Fifty years after “Harlan County, USA” won her an Academy Award, documentarian Barbara Kopple has completed a new film about American labor, this time trained on the gig-economy delivery workers who move packages and food through New York City for wages that barely cover rent.
“Union Town” premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival this week, closing out a trilogy that began with 1976’s “Harlan County U.S.A.” and continued with 1990’s “American Dream.” At 80, Kopple spent three and a half years embedded with UPS drivers, Amazon warehouse employees and the mostly immigrant bike couriers known as deliveristas as they organized against their employers. She told AFP that workers today are fighting for the same things they fought for five decades ago: a union of their choosing, fair pay, safe conditions and basic respect.
The film follows three central workers through injuries, suspensions and firings, capturing what Kopple has called the invisibility of people whose labor touches nearly every household but whose faces rarely register. By her account, roughly 90% of the city’s app-based delivery workers lack legal status, leaving them especially vulnerable to retaliation; one worker in the film loses his income after his delivery account is suspended following an on-the-job injury that wasn’t his fault.
Kopple said the biggest change since Harlan County isn’t the underlying conflict but the tactics companies use to suppress it. Where mine operators once relied on armed guards, corporations now hire professional union-busting firms, with Amazon alone reportedly spending tens of millions of dollars on the practice. The arrival of immigration enforcement adds a layer of risk that didn’t exist in her earlier films.
Autlook Filmsales acquired global rights to “Union Town” ahead of its Venice debut, with a North American premiere set for the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was produced by Kopple alongside Hannes Hosp and Peter Palandjian, and remains up for sale to distributors following its festival run.
