effort like this? I think any honest story that’s interested in that question of who participates in a struggle like this against all these odds has to be interested in what is happening on the ground. The satisfaction that comes from having a long conversation with a skeptical worker and then actually helping change their mind about what a union can do for them. Or just showing up and not even talking about the union and hearing them out because you’ve been there too. So from the beginning we were really intent on making sure those kinds of moments—the fabric of organizing—was part of the film. Again, especially Stephen and Martin, who were doing all of the shooting, are very good at knowing to not just turn the camera on for spectacular moments, but to film even when nothing is happening, because sometimes when nothing is happening, everything is actually happening.
The result of that is that we then had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours in the editing room, and had to sculpt a film that had to do a lot of different kinds of work at once. All credit to Malika [Zouhali-Worrall] and Blair [McClendon] for rising to that challenge because we had to explain Amazon as a workplace, explain why it’s so hard to form a union in America, and how complicated it is legally, but also offer something distinct from the kinds of reports that were coming out from the mainstream press. There was a kind of flurry of media attention in the aftermath of this victory that either wanted to highlight the heroism of just one or two people, or wanted to say, “This is what did it. This was the secret sauce.”
We knew we had an opportunity to tell a deeper, more honest story about what organizing actually looks like and why it’s hard. It's not just hard because the company has a lot of resources and is fighting tooth-and-nail. It’s also hard because it’s hard to work with people, because there are real differences, people get tired, and people feel insecure. Class and race really do disorganize us in these situations. If you wrote some of these Zoom meetings out on paper, they would seem unglamorous from a narrative point-of-view, but there’s these small magical things that happen in those Zoom meetings where you see people show up for each other and feel a sense of purpose. We wanted to craft a film that could both plot out the big pieces of this story, but also give you a kind of textural feeling of the organizing on the ground.
SM: I would imagine there’s a temptation to end on the union victory, but instead the film continues onward to show obstacles the group faces afterward and how this was really the first step in a very long journey. Could you talk about how you decided to end the film?
BS: It was such a challenge for a whole bunch of reasons, although it wasn’t a challenge to make the decision not to end just at the victory. That was just too easy of a choice and too disingenuous in how neatly that would wrap things up. Steve and I are both filmmakers who are drawn to complex stories; films that live in our brains long after they’re over because they’re actually posing challenging questions and films that invite us to see ourselves in them. I think it’s just not in our cinematic blood to be fine with that kind of satisfying, neat ending in a film, especially in non-fiction. Life goes on, so the film should kind of go on.
Also, it was true to life. Those cleavages, those tensions that you start to see in the film, they really broke open after the election. Over the year that we were editing the film, the union was falling apart. There were factions and people were fighting with each other really intensely. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And even though we understood that it was a new chapter that didn’t necessarily belong with the body of the film, we felt a responsibility to point to that, otherwise the film would just feel untruthful.
This union was maybe about to totally fall apart and then we would have made this story about how great and unified they all were, and that was just not true. So we settled on this kind of coda structure to the ending that I think seeds a sense of the tension and points in two directions. If the film is doing its job, it points at both the fact that organizing is hard and ongoing work that doesn’t end after an election victory. It involves real people who are flawed and tired and don’t always get along. And then, also, that this victory really did inspire other movements.
Getting an honest glimpse into some of this tension and fighting isn’t to undermine the effort altogether. The victory still had tremendous influence. It’s historically unprecedented: the first unionized Amazon workplace in America. So many people were inspired by it and immediately there was a wave of new organizing efforts. That’s a really important part of how to think about success. There’s one way of thinking about success, which is this one union winning this first contract. But also symbolically: What does this mean for other people who are looking for any indication in our political climate that they can do something together to have power over their lives?
There’s different ways of describing it: maybe it’s bittersweet, maybe it's complex, but still hopeful. I don’t think of it as a pessimistic ending. I think of it as an ending that tries to honestly do multiple things at once, including, hopefully, leaving the audience with a very excited and motivated sense of possibility. The line that I’d often use in the editing room was, “Organizing is hard. Organizing is everything.” That’s how we want to end. You might feel defeated and stressed out by watching some of these fights, but you still feel like this effort was worth it and inspiring and that it's what needed to happen.
SM: Lastly, as a Staten Islander, I must ask: I know it’s not explicitly touched on in the film, but the setting is a big part of this story for me. Staten Island is often referred to as “the forgotten borough” and JFK8 is very hidden away there—it’s a 10 minute drive from the former gigantic landfill, which epitomizes Staten Island being a place where the city pushes things that it doesn’t want anyone to see. Did you find any significance in the location that you think may have impacted people organizing in that particular place? Or do you feel it’s in the texture of the film at all?
BS: Absolutely. I have an academic life as a geographer and so I think a lot about space. The question of place and space is really near and dear to all of my films. I made a film about prisons and about how prisons shape places. A resonance with this film was thinking about the parallel between abandoned people and abandoned places. I think it’s no coincidence that, while Amazon warehouses are sited in geographically specific places because they’re part of a global supply chain and logistics chain, they’re also plotted out in places that are very similar to where prisons are put: spaces that have been destroyed or exploited by other kinds of industry.
This warehouse is on swampland and is really far away and hard to get to by the workers. We, as a society, abandon certain people and give them so few options for livelihood and material success. Then we create these workplaces of last resort that are themselves placed in places that have been either abandoned, exploited, or denigrated in environmental ways. I think it's interesting to point out the significance of the fact that this particular warehouse is in Staten Island—that this kind of “abandoned borough” is the place where the first successful organizing effort had happened. It turns out the people don’t want to be abandoned, and when they feel abandoned they take matters into their own hands.
Union screens this afternoon, October 19, and throughout next week, at IFC. Brett Story will be in attendance for a Q&A this afternoon. Several members of the film’s crew and ALU organizers will be in attendance for post-screening conversations throughout the week.
