Note: Union is doing the festival circuits at the moment but is available to watch via an $11.99 rental from the film's website https://www.unionthefilm.com until January 1st. Yes, I know that doesn't leave you that much time. Happy New Year, everyone!

Preface:
Research should never be defined as completed after a single click and a 45 second speed-read. Copy and pasting is not fact-checking. Remember, Google has its own agenda too. But who has the time these days? Finding the truth has been reduced to "Well that's what the first website I visited said." In Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari's latest book on information in the modern age, he reminds us that floundering in the tumultuous ocean of 'information', truth doesn't rise to the top. It sinks to the bottom. This preface is a caveat of sorts. In my review are statistics and 'facts' that have not been triple-checked though I have made the effort to take information from reputable sites. We are not a news agency but truth is still important to us and I don't want to deify or crucify anyone or anything at all but least of all with an aberrant statement with no roots to its bark. That said, Union bites hard and the knee-jerk liberal in me lays writhing on the soon to be messier mess table of the Nostromo as my naïve but ardent inner socialist bursts out of my chest (in a shower of red as is only fitting). In the 21st century, the old quote needs some melancholic but realistic updating… "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Oh, and your livelihood…" There's the rub. I felt that a lot of context was necessary to truly appreciate Union so skip to the 5th paragraph of the main review if you are well informed enough to appreciate the background to the front line dispute. I certainly wasn't before this film…

My life fades. The vision dims. I remember a time of innocence, a time when the word 'Amazon' conjured up the magisterial beauty of our planet's natural diversity in all of its shocking abundance. That diversity is inextricably linked and nurtured by a great river serpentining its way east to west through South America over a distance of well over 4,000 miles. It is a river that touches and supports billions of creatures, not least those indigenous tribes who were and still are grateful for the life the mighty snake of water allowed them to live. The Amazon was life. As you all know where I'm going with this, I'll stop now. If you were born in the late 80s, the 'Amazon', from the Amazon River, was a secondary definition of the word, a real world afterthought. Born as an online bookshop in 1994, Jeff Bezo's behemoth online trading company gradually came to dominate global online shopping. In 1997 it went public and its shares which started at $18 had climbed to $3,027.32 up to 2024. To date, 60% of Amazon's sales are generated by outside companies that use Amazon as a platform, a shop window if you will. Full disclosure, my family are Amazon shoppers which doesn't make us unusual, just part of the problem. My son and my wife are both vegetarians. When I was struck by something I read recently, I relayed it to my son. It was a definition of a human being and while I can't lay my hands on it, it said something like we were "…primates who stuff other mutilated animals into their mouths for sustenance." This is what I deemed to be 'perspective'. I eat much more fake meat now though not exclusively. As Amazon customers, we never get to see how the sausage is made. We get all the advantages of next day deliveries and lower prices and suffer none of the real world consequences. Yes, I know, there's a movie review in here somewhere but let's just break down why Amazon could be perfectly cast in any new Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adaptation.

Dr. Jekyll gives a vast choice of products at often cut-down prices to a huge swathe of the global buying public. The ease of use of its website, the smartness of its algorithms (which also annoy at times) and its well-oiled returns policy all contribute to a pleasing shopping experience. If you are a "must have it NOW!" person then Amazon Prime caters for that with next day delivery and with that £95 extra charge a year, you also get its Prime TV streaming service where you can watch Rings of Power! Oh, joy!

Mr. Hyde, alas, has been a lot busier under the hood… (and I'm quoting a website here)… "There's a common and unfriendly strategy in its continual growth plan: offshoring. The transnationals move their production to countries with fragile social and labour protection systems and with no environmental legislation. Additionally, these companies use tax havens to avoid paying taxes generating losses of one billion dollars a year. The result is an unprecedented concentration of wealth, inequality, systematic human rights violations, and the destruction of ecosystems." Bear that one particularly in mind. "Despite the seriousness of the human rights violations and environmental crimes of many transnational companies, there is no international agreement that holds them accountable. When the law doesn't work the same way for everyone, there're always players who benefit from it." ***

So my question is, what kind of person is Jeff Bezos? In pursuit of more and more profit, is it necessary to exploit his own workforce, the vulnerable chinks in the global regulations' armour and let's be honest, the whole damn planet? Is there a point at which when your wealth exceeds a certain amount, your morality flies out of the window never to return? This fact from September 2020 during Covid reported by Oxfam still staggers me senseless… "Jeff Bezos could personally pay each of Amazon's 876,000 employees a one-time $105,000 bonus today and still be as wealthy as he was at the beginning of the pandemic." So why didn't he?! Can you imagine how much extraordinary goodwill that would have fostered? How can the richest among us enjoy their wealth knowingly at the expense of others' whose misery is chronic? If I looked back on life as Jeff Bezos, I would be proud to have said to my fellow students that I wanted to "…colonise space so we could leave the Earth as a huge National Park." Laudable. Later in his career, he put his money where his mouth was (that's a big mouth) and founded a space technology company, Blue Origin, and in one of its rockets, he spent ten minutes in space. Up until the age of 30, he'd had his finger in many pies, all tech and business oriented. Like Apple, Amazon started life being run from a garage which is all very romantic until it wasn't. Remember that 'destruction of ecosystems' part of the Amazon global outreach? Jeff… How does your business's rapacity square with leaving the Earth as a National Park? He may legitimately say "I stepped down as CEO in 2021…" Hmmm. I'm fairly sure that for all of its customer satisfaction, Amazon is leaving swathes of its workforce scrabbling to make a basic living… I need to add a caveat. In true BBC Radio 4 style, whenever anyone mentions a product (you cannot advertise on the BBC) it's always countered with "Other brand products are available." Well, Amazon may be a truly enormous and terrifying adversary in terms of labour rights but it is – by some vast distance – not the only one. So that's the context.

Union begins with an enormous cargo vessel quietly motoring into New York laden with enough Maersk containers to satisfy another week/month/year's trading. The colossal nature of the ship is a good enough visual metaphor for Amazon itself. So there's the giant, Goliath. Where's David with his deadly slingshot? Meet Chris Smalls at his hot food stall feeding Amazon workers either leaving from or arriving for their shifts. Chris is friendly, camera-savvy and was fired from Amazon in 2020, ironically for not maintaining social distance on the same day he flagged a lack of Covid protective measures at the company. As I may have asked before, anyone know where to find irony fossils? I'm beginning to believe it's gone extinct. Smalls was to become a thorn, soon to be a cactus, in the side of the smooth but desperately unfair running of one of the biggest companies in the world. Amazon's warehouse infrastructure doesn't allow for individualism. Step out of the narrowest of lines and you're out even if you're right. Even (and maybe especially) if you're right. Remember the woman in Schindler's List who questioned the quality of the half-built barracks' foundations? Even though she was right, the SS Officer, Amon Göth had her shot anyway.

Smalls has a grassroot following of very different characters united by Zoom calls and a will to see change and slowly he starts his mission to sign up over 30% of the workers at the Staten Island AFC (Amazon Fulfilment Centre – more irony!) who support the establishment of a union. With the signatures of 30% of the workforce, this will allow a vote to form a union. After months of hustling and cold nights and colder early mornings, Smalls achieves his and the ALU's (Amazon Labour Union's) goal and with a spring in his step, approaches the company to set the union vote ball rolling. Amazon, of course, has a nice sharp object with which to deflate that ball. The inference is – if we indulge in a conspiracy theory for a moment – that the moment you are reported signing support for the ALU, you then lose your job. This means that your signature is invalid as you are no longer an employee. Amazon has a massive workforce turnover. Every six months, all the workers have been replaced. That's the life expectancy of a toothbrush. How do you get any labour union established in such a fluid environment? With immense difficulty.

Amazon also hire anti-union instructors at $2,000 a day (!), brainwashing the less-than-£12 per hour workforce into believing that a union only profits those that channel the dues into their own pockets. For a struggling worker, even the smallest donation to their own and others' rights, is seen as an anti-union deal breaker. In the film, there is an inference that some do not understand the idea of a percentage-based payment and would rather the union put an immutable figure on it which adds to the struggle to get people on board. Even official union organisations like the NLRB (the National Labour Relations Board) who should be providing support only offer seemingly scant lip service and an unhealthy dose of superiority. The average Amazon worker has a lot to be ungrateful for despite the pitiful salary as 'reward' for 12 hour shifts on your feet the whole time and breaks of 30 minutes, barely long enough to get to a canteen queue let alone sit and eat the food. If you are late back, you get reported.

The film also features a few scenes of obviously illegally taken footage inside the Fulfilment Centre which begs on bloodied knees the question "What the hell is worth keeping secret in what is essentially a shop warehouse?" They may as well stick neon signs up all over the place… "Yes, we are exploiting you." "Obey." "Ignore the Man Behind the Curtain." It's absurd. If Amazon's managers know they are committing morally offensive acts in the name of profit, why aren't there more whistle blowers? How much more are they paid than those toiling at the bottom rung? There is a whiff of 'collaboration' in their status. And I don't mean that in the 'all in it together' sense. Think occupied France in WWII. Bottom line. People need to eat. And that makes it so much worse. I am in no way making comparisons to my own 9 months this year of no work in an industry I love but for my luckier employed friends, the sword of Damocles that hangs over them is the threat of redundancy because they are dispensable. "Be lucky you have work," goes the mantra. What a lovely way to inspire people.

In a further effort to get the message across to the workforce, a projector is employed using the Amazon building as a screen. The messages? "YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT. YOU ARE NOT A NUMBER. YOU ARE A HUMAN BEING." Why do we even need to remind people of these facts? Because labour is cheap and if others, specifically companies, undervalue us, then the next step is to see ourselves as less than we are. That's where collective power just drains out of us. The film never shies away from showing us how much of a losing cause we are supporting by proxy as viewers. There are scuffles with police and arguments within the core group and one loses heart and over the year, drifts away from the ALU wishing that some reputable labour organisation will charge to the rescue. If there is a lesson here, it's that it's on you to make a difference to workers' lives if the country and laws of that country are cowed by the corporations so important to those country's economies.

Directors Brett Story and Stephen Maing pitch their filmmaking just right. The participants are camera-savvy and seem naturally impervious to their intrusion. The filmmakers, as much as documentary filmmakers can capture the 'truth', stay respectful of their subjects but never impose a point of view despite one of support for the workers being an overwhelming response to what we are seeing. Editors Blair McClendon and Maliki Zouhali-Worrall (with 200 hundred days of rushes!) do a superb job with what must have been a massive diamond hunt. Some of their choices of transitional shots raise a smile. There is the line of ducks being helped to cross a road and a bus driver (acting as a breather!) inhaling and exhaling cigarette smoke. Ongoing political events must have had the habit of infusing a long discarded scene or shot from a few months ago with topical import and significance. This was film making on the fly and on the very edge of today. In a conversation with the editors, Zouhali-Worrall said that the last scene shot came the day after picture lock! Film editors all over the world are very familiar with the illogical but perfectly normal nomenclature of 'Final Picture Lock 01', 'Final Final Picture Lock 01,', 'Final Final Picture Lock 03' etc.

The cinematography is unusually uniform given the number of sources the material was derived from and the sound design is quietly impressive with no appropriate opportunities to call attention to itself. The broad New York accents can be a little hard to understand at times but you're never at a loss to follow the narrative which is crystal clear all the way through. Facts are presented simply and straightforwardly with text on screen, enough for you to appreciate the broader picture. Small victories are outnumbered by the larger frustrations but Chris Smalls' battle is one worth supporting and one worth fighting to the very end.

footnotes:

* Stand by your Unions song lyric
 http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Labor_Union_Songs/Stand-By-Your-Unions.phtml

** https://filmmakermagazine.com/124705-the-good-bad-and-ugly-of-organizing-against-amazon-stephen-maing-and-brett-story-on-their-sundance-debuting-union/

*** https://www.ecomcrew.com/from-a-to-z-the-complete-history-of-amazon-com/