Venice Review: With Union Town, Barbara Kopple Expertly Completes Her Labor-Rights Trilogy

Coal miners from Kentucky traveled to New York City months into their 1973 strike to increase their struggle’s profile. As documented by Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA, one of their most vocal supporters was an NYPD officer. It makes sense: the Police Benevolent Association represents over 20,000 of the city’s rank-and-file cops. They know what it means to be in a union that fights for their rights.

Thus it’s no coincidence that Kopple includes a New Yorker popping his head out a car window in Union Town to vociferously label the police contingent setting up barricades preventing Amazon Teamsters from picketing the location as scabs. Fifty years is all it took to go from one union man seeing another as his brother to a union adopting flimsy messaging about “just doing their job” to help a billionaire continue dehumanizing the members of another.

The contrast epitomizes America’s disintegrating sentiment towards the labor-rights movement that Kopple documented over the past half-century. She went from the optimistic white-hat victory in Harlan County to the angry confusion that resulted from the Reagan administration’s new world order shifting power back to corporations in American Dream. Some of that initial hope and solidarity returns this time to close out her labor rights trilogy, but the war has only grown worse.

How could it not after the wealth disparity between the one percent and those on the poverty line increased exponentially during the COVID shutdown? At a time when delivery drivers were considered “essential workers,” their tireless efforts ironically made their bosses billions of dollars that they never shared in. Why? Because the government allowed it via “contractor” designations and the dismantling of the social safety nets necessary to survive.

If you thought it was bad in the 1980s, when Hormel simply hired people even poorer than the contracted employees they refused to negotiate with in good faith, we’re a full circle of Hell lower now. It’s all a lot more fractured, too: loopholes, cronyism, and outright corruption allow companies to test just how immoral they can get, knowing the slap on the wrist received if caught is peanuts compared to what it would cost to do the right thing.

Kopple expertly moves between three separate conflicts within Union Town over the course of three years, starting in 2023. The first is the Teamsters vs. UPS, the former seeking raises for full-time employees and a living wage for the part-timers who’ve barely seen a bump since their last strike in 1997. The second is Amazon employees realizing they only make half what Teamsters do. And the third sees immigrant app drivers yearning for transparency.

As with her previous two Oscar-winning documentaries, the candid footage and interviews captured here are invaluable. They supply the raw emotion shared by people on three different tiers of the same nightmare and how an almost imperceptibly incremental victory can often feel like winning the lottery after so many years of thinking progress of any kind was a pipe dream. It’s as much a tactic as union-busting, though: give a crumb and pretend it’s a feast.

The overlap between UPS and Amazon is easily made, in large part because the latter ultimately votes to join the former’s Teamster union. The app workforce is kind of on an island of its own beyond the delivery connection (probably why Starbucks workers are thanked in the end credits despite no screen time), but Kopple thematically works their plight in while expanding their story to union-like organizations Deliveristas United and The Worker’s Justice Project.

Their piece to this puzzle is actually the most harrowing and memorable. That’s not to belittle what the Teamsters are doing (and some pushback is seen due to the breadth of who they represent guaranteeing not everyone is happy when a “landmark agreement” is made). It’s just to say these majority immigrants have a lot more going on with deactivation (firing without cause), violent attacks, murders, and, as Trump’s second term begins, ICE deportations.

We’re literally seeing the full spectrum of our country’s most vulnerable citizens and neighbors sacrificing everything while those worth more money than can ever feasibly be spent in a lifetime hoard even more via tax breaks. UPS drivers fight for more than $40 an hour. Amazon warehouse workers fight for air conditioning. “Dashers” fight for the right to appeal their overnight terminations. Context and relativity prove their equal value.

Everyone who participated is equally a hero, too. You know entities like Amazon will use this film as a means to put employees on a list if they haven’t already been singled out or fired. You know the Trump cabinet will do the same for every app worker with an accent, regardless of their citizenship. They told their stories, anyway. They trusted Kopple to foster their truth in a way that will hopefully assist future generations to reach higher.

That’s the real worth of these documentaries. Harlan County and American Dream also benefit from the intense uncertainty of their eras turning their watershed moments into potential bloodbaths (literally and figuratively, respectively), but Union Town holds its own with the stakes bubbling over, portraying just how crucial it is for public sentiment to get behind these unions as a foundation for potentially preserving their own survival.

Because you’ll always be exponentially closer to losing everything than closing down Venice, Italy, for your wedding. Don’t be the smug SOB in this film playing the semantics game with a Teamster about “where’s the line on laws you’ll break?” while the one percent proves time and again that no line exists for them. Kopple documents how the system (unions included) often works against those it’s meant to support. The real victory would be rebuilding it.

Until that time comes, however, we must at least acknowledge the bravery of those putting their jobs, health, and lives on the line to remind the world that injustice is a choice. Does it bode well that the Teamsters’ straw poll for the 2024 election overwhelmingly showed its membership supported Trump, despite his policies doing more to hurt their livelihood than anyone else? No. Take yesterday’s win, fight for today, and keep hoping for a better tomorrow.

Union Town premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival.