“You know how many times I passed by this in my life and never knew,” Nailah Webber says to her friend Angel Badu as they drive past a Teamsters office in Louisville, Kentucky in “Who Moves America,” about to go inside when the union has a huge amount of sway over their immediate future. The two work for UPS and as a deadline approaches for a contract over which the union has authorized their first strike in nearly 30 years should the shipping giant not come to the bargaining table with a fair offer, they are getting a crash course in what can be achieved with solidarity as many others of their 340,000 co-workers are when deciding what kind of action should be taken.
In Yael Bridge’s compelling chronicle of the six months leading up to what inevitably will be a landmark agreement for better or worse when UPS workers are the largest workforce that the Teamsters represent, a startling amount of them are unfamiliar with what a union does or the history of their own. Bridge focuses on the latter as an obstacle as formidable as actually negotiating with the conglomerate they work for when few remain with UPS from 1997, the last time gains were made in a labor agreement when workers stood their ground, and a large part of the workforce wasn’t even born yet, making the effort to authorize a strike a tall order when employees could fear a disruption and potential retribution more than the company does. Workers like Webber and Badu also have less incentive to take part in a strike when they are bound to receive less of a bump in pay or see much other benefit as part-time employees than their full-time counterparts, though that distinction made by UPS seems relatively arbitrary given the amount of hours the company asks for from everyone.
The film has a tough act to follow coming after Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s “Union” (with which it doesn’t have any explicit ties, though they share a producer in Mars Verrone), but whereas that verite master class had an intense focus on the groundbreaking unionization drive at a single Amazon warehouse in New York and footage from the inside on how the corporation put pressure on workers to vote against their own interests, “Who Moves America” ends up as being complementary as far as what it takes to keep the appetite alive to take a stand with a workforce spread across the country and of various ages and experience, leaving younger employees without a memory of a time of when job conditions might’ve been better. That isn’t true of at least Justin Alo, a full-time driver in San Marcos, California, who knows their position at UPS is their best option for employment over similar jobs at Amazon or USPS because of what their union previously achieved, yet takes a proactive role in securing a new contract when so many others in his generation do not and as meetings in his hometown take place at coffee shops where robots are delivering plates to the table, what’s at stake can literally be staring them in the face.
The presence of both UPS and the Teamsters national leadership is somewhat limited, though the film does find its way alongside the union’s president Sean O’Brien for the home stretch and the concentration on the rank-and-file shows how much is actually up to them to push for progress, bedeviled by a business model that seeks to undermine them when it encourages passivity amongst employees that expect to come and go, yet requires a predominant belief amongst those that vote on a new contract that they aren’t seeking improvements for themselves, but for those that come after them. “What Moves America” may act as a document of one cycle, but it reflects the need for constant vigilance and selflessness for a union to actually work and ends all the more appropriately by capturing an ongoing struggle rather than a fight that has an end.
“Who Moves America” will screen again at True/False on March 7th at 9 am at the Missouri Theatre and March 8th at 8:15 pm at the Blue Note.