Union Gives a Close Look at the Historic Amazon Labor Union Win

Union depicts a seemingly endless number of Zoom and phone calls, discussions with workers, handing out flyers, and collecting union authorization cards.


Some new workers got jobs as "salts" to help organize. A principal strategy was to have activists stationed at a food tent near the bus stop at the warehouse; the film shows workers doing this at all hours of the day for a year, making themselves available to talk with coworkers as they started and ended their shift, often when it was dark out.


The film’s depiction of the Amazon workers’ plight and organizers’ dogged efforts is often moving. One featured worker was homeless and sleeping in her car; another had a sister who worked at the warehouse who died of COVID-19. In one scene, several organizers sit in the tent late at night, silent and tired, with a fire going for warmth, waiting for more workers to talk with. This is the real work of organizing, often unglamorous and exhausting for months on end; in moments like that, doubt often creeps in that this will ever work out.


Union also contains some fantastic scenes of the company running captive-audience misinformation sessions, which it called "trainings," to encourage workers to vote against forming a union. Workers in those meetings took videos of the discussions, where ALU supporters would interrupt with their own questions.


It’s remarkable how ham-fisted these anti-union efforts can seem to those of us on the Left, recycling as they do the same tired talking points: The union is just a business that wants your dues. The union is lying and making false promises they can’t deliver on. The union is an outside third party that will get in the way of our special, direct employer-employee relationship.


Yet employers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on union-busting consultants.