OVERVIEW
Union Town marks the third film in Barbara Kopple’s labour documentary trilogy, spanning 50 years. It follows Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), about the Brookside Mine strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, and American Dream (1990), about a meatpacking workers’ strike in Minnesota, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Her latest film follows the struggles faced by UPS, Amazon, and app-based bicycle delivery workers in New York City.
The main difference between the previous documentaries and this one is how decentralized the work is. The miners and meatpacking workers were physically concentrated in the same workplaces, fighting against identifiable employers, while today’s delivery workers are scattered across the city, often without even sharing a clear employer. Despite taking place entirely in New York, the film follows workers who rarely occupy the same space.
THE REVIEW
We start by following UPS workers, who are considerably more united and belong to an established union, but still face plenty of obstacles in their fight for better working conditions. We get to know them through their daily routines and personal accounts of the problems they face, making their exhaustion and frustration easy to understand.
Things get worse as we move to Amazon workers. In this newer model of employment, some are not even employed directly by Amazon, making their fight for better conditions considerably harder. They are hired through different companies, and simply organizing to demand their rights becomes a battle of its own. We meet one worker living in his car, unable to afford even his most basic needs on his salary.
And then, when we are already convinced of how terrible conditions at both companies can be, we are introduced to bicycle delivery workers. It is unbelievable how few rights they seem to have. When we order food or groceries through an app, I’m sure most of us rarely think about the person behind the delivery and the effort required to earn just a few bucks, which we still manage to complain about. These workers don’t have a guaranteed salary, relying instead on small payments and tips that, even more shockingly, we see being withheld by one of the multimillion-dollar companies they work for. Beyond the little money they make, they can suddenly lose their jobs without notice or even a proper explanation.
The documentary’s greatest achievement is how it gradually reveals the extent of these working conditions, building towards a jaw-dropping series of events. And just when things seem bad enough, political interference makes the situation even worse. It’s disturbing to witness such conditions after generations of fighting for basic workers’ rights. We live in a time when almost anything can be accessed through our phones, yet delivery workers cannot even speak to a human being to understand why they have been fired. They sign up through an app and can be dismissed just as impersonally.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Union Town is an increasingly disturbing documentary about the erosion of workers’ rights in an economy where convenience and technological progress have made corporate accountability easier to avoid. Barbara Kopple raises urgent questions about who is responsible for protecting these workers, and how easily we overlook the people making our everyday conveniences possible.
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
- Original title
- Union Town
- Director
- Barbara Kopple
- Genre
- Documentary
- Cast
- Juan Acosta, Antoine Andrews, Xavier Asqui, Mamadou Cellou Balde, Peter Benzivenga
- Composer
- Jongnic Bontemps
- Cinematography
- Timothy Grucza, Hannes Hosp, Rachel Beth Anderson
- Editor
- Francisco Bello, Hannes Hosp, Deborah Peretz
- Country
- Language
- English