The documentary particularly focuses on the union founder and president, Chris Smalls, a former JFK8 warehouse employee who was fired in 2020, shortly after he helped organize a work stoppage in protest over the warehouse’s lack of protective gear and hazard pay. The estimated average wage for Staten Island is $41 per hour, according to a US Census Bureau analysis of the borough’s $85,381 median household income. The ALU organizers sought longer breaks, paid time off for injured employees and an hourly wage of $30, up from a minimum of just over $18 per hour offered by Amazon.

Photograph: Michael Hurcomb/REX/Shutterstock for Sundance View image in fullscreen Jordan Flowers, Derrick Palmer, Chris Smalls and Gerald Bryson at the Sundance film festival. (The film opens with footage of the Blue Origin rocket paid for by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of about $206bn.) Among them: lunch breaks too short to allow workers time to walk across campus to the cafeteria minimal vacation time inhumane treatment such as refusal of bathroom breaks lack of PPE equipment during the Covid pandemic, resulting in worker illness or death lack of job security racial and gender discrimination and low pay, particularly given the multibillion-dollar company’s wealth. Workers in the film testify to numerous issues at the JFK8 facility, which employs over 8,000 workers. The videos serve as evidence of Amazon’s vigorous anti-union efforts the company spent $4.2m on anti-union consultants in 2021, and another $14.2m in 2022.

In one such session, known as a “captive audience” meeting, an anonymous Amazon manager instructs workers: “We’re asking you to do three simple things: get the facts, ask questions and vote no to the union.” The 102-minute film, made over of the course of three years, combines verité footage of union activity on Zoom and outside JFK8, as well as footage of Amazon-led mandatory “trainings” to discourage workers from supporting the union, covertly filmed by organizing employees. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dismissed the complaint, which the company has since appealed. The mega-corporation, which currently employs 1.5 million people in the United States, disputed the terms of the election. The approval by a two-thirds majority, considered a watershed victory in the nascent new labor movement, made JFK8 the first unionized Amazon workplace. Union, directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, tracks the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) from its early organizing efforts at the JFK8 warehouse on New York’s Staten Island in spring 2021, through a contentious vote to establish the union in April 2022.

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