Writing in TheWrap, Sharon Waxman profiles the documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple, now 80, whose new film ‘Union Town’ follows delivery workers as they try to organize. Waxman frames the project as a return to territory Kopple first covered nearly 50 years ago, and she draws a direct line to ‘Harlan County, USA,’ the 1976 film about a Kentucky coal miners’ strike that won Kopple an Academy Award. The piece presents the new work as both a continuation and a measure of how far conditions have or have not changed.
The central observation Waxman highlights is one of persistence. In Kopple’s account, the fundamental struggles of workers have endured across five decades, even as the methods used against organizing have shifted. Where the earlier film documented physical confrontation, the new one, as described in the piece, turns on corporate union-busting carried out through legal and financial pressure. Waxman notes that Kopple spent three and a half years making the documentary, a timeline that underscores the scale of the undertaking.
The film centers on the couriers known as Deliveristas, who ferry app-based food orders through New York. According to the piece, roughly 90 percent of them are undocumented immigrants, a status that shapes both their bargaining power and their exposure to risk. Waxman reports the economic stakes in plain terms, writing that delivery app workers earn about 7 dollars an hour before tips, compared with the 15.50 dollars an hour cited for unionized UPS workers doing related delivery work.
Waxman also lays out the cost of resistance to organizing. The piece states that Amazon spent 26 million dollars on union-busting efforts, and that professional union busters can charge in the region of 15,000 dollars a week. Those figures, presented as part of Kopple’s reporting, are offered to illustrate an industry built around discouraging collective action, and to explain why the workers in the film face long odds even when their grievances are widely shared.
Across the profile, Waxman positions Kopple’s career as a throughline connecting the coalfields of the 1970s to the gig platforms of today. The argument the film advances, as Waxman relays it, is that worker exploitation has not disappeared but changed form, moving from open conflict to quieter and better-funded opposition. For Kopple, the piece suggests, the value of returning to the subject lies in showing that the questions raised by ‘Harlan County, USA’ remain unsettled a half-century later.
