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Across the harrowing financial realities of late capitalism, an indisputable global fact is the injustices faced by countless workers who deliver everything we have come to rely on, from food orders to Amazon purchases.
Despite their hard work under unideal, sometimes even unsafe conditions, it’s no secret that delivery staff have been barely compensated with dignified wages, a topic that Oscar-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple tackles in her fiery documentary “Union Town.” Focused on a variety of recent legal cases unfolding in New York, Kopple’s film is both aptly angry and optimistically community-minded in charting the fight of several Big Apple workforce groups: delivery staff, union leaders, Teamsters and others trying to bring about meaningful change to an increasingly corrupt system that leaves these hourly workers behind.
This is not new territory for Kopple. In 1976, her Oscar-winning “Harlan County U.S.A.” portrayed Kentucky coal miners on strike, while her “American Dream” (1990) charted the shattered aspirations of food industry workers in Minnesota, winning the filmmaker a second Academy Award. Following in the footsteps of these movies, “Union Town” completes Kopple’s unofficial labor rights trilogy, urgently shedding a light on a deeply unjust financial contract corporations seem to have made with their workers. And that contract goes something like this: Few people at the top will get exceedingly rich, while those who operate the day-to-day will be paid a pittance and treated as worthless and replaceable.
These are the largely unspoken evils of the “gig economy,” a shady 21st-century construct that fiction filmmakers Ken Loach and Sean Baker examined in “Sorry We Missed You” and “Take Out” respectively. In some sense, “Union Town” feels like the perfect nonfiction companion to those films, honoring the real faces and names of many unsung workers who deserve a lot better than the thankless hand they’ve been dealt. And their only option is to go out there and defend their rights.
New York City is the perfect stage for Kopple’s story of grassroots activism, and not only because roughly 2.5 million packages and 500,000 meals are delivered daily across the city’s five boroughs, as early title cards inform us. The city is also where some of the biggest labor law battles have been fought by delivery workers in the years since the summer of 2023. Three of them — spearheaded by UPS drivers, Amazon delivery personnel and deliveristas for food apps like GrubHub and DoorDash, many of them immigrants — are central to “Union Town.” Along with her editors Hannes Hosp, Francisco Bello and Deborah Peretz, Kopple weaves these stories together seamlessly, underscoring various collective struggles that came into sharp focus in the COVID years. The essential workers that the world celebrated by banging pots and pans often risked their own lives to keep the world functioning, but continued to have their needs ignored by their employers.
Kopple is especially successful with her focus on individuals, while maintaining the bigger picture in the backdrop. Throughout, we meet app workers on government assistance barely making ends meet, with their lives under threat in traffic and their bikes moments away from being stolen. Among the most heartbreaking stories Kopple portrays is that of a 24-year-old delivery worker killed in 2024 after getting hit by an emergency vehicle. While Kopple’s camera stays at a respectful distance during his funeral, it also intimately pulls the viewer into the immense grief that his family now has to endure. We also meet workers sleeping in their trucks to hit their delivery numbers, those fired for unjust causes (like being in the hospital and unable to work) with no chance to appeal and reactivate their accounts, and others who can’t hold back their tears while reassessing whether their move to the U.S. has actually given their families a better future.
Among the infuriating truths that Kopple spells out is the companies’ willingness to spend millions on efforts to block the unionization of workers, instead of putting those funds toward a fair compensation and employment model. At one point in the film, Queens-based Amazon workers credibly question whether a flood that occurred in the midst of their pro-union efforts was caused on purpose by their employers. Teamster organizer Antonio Rosario, one of Kopple’s many human subjects, wonders why this is so: “They have the money, they can make this a better place. Why don’t they?”
Kopple also doesn’t shy away from representing internal disagreements within various activism groups, some of whom embrace the companies’ tentative offers to avoid a strike, while others try to make a case for something better. These disparities rise to the surface near the start of Trump’s second term, when various Teamsters figures inexplicably favor him, leaving others faced with a leadership voting against their own interests.
There are exuberant wins in the conclusion of Kopple’s muscular documentary, as well as a window she opens for yet another incoming workers’ rights fight: Are we all about to be replaced by robots and AI? If this imminent threat somehow becomes the next chapter in Kopple’s extraordinary pro-labor filmography, we already know that only an unwaveringly pro-human filmmaker like her can do it justice.
