Union Gives a Close Look at the Historic Amazon Labor Union Win
In 2022, Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island became the first in the US to win a union election. The new documentary Union gives a compelling glimpse behind the scenes of the victory — and the challenges that have come since.
Workers rally outside JFK8 on April 24, 2022, in the run-up to their successful union election. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2022, a group of Amazon workers stunned the world by winning a union election at the huge JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Many had wondered if Amazon workers in the United States could ever win a union election at the corporate giant, which transformed from a small online bookseller in the 1990s to a behemoth with 1.5 million employees.
These Staten Island workers showed that it could be done. But how did they do it? A new documentary, Union, offers a close look at what happened, following the organizing campaign for over a year. The film focuses a lot, necessarily, on Christian Smalls, the founder and leader of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU). After he was fired early in the pandemic in 2020 for leading a walkout to protest Amazon’s COVID-19 policies, he started talking to other workers at JFK8 about the need for a union. The campaign soon attracted other key leaders and supporters shown in the film, including Angelika Maldonado, Connor Spence, Derrick Palmer, and Madeline Wesley.
The Organizing Process
The film captures a lot of compelling scenes of union members in action and does a nice job of showing the nuts and bolts of union organizing, which started at JFK8 in the spring of 2021. Union depicts a seemingly endless number of Zoom and phone calls, discussions with workers, handing out flyers, and collecting union authorization cards.
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