‘Union Town’ review: Fifty years after ‘Harlan County, USA’, Barbara Kopple returns to the frontline of America’s labour struggle

Dir: Barbara Kopple. USA. 2026. 110mins.

Fifty years on from her groundbreaking 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple returns to the industrial relations coalface to find out just how much things have changed. Back then, a group of striking miners and their wives face down an entire energy corporation and its strikebreaking thugs – helped both by their community spirit and their union. Fast forward half a century and even larger, more powerful corporations are continuing to exploit their low-paid gig workers. Except now communities are fragmented, workers paid by the job with no time to organise, established unions struggle to gain a foothold and intimidation tactics have become far more sophisticated, relying on hired consultants rather than hoodlums. Welcome to Union Town.

Both observational and empathetic

This is the third part of Kopple’s ‘labour rights’ trilogy; both Harlan County and the second instalment American Dream (1990) won the Oscar for best documentary. Union Town premieres out of competition in Venice and, while many audiences will likely end up seeing this on a small screen, the film has the pace and audience engagement to land in well-curated urban theatres, especially if it is accompanied by the buzz of a campaign to land Kopple her third documentary Academy Award.

American Dream was shot towards the end of the Regan era in an already-changed landscape, in which a meatpacking corporation could break the resolve of strikers by hiring replacement workers and shifting production to other plants. The story has hardly got any rosier since then. Maybe that’s why Union Town strives against the odds to look on the bright, motivational side, charting the few if partial success stories in the fight of US parcel and food delivery workers against the vast conglomerates that pretend to make life easy for all of us. 

Is Union Town as ironic a title as American Dream? The New York metropolitan area, where most of Kopple’s documentary was shot, has higher unionisation rates than most of the US, but that still leaves vast swathes of workers without anyone to plead their cause. In the early part of the film, we meet some who do: UPS delivery drivers, who are represented by the Teamsters union. Kopple’s camera follows a few in 2023 as they haul packages around NYC and prepare for the prospect of a strike as the deadline for a new five-year contract looms.

There may be a divide-and-rule system in place at UPS, with part-time drivers making far less per hour than their full-time colleagues, but that gulf is nothing compared to the pittance earned by app-reliant bicycle and motorbike delivery workers for food delivery platforms such as DoorDash, who depend on tips to make a living wage. Gradually, a third strand is folded in: Amazon staff, both those on the road and those in warehouses, who, we learn, are harassed in all sorts of ways if they even attempt to unionise.

In classic Kopple style, Union Town is both observational and empathetic. The injustice of ‘account deactivations’, whereby companies can terminate a driver’s access to an app without reason or easy recourse, is brought home via an interview with a Bangladeshi driver whose account was deactivated four days after an accident on the job put him in hospital. When earnings are directly correlated to delivery speed, it’s no wonder so many bike couriers risk their lives. In its most moving sequence, the documentary spends time at the funeral of a young delivery cyclist who was killed in a collision with an emergency vehicle. Like so many of the workers depicted in a film in which we hear almost as much Spanish as English, he had come to New York from Latin America to make a better life for himself.

After Trump is elected to a second term, the Worker’s Justice Project, a non-profit organisation that features prominently in the documentary, is forced to pivot from helping low-wage immigrant workers to organise and lobby, to telling them never to open their door to ICE agents. Yet over at Teamsters, an informal, internal poll reveals that 60 percent of its members are Trump supporters.

This is one of several ironic echoes that give the deftly-edited Union Town its chiaroscuro mood. If Harlan County, USA was the chronicle of a hard-won victory, and American Dream charted a frustrating defeat, the 80-year-old Kopple’s third contribution to what she may never have intended as a trilogy is, like the first two, suffused by the spirit of its time. Alternately downbeat and hopeful, celebratory and valedictory, it’s shot through with the dirty romance of the city that doesn’t sleep – but ends with footage of a parcel-sorting robot at a UPS hub.