‘Union Town’ Review: Energetic Labor Documentary Rounds Out 50-Year Trilogy

Legendary documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple completes a trilogy of films about labor in the United States that started with 1976’s “Harlan County, USA,” continued with 1990’s “American Dream” and now culminates in “Union Town,” a towering achievement. After chronicling a Kentucky miners’ strike and the Hormel strike in Minnesota, the documentarian returns home to the Big Apple for a tale of delivery workers and some of the most far-reaching organizing the U.S. has ever seen. It’s as enormous as it sounds, with an appropriate intensity. Famous for her fly-on-the-wall, cinéma vérité approach, Kopple continues this aesthetic thread while providing even more intimate accounts in a multi-pronged narrative en route to UPS negotiations and a major strike against tech juggernaut Amazon, near Christmas 2024. Her inside track details not only meetings and town halls, but ground-level interviews with workers dismissed casually by automated systems, new immigrants seeking ways out of exploitative deadlocks and activists detailing health hazards caused by unsafe work conditions and an increasingly temperamental climate. Everything feels connected, precisely because it feels so precarious. The film’s contemporary politics are especially urgent, as Kopple and her who’s who of editors (Francisco Bello, Hannes Hosp and Deborah Peretz) combine dialogue from casual interactions with audio and video clips from news broadcasts, painting a wide-spanning portrait of a world in callous motion. Meanwhile, her cinematographers (there are just as many of them; Timothy Grucza, Hannes Hosp and Rachel Beth Anderson) get up close and personal for each testimonial. The faces matter, and their stories are deeply felt. Amidst its swift unfurling, the film features thorny discomforts too. These stem from disagreements between the various tiers of workers that conglomerates have created of late. As full-time employees and temporary contractors fight for different wages (and use different levels of influence), these skirmishes point to the infighting that often plagues leftist political movements, though this thread is unfortunately dropped in favor of a rosier picture. Still, that’s a comparative statement; the task these unions undertake is anything but easy. Above all else, what makes “Union Town” such a riveting watch is its sense of dignity. Like many of its subjects, it has no qualms about delivery driving and package sorting being honest work, so long as it’s fair. It even begins by detailing the number of meals and boxes delivered in New York each day — a figure in the millions — which only re-enforces the collective bargaining power held by the strike’s participants. However, the modern world has increasingly modern problems. The police, who have seldom been friends to striking New Yorkers to begin with, now appear to do the bidding of powerful corporations through underhanded methods, complicating demonstrations. And yet, a sense of community remains the movie’s throughline, even if that community sometimes frays and frustrations boil over. Through a journalistic lens buoyed by musical fervor, Kopple’s observations become cinematically invigorating. Alongside fellow New York labor doc “Emergent City” (a film about the economic blast radius of zoning in Brooklyn), “Union Town” makes for a multifaceted portrait of the people who make the world go ‘round, in the heart of it all. By the time the credits roll, it’s hard not to feel inspired by the noble battle at hand, by the handful of aged leaders who have been fighting for years, and by the industry-wide solidarity forced to emerge from beneath obfuscating forces seeking to divide and conquer. The politics of “Union Town” are appropriately personal — in that they’re about real people, in the most meaningful ways.