Union Town review – passionate exposé of US delivery workers’ employment conditions

Venice film festival: Barbara Kopple returns with her third film investigating US workers’ rights – this time, undocumented ‘deliveristas’ and the attempts to unionise Amazon staff Barbara Kopple’s documentary about app-based delivery workers is a stirring, defiant, battle-hardened affair, swinging between the fraught picket line and the still more hazardous New York City streets.

It’s a new film that feels old in the best sense of the word; a hoarse battle cry that summons the ghosts of The Grapes of Wrath and the New Deal, Eugene Debs and Woody Guthrie. That America is long dead and buried, a casualty of changing times, but Kopple sees no reason why it should not rise again. Union Town, tellingly, is the third part of a loose trilogy which serves as an ongoing audit of US workers’ rights. This began with 1976’s Harlan County, USA, which tackled a Kentucky miners’ strike, and continued through 1990’s American Dream, which covered a meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota. Since then, however, the culture has shifted,…