Strength in numbers: what have union documentaries over 50 years shown us? | Documentaries

“W“We’d better start banding together, or they’ll bury us, by God,” says a meatpacking worker during a union meeting in Barbara Koppel’s 1990 documentary “American Dream.” It’s a desperate plea for survival; “they” are the Hormel Foods Company, which took advantage of union chaos to replace a large portion of its workforce during a costly strike. 1985-1986 in Austin, Minnesota, as a symbol of the organized labor state of the United States – they called it an alternative to the State of the Union address.

The American Dream is set in the Reagan years, which were marked by an uncompromising approach to union power: in 1981, the president threatened striking air traffic controllers with termination if they did not return to work within 48 hours; Private companies such as Hormel, Phelps Dodge, and International Paper increasingly replaced striking workers; Unions lost 2.7 million members from 1980 to 1984.

The film, restored and re-released this week by Janus Films, was Kopple’s follow-up to Harlan County, USA, about the 1973 Brookside strike at a Kentucky coal mine. The film, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this year, is a more empowering watch than American Dream. In both works, Koppel uses a roving movie camera to capture confrontations in all their frustration and tenacity, an extended, intense timeline that encapsulates the pressure that emboldens workers together in solidarity, even as some grow weary of union obstinacy.

But the DNA of Harlan County USA was also present in several union and strike documentaries that followed: The Final Show, about the 1984 contract negotiations with General Motors, and American Standoff, about the fraught truckers’ strike against Overnight Transportation starting in 2000. More recently, the union followed the Amazon workers’ union’s historic attempt to unite an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, while the upcoming Who Moves America is a Nationwide survey of UPS drivers preparing to strike as Teamster negotiators. Fight for an acceptable contract.

Stories about strikes come ready-made with real tension, pressure and risk – they are underdog stories with added weight and nuance from their shared history of class struggle. Whether meatpackers, miners, couriers, or warehouse workers, filmmakers gain the trust of workers who risk everything, and the subsequent films are examinations of the temperature of organized labor in the United States.

Some scenes in union documentaries are almost foolproof: organizers rallying the base at meetings, workers expressing concerns about the impact of a strike on their families, and tensions brewing at the picket line. There will be corporate spokespeople, union veterans until I die, and union members. But these recurring scenes have less to do with the overall narrative than with the established and rigid processes of union action and the predictable tactics of corporate goals. Similarities in content and style demonstrate that the basic labor crisis remained constant from Harlan County USA onward, but the ground-level focus and specificity of each film means that the subgenre reflects a changing landscape of American labor.

For some, the history of union work has shifted from shared societal memory to antiquated irrelevance. Striking miners in Harlan County, USA stand in the shadow of the Harlan County War, a series of strikes and skirmishes during the 1930s that left more than a dozen dead. “Bloody Harlan” is invoked throughout Kopple’s film, including when singer Florence Rees sings her protest anthem “Which Side Are You On?”, which was originally written during the earlier Harlan County strikes. Early union activism like this comes to the forefront of traditional archival documentaries, such as With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, The Wobblies, and this week’s American Agitators, which chronicles the life of organizer Fred Ross, who began his career in charge of the Dust Bowl migrant labor camp that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

In Who Moves America, UPS contract negotiations in 2023 contrast with the historic 1997 UPS strike, shown through archival video camera footage from the picket line. Many UPS drivers remember the strike, but the younger generation is unaware of its importance. Modern companies employ far more part-time and short-term workers, who are less likely to devote themselves to organisation; Instead of one company playing a large role in a city’s economy, working for Amazon or UPS could be one of two or three jobs held by a single worker. Recent documentaries point to the gap between union fanatics and those who should be convinced of the value of solidarity as the greatest weakness facing unions.

The “American Dream” contains all the seeds of the institutional transformations that changed the discourse surrounding unions. In Harlan County, USA, gun thugs and mining company representatives cast their eyes downward around Coble’s camera, both hopeful and resistant to the lens of a free press. By the mid-1980s, executives had become more willing to appear in front of the cameras, and brazenly rejected the union’s newly launched campaign against them. By the 2020s, any discussion of unions at the top management level will be complex in its condescension; In Who Moves America, UPS CEO Carol Toomey appeases shareholders by comparing Teamster negotiations to arguing with her husband over getting a puppy. At Union, union-busting is the prerogative of PowerPoint-wielding consultants, like those hired to isolate Amazon employees in conference rooms and persuade them not to organize. It’s a far cry from the armed group guarding the mine in Harlan County, USA, which attacked picketers and eventually killed miner Lawrence Jones.

It is difficult to criticize the political value of the union in a documentary full of real and passionate voices, especially since modern films increasingly include the perspectives of immigrants and undocumented workers who receive the brunt of scapegoating and demonization. But Hollywood is no savior for unions. Although there are unions such as Sag-Aftra, WGA and IATSE, business politics remains mostly in place. Even after it was praised on the festival circuit, Union was forced to self-distribute when buyers decided not to jeopardize its working relationship with Amazon MGM Studios. It didn’t completely bury the film, but it certainly made things more difficult, depriving it of the publicity that the Best Documentary Feature Oscar had garnered, like the two awards Koppel received. But when you watch half a century of these films, which show the tenacity and tenacity of the organisers, you are convinced that the union’s documentary is an ongoing collaborative project – capable of being both an archive and a guide.