I was at a Crotona Park barbecue in the South Bronx to celebrate my wife’s nephew, who was going off to a trade school after graduating high school. The family barbecue included a cross section of union members, among them electricians, hotel workers, Teamsters — not a strange amalgam, thanks to New York’s high union density. It’s often only in TV shows that you see a tight-knit group of friends from vastly different class backgrounds hanging out together. In real life, we can’t curate a social circle of people from disparate backgrounds with the same ease you assemble an eclectic wardrobe from a thrift store.

But social segregation can be overcome through political and civic institutions that turn strangers into comrades, offering an antidote to loneliness and atomization. In 1947, Life magazine photographer David E. Scherman shot a picture of a Communist Party cell at a Paris café, planning a Christmas dinner. The meeting included a classics professor, a stenographer, a salesman, a jeweler, a tailor, a schoolteacher, a metallurgist, an upholsterer, a dressmaker, and a pastry cook. The party offered a political home that brought all of them together to understand themselves as part of a unified class with a shared worldview.

Unions also bring together an unlikely assortment of people to exercise collective power in the workplace. In the new documentary Who Moves America, filmmaker Yael Bridge offers a window into the working-class culture of one of the country’s largest unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, at United Parcel Service (UPS) in 2023. Bridge previously directed the 2020 documentary The Big Scary “S” Word, chronicling the rich history of the socialist movement in the United States with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ second presidential run as a backdrop, and the 2022 documentary When We Fight, about the 2019 Los Angeles teachers’ strike. In her latest film, she returns to the strike, that most potent of working-class weapons.