Amazon, Amazon Labor Union, Angelika Maldonado, Brett Daniels, Brett Story, Chris Smalls, documentaries, film festivals, Jason Anthony, Madeline Wesley, movies, Natalie Monarrez, New York City, New York Film Festival, reviews, Stephen Maing, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Union
December 26, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Stephen Maing and Brett Story
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City from 2021 to 2022, the documentary film “Union” features a racially diverse group of people (African American, white, Latin and Asian) who are connected in some way to corporate giant Amazon.
Culture Clash: Several past and present employees at Amazon’s JFK8 Fulfillment Center (located in the New York City borough of Staten Island) take action to have a union for the center’s employees, but the union activists get pushback and criticism from Amazon’s management, other Amazon employees, and within the activist group.
Culture Audience: “Union” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in documentaries that take a behind-the-scenes look at a “David versus Goliath” story in corporate business, from the perspective of the underdog.
“Union” is a cinéma vérité film that is minimalist almost to a fault. This pro-activist documentary (about the controversial formation of Amazon’s first worker union) is a feel-good underdog story. However, the story is one-sided, has drab pacing, and doesn’t tell enough about union members who aren’t leader Chris Smalls.
Cinéma vérité filmmaking is non-fiction storytelling without narration, re-enactments, animation and other contrived characteristics that are frequently in other documentaries. “Union” barely has a musical score, and there are no “expert” talking head interviews. This “no frills” approach to “Union” works in some ways but doesn’t work in other ways.
Directed by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, “Union” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Art of Change. The movie also made the rounds at other film festivals in 2024, including the New York Film Festival and DOC NYC. “Union” was one of the 15 documentaries selected for the 2025 Academy Awards shortlist (eligible for the final nominations) for Best Documentary Feature Film.
“Union” is told entirely from the point of view of the activists who were involved in creating Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which in 2022, became the first employee union for Amazon, a notoriously anti-union corporate giant. ALU was created for employees at Amazon’s JFK8 Fulfillment Center, located in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The “against all odds” official sanction (by employee voting) for this union to exist was a historic business event that received significant media coverage. Most people who will be interested in watching “Union” already know that this outcome happened. Therefore, there’s not a lot of suspense in watching “Union,” which was filmed from 2021 to 2022.
When a documentary is about an event or conflict that has a fairly well-known outcome, it behooves the documentary filmmakers to present some fascinating behind-the-scenes insights into how this outcome was achieved. In that respect, “Union” mostly delivers if you want an admittedly biased “root for the underdog” approach to this story. However, the movie falls short in giving viewers a deeper understanding of who the key players were in this battle that took place during the time the documentary was filmed.
Early on in “Union,” the movie juxtaposes two types of footage: (1) the Amazon warehouse employees arriving by bus and (2) news footage of the first suborbital space flight for Blue Origin, the space flight company from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos reportedly spent around $5.5 billion for this four-minute flight.
The contrast is obvious: These Amazon warehouse employees (who probably barely make above minimum wage) can’t afford to travel to work by car, while Bezos spends more money on a four-minute space flight than most people will ever earn in their lifetimes. It should be noted that Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in July 2021, so that he could focus mostly on Blue Origin. Bezos (whose current Amazon title is executive chairman) is still the largest shareholder in Amazon, which has made him one of the richest people in the world.
Even though Bezos’ name is mentioned several times in “Union,” and he’s vilified as the chief corporate villain to Amazon employees who want to unionize, the “Union” documentary leaves out the fact that Bezos was no longer Amazon’s CEO during the making of most of this documentary. It makes “Union” look biased by omitting crucial facts. A epilogue hastily mentions that Amazon officials declined to answer questions for the documentary, but it’s not that hard to include publicly known information about Bezos’ role at Amazon during the time that this documentary was filmed.
It should come as no surprise that “Union” has relentless messaging that Amazon’s management officials are greedy and heartless villains, while the employees who want to form a union are brave and oppressed heroes. The only footage that shows Amazon’s management officials speaking is footage (usually from undercover audio/video taken at Amazon employee meetings) where Amazon’s management tries to squash support for anything related to union activities. Even viewers who agree with the union activities can see that this documentary goes a little too far with its bias.
And that’s why it’s disappointing that “Union” does not go “all in” by showing more of who these union activists really are as people. “Union” is about ALU but keeps most of the ALU members at a vague distance—seen mostly as nameless people at protest rallies or in group meetings. The exception is ALU leader Christian “Chris” Smalls, the only ALU member whose work experience is discussed and his personal life shown in the documentary.
Smalls (a married father, whose home life gets several scenes in the documentary) used to be a mid-level manager at JFK8 until he was fired. “Union” gives no details about the work history of the people who were current Amazon employees at the time this documentary was filmed. After getting fired from Amazon, Smalls put all of his work efforts into forming ALU. The documentary doesn’t give details on how ALU gets funding.
Smalls is talkative, often abrasive, and sometimes arrogant. But in his own foul-mouthed way, he can be a great motivator of people and has above-average persistence. In ALU meetings, Smalls says things such as: “We have to match Amazon’s intensity and power … Right now, Amazon is on their high horse. We need to punch them in the face.”
He is also a better strategist than most of the people who think they are more knowledgeable than he is in how to make this union official. Even with a strategy that ended up working, Smalls makes some mistakes that probably affected people’s perceptions of him as a leader. There are also indications that he’s gotten a bit conceited from the media attention he gets as ALU’s leader.
“Union” does a lot to show that Smalls has a “big personality” but the documentary skimps on a lot of details about the resources needed for this ALU battle. Smalls mentions several times in the documentary that he’s financially struggling because he’s not getting paid enough before the union becomes official. The documentary needed details about ALU’s fundraising and where the money was going during this period of time.
Smalls also mentions that ALU has help from attorneys, but these attorneys are nowhere to be seen in the documentary. And that’s why “Union” is perhaps too narrow in its focus. “Union” has an obvious agenda to make ALU members look like “scrappy, inexperienced underdogs” as much as possible. But as soon as Smalls mentions that the ALU has attorneys, you know this group is getting a lot more help from corporate professionals than what’s shown in the documentary.
All of these are unanswered questions that many viewers might have when there’s scene after scene of ALU trying to get Amazon employees to sign ALU petitions by offering the employees free fast food (such as pizza and hamburgers), free drinks, and free marijuana at makeshift booths stationed in or near the JFK8 parking lot. One of these questions is: “Who’s really paying for all of these giveaways? And how much of that money is from ALU’s budget?” Don’t expect the documentary to answer those questions.
“Union” gets a bit repetitive with multiple scenes of Zoom meetings where ALU members complain about enduring unsafe work conditions; being overworked and underpaid; and getting threats of job termination or job demotion for wanting to join a union. The repetition doesn’t have to do with the complaints themselves. It has to do with the fact that “Union” doesn’t really explain who these disgruntled employees are. If the documentary told us more of about their personal stories, then “Union” would have been a much more impactful movie.
These are the Amazon employees who get more screen time than most of the Amazon employees in “Union”:
- Angelika Maldonado, the chair of the ALU Workers’ Committee, occasionally clashes with Smalls, but is mostly loyal to him.
- Derrick Palmer, another Smalls loyalist, was voted ALU’s external vice-president during the making of this documentary
- Natalie Monarrez was initially a ALU member but quit and became opposed to ALU because she disagreed with ALU’s leadership and strategy.
- Jason Anthony, who appears to be on the autism spectrum, had an anxiety-ridden meltdown over all the time spends on ALU and threatened to quit when he started to give up hope.
- Brett Daniels, ALU’s director of organizing, is laid-back and doesn’t try to be the “alpha male” of the group.
- Madeline Wesley, an optimistic college graduate, is a key organizer for ALU.
Many of the ALU group meetings shown in the documentary are surprisingly bland, except for one meeting that devolves into petty arguing because Smalls scolds a member for being 15 minutes late, even though he frequently excuses himself for being tardy to meetings. The more interesting ALU member interactions are the ones that aren’t official group meetings.
For example, at an ALU recruiting booth, Monarrez confides in Wesley about her concern that ALU leadership is turning into a “boys’ club” where only men get to be at the top. Monarrez also thinks ALU should be led by more experienced union leaders, such as the Teamsters, and ALU should wait for these more experienced leaders to step in and help. Wesley disagrees and says these more experienced leaders aren’t going to arrive in time for ALU to get what they want by ALU’s deadline goals.
Much of “Union” shows ALU members getting petitions signed, planning their next move, and trying to recruit Amazon employees to join ALU or at least vote for the union. ALU has the additional challenge of getting enough petition signatures by people who will still be Amazon employees by the time the petitions need to be submitted and ratified. It’s mentioned that Amazon has a high turnover rate for warehouse employees. And after the peak seasons, the majority of these warehouse employees are almost certain to be laid off and then rehired if they choose to join the company again for the next peak season.
Other information is noticeably absent from “Union.” A few ALU members mention getting wrongfully terminated from Amazon, but the documentary doesn’t follow through to get more details on these terminations. There’s a scene where Smalls and Anthony get arrested because Smalls refused to leave an Amazon parking lot, and Anthony got into a physical confrontation with a cop over it. Smalls and Anthony were obviously bailed out, but the documentary never mentions what happened to these arrest cases.
“Union” gives so much screen time to Smalls and his personal life, while telling almost nothing about the backgrounds and lives of his ALU teammates, the documentary could almost be subtitled “The Chris Smalls Show.” ALU is much more than one man’s vision and truly was a team effort, but the documentary doesn’t give enough proper acknowledgment to Smalls’ subordinates, which is ironic for a documentary that wants to look like it’s a champion for underrepresented and overlooked people.
“Union” acknowledges some of ALU’s internal conflicts but doesn’t adequately explore or examine them. For example, observant viewers will see that Monarrez starts off as one of ALU’s most vocal and active supporters. And then she’s not seen for a great deal of the movie. And then, toward the end of the documentary, Monarrez is abruptly seen again in an interview where she says she quit ALU and will be voting against ALU. After this documentary was filmed, ALU has had even more internal problems, which have been documented in several media reports.
“Union” can be commended for getting exclusive access to filming these activists during the formation of ALU. However, the documentary is more anecdotal than educational, with many questions unanswered or details glossed over or sidelined. Viewers won’t learn anything interesting about the lives of any ALU member after watching “Union.” The documentary is about a “movement” but seems to forget that viewers should know more about the crucial people who made this movement possible.
Level Ground Productions released “Union” in select U.S. cinemas on October 18, 2024. “Union” is available for paid streaming on the movie’s official website and on Gathr.