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“We better start pulling together or, by God, they’re going to bury us,” says a meat packer during a union meeting in Barbara Kopple’s 1990 documentary American Dream. It’s a desperate plea for survival; “they” are the Hormel Foods Corporation, who took advantage of union disorder to replace a huge portion of their workforce during a costly strike. American Dream sees the 1985-86 labor crisis in Austin, Minnesota, as symbolic of the state of organized labor in the United States – call it an alternative State of the Union address.
American Dream takes place in the Reagan years, characterized by an uncompromising approach to union power: in 1981, the president threatened striking air traffic controllers with termination if they didn’t return to work in 48 hours; private companies like Hormel, Phelps Dodge, and International Paper increasingly replaced striking workers; and unions lost 2.7 million members from 1980 to 1984.
The film, which has been restored and is re-released this week by Janus Films, was Kopple’s follow-up to Harlan County, USA, about the 1973 Brookside strike in a Kentucky coalmine. The film, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this year, is a more empowering watch than American Dream. In both works, Kopple uses roving, cinema vérité camerawork to capture the standoffs in all their frustration and perseverance, an extended, condensed timeline encapsulating the pressure that emboldens workers together in solidarity, even as some grow weary of union stubbornness.
But the DNA of Harlan County, USA is also present in the many union and strike documentaries that followed it: Final Offer, about the 1984 contract negotiations with General Motors, and American Standoff, about a fraught Teamsters strike against company Overnite Transportation beginning in 2000. More recently, Union followed the Amazon Labor Union’s historic attempt to unionize 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 stakes – they’re underdog stories with added weight and nuance from their shared history of class struggle. Be it meat packers, miners, couriers or warehouse workers, film-makers gain the trust of workers who risk everything, and the subsequent films are temperature checks on organized labor in the United States.
Some scenes in union documentaries are almost guaranteed: organizers rallying the rank and file at meetings, workers expressing concerns about the strike’s impact on their families, tensions flaring up at the picket line. There will be corporate spokespeople, union-till-I-die old-timers, and scabs. But these recurring scenes have less to do with generic storytelling and more to do with the established, rigorous processes of union action and the predictable tactics of corporate targets. The similarities in content and style proves that an essential labor crisis has remained constant from Harlan County, USA onwards, but each film’s ground-level focus and specificity means the subgenre reflects a changing landscape of American labor.
For some, the history of union action has shifted from shared community memory towards antiquated irrelevancy. The 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 racked up more than a dozen fatalities. “Bloody Harlan” is invoked throughout Kopple’s film, including when singer Florence Reece sings her protest anthem Which Side Are You On?, originally written during previous Harlan County strikes. Early union activity like this is at the foreground of more traditional archival documentaries, like With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, The Wobblies, and this week’s American Agitators, which recounts the life of organizer Fred Ross, who started his career in charge of the Dust Bowl migrant labor camp that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
In Who Moves America, the UPS contract negotiations in 2023 are contrasted with the historic 1997 UPS strike, shown through archive camcorder footage from the picket line. Many UPS drivers remember the strike, but the younger generation are ignorant of its significance. Modern companies employ far more part-time, short-term workers who are less likely to dedicate themselves to organizing; instead of a single company playing a huge role in a town’s economy, working for Amazon or UPS could be one of two or three jobs held by one worker. The recent documentaries point to the gulf between union diehards and those who must be convinced of solidarity’s worth as a union’s largest vulnerability.
American Dream contains all the seeds for the corporate makeovers that altered the discourse surrounding unions. In Harlan County, USA, the gun thugs and mining company representatives cast their eyes downward around Kopple’s camera, bullish and resistant to the lens of the free press. By the mid-1980s, the executives are far more smiley and camera-ready, brazenly dismissing the union’s newly devised campaign against them. By the 2020s, any C-suite discussion of unions is sophisticated in its condescension; in Who Moves America, the UPS CEO Carol Tomé placates shareholders by comparing Teamster negotiations to arguing with her husband about getting a puppy. In Union, union-busting is the remit of PowerPoint-wielding consultants, like those hired to sequester Amazon employees in conference rooms and convince them not to organize. It’s a far cry from the armed posse who guard the mine in Harlan County, USA, who assaulted picketers and ultimately killed miner Lawrence Jones.
It’s harder to critique a union’s political value in a documentary full of real, impassioned voices, especially as modern films increasingly include the perspectives of immigrant and undocumented workers who receive the brunt of scapegoating and demonization. But Hollywood is not a saviour for unions. Despite the existence of guilds like Sag-Aftra, WGA and Iatse, the politics of business mostly remain. Even after it was praised on the festival circuit, Union was forced to self-distribute when buyers decided not to jeopardise a working relationship with Amazon MGM Studios. It didn’t bury the film exactly, but it certainly made things more difficult, denying it the publicity earned by a best documentary Oscar, like the two awarded to Kopple. But watching a half-century of these films, showcasing the tenacity and doggedness of organizers, you’re convinced that the union documentary is an ongoing, collaborative project – capable of being both an archive and a manual.
English (US)