New Film Documents Amazon Union Drive

Five days before Christmas, the Teamsters called a strike at eight Amazon warehouses across the country. According to an investigation by In These Times, about six hundred Amazon workers joined the walkout. Picket lines were augmented by union retirees, staffers and shop stewards, rank and file Teamsters from other workplaces, and, at one New York plant, two busloads of volunteers from DSA. 

To be sure, those who walked off the job are a tiny fraction of Amazon’s three quarters of a million workers. The Teamsters have set aside $8 million for an organizing drive at Amazon, and it will likely take at least that much to bring the corporate behemoth to its knees. But as always, the heavy lifting needs to be done inside the plants. 

Much will be required of the people who do it. Union, a new documentary by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, provides a compelling view of the challenges they face, and what can still be accomplished in the face of those challenges. 

Fly on the wall picture

The filmmakers have trained their cameras on Amazon’s giant fulfillment center on Staten Island, site of the first successful union vote at an Amazon plant. They offer no analysis and little in the way of commentary—just a few titles for continuity and a brief summary of the mechanics of an NLRB election. What they do give us is a fly-on-the-wall picture of the campaign, focused on members of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union.

Union opens with container ships gliding silently into New York harbor, then takes us into an immense warehouse where columns of towering yellow robots adjust  their positions on the workroom floor without any apparent human prompting. Later, we see small parcels being disgorged onto a moving conveyor belt. 

All this sophisticated machinery does not replace human labor so much as it disciplines it. There are 8,000 workers in the plant. They work ten-hour shifts, and their work is fast-paced, monotonous, and closely monitored. It’s also exhausting and for the most part isolating. There are shots of workers trying to catch a few winks on the subway in the wee hours of the morning, then queuing up for a bus to the plant as the sun is beginning to rise.

One of the more haunting sequences shows a woman preparing to bed down for the night in her car, parked in the plant parking lot. “Three and a half hours,” she says, looking at a digital clock. “We’ll make it work.”  We meet her again in one of management’s captive audience meetings, countering management’s anti-union propaganda, giving the union rap  in a firm, measured voice.   (Later, a whole team of ALU members completely disrupts one of these meetings, forcing the management rep to abruptly adjourn it and order people back to work.)

Under the tent

The union drive started at the height of COVID-19. Even as they prepared shipments of personal protective equipment to go out across the country, Amazon workers were denied any themselves. (One woman contracted COVID and died; the film is dedicated to her, and her sister joined the organizing committee.) A lanky, articulate worker named Chris Smalls led a walkout in protest and was fired. He raised money through GoFundMe, pitched a tent in front of the plant, and began passing out union authorization cards along with free meals.  Much of the action in the movie takes place under the tent, where union supporters gather to share experiences, proselytize their fellow workers, and figure out their next moves. 

At one point they’re approached by an unnamed union and are invited to its office for a meeting. It doesn’t go well; afterwards the workers vent in the parking lot, believing they have been patronized and not taken seriously. The ensuing discussion gets more intense towards the end of the movie, after the ALU has won the vote at Staten Island but fails to extend its victory to other plants. It’s one that has doubtless taken place wherever workers organize independently and come up against the limits of what they can do on their own: what is gained, and what is lost, by affiliating with an established union? 

The Amazon Labor Union eventually became Teamsters Local 1, but by that time Chris Smalls was no longer around. He steadfastly resisted the advice of outsiders; towards the end of the movie, his co-workers are becoming visibly impatient with his rigidity. 

Real organizing potential

In truth, there is no way to defeat Amazon in a single plant. Fulfillment centers like the Staten Island plant are like something straight out of Das Kapital, concentrating thousands of workers under a single roof and harnessing their labor power to the most advanced technology. But the real organizing potential lies with Amazon’s smaller sortation and delivery centers. Especially since the pandemic-fueled surge of on-line shopping, these have proliferated across the U.S. They are vulnerable to work stoppages that could play havoc with the company’s supply chain, and the Teamsters are old hands at using such “choke points” against employers.

Amazon is more than a distribution network. With massive amounts of capital at its disposal, it has extended its reach  to other parts of the economy, far afield from Amazon’s origins as an on-line retailer. Organized labor has taken notice. The Communications Workers hopes to organize its call centers. Whole Foods, long a bitter foe of unions, is now part of the Amazon empire and is being targeted by the United Food and Commercial Workers. Amazon even took over OneMedical, a boutique chain of  clinics for people who can afford to shell out an extra $200 to get easier access to primary care. Doctors at OneMedical complain that since the chain was bought out, “tech-leveraged medical offerings” have supplanted face-to-face treatment.

In short, Amazon is assuming the same dominant role in the US economy that giant manufacturing corporations like General Motors and US Steel enjoyed one hundred years ago. Cracking the open shop in basic industry required a major social movement, born of a seemingly unlikely alliance of Communists and other leftists with John L. Lewis, autocratic head of the United Mine Workers. Lewis and the left put aside their differences when both sides realized that neither could win without the other’s help. They did win, and the results proved transformative for two generations of workers. 

Vivid picture

Then as now, the battle began on the shop floor, and Union gives us a vivid picture of what today could grow into something bigger. That message may be a little too subversive for the movie industry: though it won a prize at the Sundance Festival, made the New York Times “best ten” list, and has been shortlisted for the Oscars, Union still hasn’t found a commercial distributor. It’s connecting with audiences through the same kind of do it yourself, seat-of-the-pants operation as the union drive it chronicles. To arrange a screening, you can go to its web site.

If you’re inspired to do more than watch a movie, you can become part of the struggle. The Teamsters are recruiting “salts” to take jobs in Amazon plants and help them organize. It’s a serious commitment, one that requires patience and listening skills as well revolutionary zeal, but well worth doing. Just go to bit.ly/amazonteamsters. As one current DSA salt observes, “The fight to organize Amazon is one of the most critical labor struggles in modern history. It’s the most meaningful organizing I’ve ever been a part of. I hope more DSA members come join the fight.”