How a small group of Amazon workers took on big business and challenged traditional unions | Kenan Malik

‘The union wants to protect workers. The employer wants to protect workers. How do I choose between them?” So asks one young worker in Union, a documentary about the battle to unionise an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York. It is a telling comment on the confusion today about what it means to defend working-class interests and the difficulties in trying to build working-class organisations.

Directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, two of the most engaging and innovatory documentary film-makers today, Union opens with a huge cargo ship piled high with containers, sailing slowly into view. The film then cuts to a line of people, half asleep in the early hours of the morning, waiting to be transported to an Amazon “fulfilment centre” – a vast warehouse stuffed full of commodities, both goods and humans. It cuts again to a shot of the Blue Origin rocket carrying Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and a few friends and fellow billionaires into space. It is a visual metaphor for the disparity of power that lies at the heart of the story.

Union follows a small group of Amazon workers and ex-workers between the summer of 2021 and the spring of the following year as they try to establish the Amazon Labour Union (ALU). The central figure in the story is Chris Smalls, a former worker at the Staten Island warehouse who was sacked after leading a protest against Amazon’s failure to protect workers from Covid. He is charismatic and passionate, someone as comfortable in front of a camera as in a campaign meeting.

Union is, though, no hagiography. Filmed in vérité style, with no narrator or talking heads, it is as much a portrait of the difficulties and conflicts that attend attempts to forge solidarity, as it is of the ALU. It is to the credit of Story, Maing and Smalls himself that the film shows Smalls not just as a hugely inspiring leader – which he is – but also as someone others often find exasperating and who leaves some feeling unheard. It is not simply a feelgood David and Goliath drama but an exploration of the messy reality of building solidarity, the disorderliness of democratic decision-making, the frustrations that come with challenging overwhelming odds.

Amazon is a company with seemingly limitless resources and a long history of often devious manoeuvres aimed at crushing unions. Its tactics were all on display on Staten Island: a deluge of anti-union propaganda; constant surveillance; threats to, even sackings of, those who push for a union; the use of police to harass campaigners. That Amazon would rather pay millions of dollars to lawyers and union busters than provide even half-decent wages and conditions to its employees tells us much about how people and profits are valued in today’s world. Amazon may be a particularly shoddy employer but it is not unique. From Boeing to Volkswagen, from Tesla to Walmart, the same calculations apply in every dystopian workplace.

Yet, despite the odds, the ALU triumphed, winning sufficient support among the warehouse workers to force Amazon to recognise the union in April 2022. The triumph, though, was bittersweet, revealing not just the fortitude of the campaigners but also the enormous capacity of big business to resist them. Disdaining the ALU’s victory, Amazon has refused for more than two years to negotiate with the union, using its lawyers to drag out the process.

The experience of being working class is significantly different today than it would have been even half a century ago. Unionisation has plummeted (just one in 10 American workers are in a union, half the figure of that in 1983) and many people have no generational experience of being part of a labour movement. Class is perceived less as a collective identity than as a cultural identifier.

As they have lost members and power, unions themselves have transformed, their leaders preferring to cultivate political influence than to organise industrial action. “Unions have renounced class warfare,” the late sociologist and activist Stanley Aronowitz observed in his book The Death and Life of American Labor, while corporations “pursue it with a vengeance – against the workers unions are supposed to represent and defend”. The consequence is a disconnect with workers, many questioning the very purpose of a union.

There is equally a disconnect with, and a sense of betrayal by, political parties, from the Democrats in America to social democratic parties in Europe, which once were seen as representing working-class interests, but have long since abandoned such a commitment. That sense of betrayal, combined with a lack of any alternatives, has pushed sections of the working class towards politicians and parties that are among the most hostile to working-class interests, from the far right in Europe to Donald Trump in America.

Trump’s presidential triumph illuminates both the failure of the old and the cynicism of the new. Elon Musk, Trump’s new cheerleader, whom the president-elect has tasked with cutting government bureaucracy and spending, is more rabidly anti-union than even Bezos. He has refused to countenance unions at Tesla, threatening to remove stock options from any employee who went on strike, an act the courts have deemed legal, and sacked workers for union activity and for criticising his policies. Trump has praised Musk’s willingness to sack striking workers. He has also previously claimed that US workers’ wages are too high. Musk has joined Bezos in bringing a legal challenge to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that regulates collective bargaining.

Why should working-class people give their support to parties and politicians so hostile to working-class interests? For the same reason that a worker in an anonymous, alienating, algorithm-driven factory run by a company that pays execrable wages, monitors their every activity and maintains order though fear and intimidation, cannot decide whether the company or the union might better protect her. So disenchanted have many become with the traditional organisations that claimed to safeguard working-class interests, so enraged with their failures and betrayals, that they feel it more rational to look elsewhere for answers.

In such a world, an organisation such as the ALU, that shows the practical possibilities of building solidarity, of challenging corporations and of defending working-class interests without tumbling into bigotry or divisiveness, becomes more important than ever.