‘Union Town’ Review: Barbara Kopple Takes on UPS, Amazon and the Apps in Another Essential Organized Labor Documentary

For a certain class of cineaste, a new Barbara Kopple-directed documentary about organized labor is an event on par with Steven Spielberg revisiting extraterrestrials or Martin Scorsese rekindling his love affair with the mob.

When it comes to filmmakers scoring triumphs within a single topic, it’s almost impossible to beat the combo of Kopple’s Harlan County, USA and American Dream, both nonfiction landmarks and Oscar winners.

Union Town

The Bottom Line Another must-see work from organized labor's premier chronicler.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Director: Barbara Kopple
1 hour 46 minutes

Whether Kopple’s latest documentary, the Venice-premiering Union Town, completes an unprecedented Academy Awards triple won’t be known until next spring, but it’s another simple-yet-profound celebration of unions and aspirational patriotism, another pragmatic examination of where we are as Americans and where we ought to be.

As much as any annual address that a president might make before both chambers of Congress, Union Town is a State of the Union — and, as was the case in both 1976 with Harlan County, USA and 1990 with American Dream, the state of the union circa 2026 is precarious, this country’s great bounty and boundless promise still failing to percolate down to its most vulnerable citizens.

Much of the terrain that Kopple is covering in Union Town is closely tangential to material from Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s 2024 documentary Union, diminishing the urgency, while trading the small towns of Kentucky and Minnesota for the urban sprawl of New York City reduces the intimacy.

At the same time, it’s the latter point that makes Union Town Kopple’s most essential documentary, because the battleground at stake isn’t actually a company town where both the workers and the white-collar executive class grew up together and negotiated around certain shared goals. The battleground here is New York City, and really the United States at large, a collective gig economy that has made the rich richer by making the poor isolated and decentralized.

Kopple begins this snapshot in the summer of 2023 and focuses, or sometimes doesn’t fully focus, on a trio of unconnected but fully related struggles involving UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse workers and app delivery people. They don’t share a contained neighborhood, an assembly line, a mine shaft or even, in some cases, a common language, all the elements of proximity that grease the gears of solidarity. Plus, they’re in a fight against adversaries whom Kopple depicts as basically faceless.

Working in her familiar vérité style, Kopple blends fly-on-the-wall witnessing of various introductory meetings, negotiations and protest rallies — this, unlike American Dream and Harlan County, USA, is not a strike-centric documentary — with vignettes introducing viewers to a dozen key figures.

There’s Shellyanne Ellison, a UPS driver driving her route in a truck whose air-conditioning the company refuses to repair, lugging heavy packages up and down stairways and making heroic accommodations to regulars, some of whom depend on her packages for survival.

There’s Ira Pollock, who admits that he suffers from social anxiety but takes on a very extroverted role in organizing a potential Christmas season strike at the Amazon warehouse in Maspeth, Queens, a mobilization made all the more urgent because Pollock suspects the bosses are eagerly awaiting another potential Trump presidency.

There are Alejandro Grajales and William Medina, app delivery drivers who arrived from South America hoping to send money to family only to get dangerous jobs that take them around an inhospitable city on errands for clients who often don’t know they’re supposed to tip — all on behalf of companies capable of shutting down their app access (and thus their employment and thus their ability to remain in the country) without warning or recourse.

We meet different organizers, including Ligia Guallpa of Workers Justice Project, whose base is made up largely of Spanish-speaking immigrants who we know are soon to face their own threat from a potential Trump presidency. And then off in the distance, we see Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, a fourth-generation, labor-dedicated Teamster who still spoke at the Republican National Convention.

What makes Kopple’s documentaries on this subject so special is that she’s incredibly clear-eyed on organized labor. She recognizes the different agendas that sometimes make negotiations frustrating if not impossible, and she captures how each worker, when separate and operating as an individual, thinks they have it worse than anybody else, that they’re in competition with their peers, only to realize, when they come together, the adversity they share.

The same is true of the documentary as a whole. As with any film featuring three interlocking parts, it’s hard to give each piece equal value, and the Amazon stuff will feel particularly repetitive to viewers who saw Union or who, honestly, simply follow the news. But as the pieces come together — thematically if not narratively — the film builds an intersectional tapestry of interests that ownership and anti-union politicians prefer to keep apart because the fragile economy of part-time workers relies on their separation. That makes Union Town more cumulatively powerful at minute 106 than at any single point, no matter how sad or harrowing or infuriating the stories and experiences are.

It was the case in 1976 and in 1990 and now that companies will always prioritize profits over people, whether it’s the Nixon era, the Reagan era or whatever we’re living through today. Given how long it has been between each of Kopple’s labor documentaries, she has captured a lot of changes, from the rise of new technologies to the ubiquity of media and social media, but what’s so necessary and sad (and hopeful) about Union Town and the films that came before are the things that remain the same.