Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s documentary Union is one of the best American films about the labor movement since 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath. Using cinéma vérité “you-are-there” film techniques, Union chronicles the fight to organize the JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Union, a Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award winner, focuses on fired Amazon worker Chris Smalls, who co-led a movement of working-class heroes taking on the trillion-dollar company owned by Jeff Bezos, often called the world’s wealthiest person.
Another grassroots organizer highlighted in Union is Connor Spence, who was elected Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) second president in August. With its “fly-on-the-wall” style, Maing and Story’s film follows the proletarian campaign that made the New York warehouse the first — and only — unionized Amazon facility in the U.S. Adam McKay, who co-wrote/directed the 2015 anti-Wall Street film The Big Short, executive produced Union. The theatrical release of the 100-minute documentary began on October 18.
In this candid conversation, Union co-director Steve Maing and ALU organizer Chris Smalls discuss Amazon, unionization, socialism and whether film can change the world. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Ed Rampell: What’s your current ALU status?
Chris Smalls: I’m the founder, still active in some capacity. I have lots more on my plate because I’m able to travel and do the things I’m doing internationally, as well. I created the union because it’s worker-led. I would pass the torch; as somebody who doesn’t work at the plant, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m trying to be in a position of power, longevity. It was more about building a foundation for Amazon workers to have a choice to join the union or not. That’s my role right now, continuing to spread that message. Unions in this country are at an all-time low, as far as union density. To reverse that, we have to get to other spaces.
When ALU was co-founded by Smalls in April 2021, it was an independent union specifically for Amazon workers. In June 2024, ALU affiliated with the Teamsters, giving the newly chartered ALU-International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 1 access to the financial and organizational resources of the Teamsters International Union, the Teamsters Amazon Division and Teamsters Joint Council 16 in New York. Could you talk more about why you affiliated with the Teamsters.
Smalls: I signed that agreement. They have the resources to help the union, legally, financially. They’re the closest union in the field of logistics, in trucking, compared to Amazon workers. That will be an easier transition for Amazon workers to relate. I’ve met with [Teamsters President] Sean O’Brien over the years and developed a relationship with the Teamsters. We had a summit over the summer, we went to Washington, D.C., met with the Teamsters’ general counsel, including the president. When we left that meeting, we decided we wanted to negotiate an affiliation.
Has Amazon negotiated a contract yet with ALU?
Smalls: No. Amazon refuses to recognize ALU until this day. Amazon still doesn’t believe the union won the election. So, they’ve been holding us up in federal court for the last two-and-a-half years. We don’t even have a bargaining order to negotiate.
How did Amazon respond to the unionization drive?
Smalls: [Laughs.] They continue to appeal us in federal court. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to court against them over the past two years, testifying. They continue to use a police presence. I can’t tweet “I’m going to an Amazon warehouse” because they still meet me with an auxiliary unit. They spent $14.2 million last year alone, millions every year trying to stop us.
Union opens with a freighter carrying containers filled with cargo destined for an Amazon warehouse. It then cuts to a public bus transporting employees to the JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. The film then cuts to the July 2021 launch of the Blue Origin NS-16 rocket into sub-orbital space, with Amazon CEO and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos among its crew. Could you talk about why you made Union open with Bezos’s spaceship flight?
Steve Maing: It’s important to note workers at Amazon and many other places live in a tremendous state of contradiction. Amazon puts all this effort into being considered Earth’s best employer. Yet it employs this system of surveillance — they’re the most surveilled workers. There are productivity quotas; they live with the fear of retaliation and this unbelievably treacherous 150 percent turnover rate. This idea they’ve been called “essential,” yet every single worker at Amazon feels highly expendable. They’re being told the company’s making record profits, while wages remain stagnant or even unlivable.
This is the contradiction we wanted to convey by showing workers going to work, at the same time Bezos drops millions of dollars to take a little vacation up into space on his spaceship. This was part of the high contrast we wanted to show about where his attention and interests were at Amazon.
What do you think of Bezos spending billions on a space program while you had to struggle with COVID protocols during the pandemic?
Smalls: If you want to know the real honest truth, we could care less about his toys in space, billion-dollar penthouses, cars, or half-billion-dollar yacht. Our message was: Our CEO, one of the planet’s richest people, has more money than [is needed for] 10,000 lifetimes and should pay his workers a fair living wage. That was a message at one point during our campaign. The message was really that conditions at the warehouse, where everybody worked every day, were terrible — still are. If we don’t do anything, Bezos isn’t going to wake up one day and say, “Hey, I’m going to do the right thing and give the workers what they want.”
How were pandemic conditions at the warehouse where you worked?
Smalls: Very eerie. There was not a real clear understanding of how to deal with COVID. It was literally sweeping the nation. New York became the epicenter overnight. There was not much direction from upper management. We were still sitting together, working closely — weren’t protected with the right PPE [personal protective equipment]. Lots of workers were getting sick; lots weren’t showing up. We were the only cars on the road during quarantine. You can imagine how scared people were, especially pregnant people, elderly people — afraid to even speak up, afraid of losing their jobs and bringing this deadly virus home.
Amazon was racist?
Smalls: It’s systemic. It’s not individuals in particular, even though individuals are gatekeeping certain positions through favoritism, things like that. But they have a system; as you go up the ladder, the whiter it gets. Seventy percent of upper management is white. Thirty percent Black, Brown, other. When you have demographics like that, the chances of us getting promoted are slim. I noticed a certain trend — most Black management, including myself, got put onto night shift, where we were more out of sight, out of mind. We weren’t able to be on day shift, where we’re more visible to upper management that decides who gets promoted.
I noticed white college kids would get promoted fresh out of college, with no job history, over Black and Brown workers. Somebody like myself, who worked at the company five years and applied to be manager nearly 50 times, was only interviewed twice. There were plenty of good Black and Brown workers I’ve known who burned out, got fired, injured or quit.
Tell us about how Amazon uses surveillance against its workers.
Smalls: Surveillance is obviously a number one thing Amazon uses to control, to put fear in people. We’re on the clock as soon as you clock in, surveilled as soon as you’re on the property. Warehouses can have 2,000 to 4,000 cameras all over. It surveils what we’re doing, who we’re talking to, when we’re going to the bathroom. As a supervisor I was part of that system, where I had to keep track of all the workers, labor track them, report back whether they were working, how long they worked, making sure they kept certain hourly rates. In my department, we were required to pick 400 items an hour. If you didn’t make that quota, you’re at the bottom 5 percent every week, you’re on the way out. Surveillance, technology, machinery is how Amazon puts profits over people.
How about breaks?
Smalls: Very scarce. Before ALU, there was no transparency. Management can fire you and say you weren’t working 30 minutes or more. They’ll write you up; after three times, you’re out the door. The warehouse is over a million square feet, the size of 14 NFL football fields; imagine how long it takes to get to a bathroom. Before the union, workers would get fired just for trying to use a restroom. Despite [some workers] having medical conditions, it didn’t matter, there was no transparency. The union and myself pioneered New York’s Warehouse Worker Protection Act passed by the governor last year. With that bill, we abolished that rate system; now, they have to have transparency, and can’t use productivity and rates against people who need to use the bathroom or need breaks. That’s something Amazon didn’t have before the union.
In the film, at mandatory anti-union meetings, hidden cameras capture union-busters trying to convince workers to vote against the union.
Maing: ALU worker-organizers were very much engaged in documentation; it was largely protected activity for them to document any unfair labor practices. I believe Amazon actually accounts for 7 percent of all unfair labor practice charges — a very disproportionate amount of labor complaints received at the National Labor Relations Board.
Discuss your cinematic style.
Maing: We wanted to share with the public what contemporary organizing looks like for real people, to care for your co-workers and build a community of support and engagement that hadn’t existed before in an industry that people for decades, even in established unions, had said was unorganizable. That required lots of care on our part. We spent almost 300 days filming on the ground. My co-director, Brett Story, [and] co-director of photography, Martin DiCicco — we were all really interested in this form of highly observational cinéma vérité because it would allow us to have proximity to the exhaustion, challenges, hardships, heartache, and also see firsthand the determination these workers experienced.
Amazon made every effort to put itself at the center of capitalism’s logistics and distribution. As a result, the new labor cinema zeitgeist is not like coal, auto, steel films of the past; it’s these warehouse workers at fulfillment centers across the country, run by Amazon or Walmart.
What’s the state of the U.S.’s class struggle?
Smalls: Right now, the class struggle is very divided due to numerous things. The economy, wars overseas, COVID, unions on strike in major industries. Elections are distracting, policies play a part. It’s very hard to have so many things coming at us at once. We’re at a very unique window in American history — labor unions, especially what we’ve done with Amazon, we rejuvenated the labor movement. America needs to figure out a way to harness our victory in a way we’ve never done before. That’s very difficult to do when we’re going up against a trillion-dollar company still suppressing our victory, and the film. We have to figure out new ways to reach the masses. That’s the challenge we face now: How do we change the union density, reversing from declining to increasing?
You met President Joe Biden. Is ALU endorsing any presidential candidates?
Smalls: No. It’s in our constitution we don’t endorse politicians.
Do you think socialism is the solution for American workers?
Smalls: Of course, socialism works. I’ve gone to socialist and communist countries and countries with way stronger labor laws than America. Their union density is way higher, anywhere between 30 percent to 90 percent. Socialism is part of that.
Can film change the world?
Maing: Cinema has this great power to reveal the balance of power and address political and social structural inequities. We want people to be both moved and transformed, hopefully walk away thinking differently, having an updated experience where the labor movement is. Established unions have to understand how to support grassroots movements. Society must understand how to support worker-led movements on grassroots levels … if we’re ever going to break this cycle of economic exploitation.
Smalls: This film is a tool for the working class to utilize, to motivate and encourage them to take on corporations. Hopefully when people watch it, they get inspired to know what’s possible.
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