‘Union Town’ Review: Barbara Kopple Takes on UPS, Amazon and the Apps in Another Essential Organized Labor Documentary
Barbara Kopple, the two-time Oscar-winning director behind *Harlan County, USA* and *American Dream*, returns to the subject of organised labour with *Union Town*, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary examines the modern American gig economy through the struggles of UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse workers and app-based delivery couriers in New York City, arguing that the fragmented, isolated nature of gig work has made solidarity harder to build even as inequality deepens. Reviewers note the film covers similar ground to the 2024 documentary *Union*, but its shift from small-town settings to sprawling New York gives it a distinct, if less intimate, urgency.
Filmed from summer 2023 using Kopple's trademark observational style, the documentary follows around a dozen key figures rather than centring on a single strike, including UPS driver Shellyanne Ellison, Amazon organiser Ira Pollock at the Maspeth, Queens warehouse, app delivery drivers Alejandro Grajales and William Medina, and organiser Ligia Guallpa of the Workers Justice Project. Their stories touch on issues such as unsafe working conditions, precarious immigration status and the threat of a second Trump presidency, framing the film as a broader "state of the union" reflecting on unresolved economic hardship in America.
- Barbara Kopple's new labour documentary premiered at Venice Film Festival
- Film follows UPS, Amazon and app delivery workers in New York
- Explores gig economy struggles, solidarity and organising challenges
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Union Town is a new documentary by Barbara Kopple, a director well known for her past films about workers organising, including Harlan County, USA and American Dream. Her latest film looks at today's American gig economy, following UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse staff and app-based delivery riders in New York as they try to improve pay and conditions, and considers why building solidarity is harder when work is scattered across warehouses, depots and smartphone apps rather than one workplace.
The film follows around a dozen real workers and organisers rather than one central figure, including UPS driver Shellyanne Ellison, Amazon organiser Ira Pollock, and delivery riders and union organisers connected to groups such as the Workers Justice Project. It was filmed over more than a year and touches on issues including workplace safety, immigration status and wider economic pressures facing low-paid workers in the US.
The documentary has just had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where critics have been comparing it with Union, an earlier 2024 film that covered similar territory at an Amazon warehouse. It matters as part of a broader ongoing conversation about labour rights, unionisation and working conditions in large US companies and the gig economy more widely.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Advocates of the film's perspective argue that gig and warehouse work has genuinely eroded worker protections by classifying people as independent contractors or isolating them from colleagues, making collective bargaining structurally harder even as companies post record profits. They see documentaries like this as valuable because they give voice to workers facing unsafe conditions, unpredictable pay and precarious immigration status, and argue that renewed unionisation efforts at firms such as Amazon are a legitimate response to real power imbalances between vast corporations and individual workers.
The case against
Others argue that gig and delivery platforms succeed precisely because they offer flexibility, low barriers to entry and supplemental income that traditional unionised employment structures often cannot match, particularly for immigrants, students and those balancing multiple jobs. They contend that framing this sector primarily through the lens of exploitation and organised labour risks overlooking workers who value independence over collective bargaining, and that companies like UPS and Amazon already operate within a highly competitive, heavily scrutinised market that incentivises reasonable working conditions without mandated unionisation.