{"id":841995,"date":"2026-09-09T17:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T17:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/841995\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T17:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T17:54:09","slug":"union-town-review-passionate-expose-of-us-delivery-workers-employment-conditions-venice-film-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/841995\/","title":{"rendered":"Union Town review \u2013 passionate expos\u00e9 of US delivery workers\u2019 employment conditions | Venice film festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barbara Kopple\u2019s documentary about app-based delivery workers is a stirring, defiant, battle-hardened affair, swinging between the fraught picket line and the still more hazardous New York<\/a> City streets. It\u2019s a new film that feels old in the best sense of the word; a hoarse battle cry that summons the ghosts of The Grapes of Wrath and the New Deal, Eugene Debs and Woody Guthrie. That America is long dead and buried, a casualty of changing times, but Kopple sees no reason why it should not rise again.<\/p>\n

Union Town, tellingly, is the third part of a loose trilogy which serves as an ongoing audit of US workers\u2019 rights. This began with 1976\u2019s Harlan County, USA, which tackled a Kentucky miners\u2019 strike, and continued through 1990\u2019s American Dream, which covered a meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. Since then, however, the culture has shifted, atomised, with the big corporations increasingly reliant on a shadow economy of undocumented workers. Kopple\u2019s \u201cdeliveristas\u201d ferry packages for the likes of Amazon and DoorDash but they are technically third-party contractors. That means if, say, they happen to be injured in the line of duty, they cover the hospital bills and repairs to the bike. It also means that they are likely to be fired while they\u2019re laid up in bed.<\/p>\n

An Amazon worker in Union Town. Photograph: Hannes Hosp\/Cabin Creek Films<\/p>\n

Kopple spotlights a push by the Teamsters union to unionise Amazon\u2019s disparate workforce, which culminates in a paralysing six-day strike over the 2024 Christmas period (\u201cYou\u2019re killing Santa,\u201d a disapproving news anchor tells Teamster president Sean O\u2019Brien). Along the way, the film collates a lengthy and damning rap sheet. We hear from the warehouse employees who pack boxes in 105-degree (40.5C) heat, the delivery drivers who sleep in their cars and earn $7 an hour, and the exhausted migrant workers who live under threat of being apprehended by ICE. Kopple\u2019s fly-on-the-wall approach ensures that these invisible workers have names, faces and voices \u2013 and it\u2019s only the bosses who refuse to break cover. The sole one we hear from is Carol Tom\u00e9, the grandmotherly CEO of UPS. She materialises on a TV business show to enthuse about the benefits of putting robots in the warehouse. Robots would be better, she giggles. More efficient; \u201cNo attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

Union Town is keen to emphasise the positives. Solidarity pays dividends. David slew Goliath. \u201cJeff Bezos is Darth Vader,\u201d says one Teamster. \u201cAnd we\u2019re the rebel army.\u201d And yet the unavoidable takeaway of this bleakly potent picture is that this struggle is Sissyphian, with the membership split and confused and actively voting against their own interests. The Amazon drivers envy the UPS drivers; 60% of Teamster members support Trump. Outside the Amazon headquarters at night, the union\u2019s Chris Williamson maintains what is effectively a one-man picket line after everyone else has gone home. He\u2019s freezing his feet off in the New York slush and angrily, desperately calling for reinforcements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara Kopple\u2019s documentary about app-based delivery workers is a stirring, defiant, battle-hardened affair, swinging between the fraught picket…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":841996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-841995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=841995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/841995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/841996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=841995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=841995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=841995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}