In the 1930s, unions organized with great success, and by the mid-1950s, they came to represent more than a third of the country’s unions.
During the same period, unions were able to shut down companies through measures to force managers to come to the bargaining table. The General Motors strike of 1937, which autoworkers used to gain popularity for the United Auto Workers union, was a landmark. The workers created a castle around the Flint, Michigan, plant that at the time was guilty of assembling engines for any and all General Motors makes and models, to make sure that no thugs hired by the company could sabotage the factory. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Michigan Gov. Frank Murphy refused to intervene, in part because both had won the respective elections with an overwhelming majority of hard-working groups.
Smart, energetic, forceful, and dramatic, Union, a documentary directed by Brett Story and Steve Maing, does a wonderful job of highlighting how the union landscape of the 2020s is affected by a new set of dangers and obstacles. for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), created in Staten Island, New York.
Featuring Christian Smalls, a savvy and effective grassroots organizer who led the ALU to its first big win in 2022, the film received a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Incidentally, it is one of four documentaries at this year’s festival presented by Impact Partners Film and Geralyn Dreyfous, one of the founders of Impact Partners and cofounder of the Utah Film Center. She is executive producer.
The administrators chose the right example to describe the formidable struggles that union organizers have faced in the 21st century, namely those involving independent unions that have taken on personal sector giants like Target, Google, Microsoft and Uber. Facebook, Starbucks and others.
Few believed it was imaginable that Smalls and others pushing for an independent union to win an organizing election at an Amazon warehouse. Smalls built a base through the most unorthodox means, employing GoFundMe to raise money and providing fish frying food, beer, and marijuana as treats to lubricate organizing channels. Renowned hard-work historian Erik Loomis said elsewhere that he was surprised by the ALU’s victory, noting that even classic unions had continually failed in recent decades to organize staff into a fashionable economy. The little guys have avoided elements of classic organizing campaigns, which usually involve hard-working lawyers, corporate headquarters set up to make the decisions, or teams of outside experts who tell local staff what they deserve to do and dictate their talking points.
As the film recounts, the victory on April 1, 2022, was hailed as historic, highlighting that after all, an independent hard-working movement had proven that a bottom-up strategy could work, even at a giant employer like Amazon. That victory has also faded significantly since then. The ALU lost back-to-back elections by decisive margins shortly after that victory. Elsewhere on Staten Island, the margin of defeat was significant, and in Albany, fewer than one in five Amazon employees qualified for bargaining unity voted for the ALU.
Amazon has also responded to any calls to engage in formal contract negotiations. And most of today’s labor law lacks the enforceability and political will to force corporate control to respond to negotiations in a timely manner. In a discussion after a screening in Salt Lake City this week, Smalls, who earned a standing ovation for his status, rightly pointed out this obstacle. Given the U. S. Senate’s regulations on the number of votes needed to pass legislation, traditionally pro-Labor Democrats don’t have enough votes to stipulate mandatory mediation or set strict measures. Deadlines for the commencement of contract negotiations.
Meanwhile, a recent Cornell University study indicated that more than half of the companies had yet to begin negotiations one year after workers had voted to organize and that even after two years, more than one-third of those companies had not offered any overtures for bargaining. Also, decades of legal precedents in federal courts have watered down whatever labor laws are on the books. Business leaders have always been anti-union but the way mass manufacturing was centralized in the 1930s made companies such as General Motors far more vulnerable to the effects of work stoppages than today. To wit: Smalls noted that taking a unionized Amazon warehouse facility offline will not be enough to disrupt business to the extent that management will want to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible.
The documentary includes many scenes of confrontation, and not only with the management. There are cases where staff would welcome some resources from established unions to an independent union that is still in its infancy. However, Smalls, whose presence is as imposing on the user as he appears on screen, has not yet indicated whether he would settle for talArray
Their reserves are well situated. On the other hand, virtually none of the old unions agreed to independent organizing efforts. And the ball is in their court. Regarding the old unions, Loomis wrote: “They will want to do things like put the interests of the planet first, lead protests against police brutality, invest gigantic sums in unionization, and take other ambitious measures to combat massive structural unions. The inequality in which we live.
Actually, Smalls is as charismatic as the Baptist minister turned organizer (Homer Martin) who got the United Auto Workers off the ground. Smalls said at the talkback that ALU organizing efforts are set to spread internationally, which would be a potentially good move for formulating precisely the type of organizing culture that could give the fledgling union the credibility it needs at the bargaining table. But, Smalls might also be well advised to take a cue from union history and open the doors to others who can help expand his groundbreaking vision. Indeed, it would even make the documentary film chronicling his efforts that much more valuable and impactful in spreading the message about the ALU.
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