Film Review: A Portrait of How Workers Build a Strike

“Who Moves America” is touring the U.S., with upcoming screenings across the West Coast, Northeast, and South. See when it’s coming to your town, or request a screening, here.

In the new documentary “Who Moves America,” filmmaker Yael Bridge offers a window into the working-class culture of one of the country’s largest unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, at United Parcel Service (UPS) in 2023.

It’s a rare and moving portrait of a massive, diverse group of workers building themselves into a fighting force, who then must wrestle with a different version of victory than they expected.
We watch as 340,000 Teamsters gear up for a potential strike against package giant United Parcel Service, the largest private-sector union contract in North America. Behind the wheel in brown trucks and along conveyor belts in warehouses, their working conditions are grueling and dangerous: at the time, two drivers had died in the past year from sweltering heat.

If they strike, their market leverage from moving 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product means they can cripple the company’s profits and send shock waves across the economy.

The last time UPS Teamsters struck was in 1997; grainy home video and archival footage from that strike is interspersed throughout the documentary. The film’s contemporary subjects—from strike veterans to workers who weren’t even born yet—reference that walkoff as a touchstone in their lives, Teamsters history, and the American labor movement.

‘REPLACE YOU WITH A HAND TRUCK’

Spoiler alert: A 2023 strike isn’t called. Members all across the country are chomping at the bit to walk off the job, but after the union reaches a tentative agreement that even the most strike-ready militants acknowledge is a much stronger pact than previous ones, the members ratify the contract 5 to 1. (The five-year contract is set to expire on July 31, 2028.)

So the film is deprived of the sexy stuff of massive picket lines and physical confrontations with strikebreakers. A simpler narrative of heroic workers taking on greedy bosses gives way instead to a thornier one, as workers who were charged up to strike wrestle with what it means to win these gains without walking off the job.

From covering the campaign, I recall workers seething in anger from the pandemic-era abuses and risks they were exposed to and wanting to stick it to management. “I can still vividly remember getting my drivers together outside the building when the pandemic first started and the fear on their faces that somehow they could bring the virus to their children,” delivery driver Greg Kerwood, a steward in Somerville, Massachusetts, told Labor Notes at the time.

“Part of what happened when people got out there with the practice pickets was they started to feel a sense of their own power,” Kerwood said. “The shackles were beginning to break. And they were starting to stand up and hold their shoulders straight and put their heads high and start to take some pride in their own self-respect in the workplace.”

That pent-up anger meant high expectations that a strike could temporarily rebalance workers’ relationships to their management tormentors. “This company hates you,” Teamsters Local 804 President Vinnie Perone says in the documentary. “If they could, they would replace you with a hand-truck.”

REAL ORGANIZING, ON SCREEN

Like the 2024 documentary “Union,” which chronicled the stunning organizing victory of Amazon workers at a fulfillment center on Staten Island in New York City (producer Mars Verrone was involved in both films), “Who Moves America” shows what organizing looks like in practice in the buildup to a potential strike.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien makes a number of appearances, deploying tough talk against UPS that gets under corporate investors’ and executives’ skins. He’s recorded at his stately desk at Teamsters headquarters in Washington, D.C., relating an anecdote of how a fellow union leader was surprised by the size of the UPS National Negotiating Committee, which was expanded by appointing rank-and-file members.

But the film spends the bulk of its time tracking not the moves at the union’s top but the ferment below. O’Brien is on screen less than the Teamsters discussing the contract and developing working-class leadership across locales, from a beach in Southern California to the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, and Brooklyn, New York.

We see fellow Teamsters talking at a diner across generations, dipping French fries in ketchup while chatting about how the contract could change their lives (including, one part-timer half-jokingly hopes, being able to afford a ticket to a Beyoncé concert). We see them shifting in their chairs during trainings at union halls and local sandwich shops, debating how to engage part-time package sorters in the contract campaign and where best to position picketers if and when the strike comes, and then whether the contract is good enough to warrant a yes vote.

LOWER FREQUENCIES

None of that happens spontaneously. The work of working-class organization involves weaving relationships into dense knots across lines of race and immigration status and age and job type, over and over again, forming a rank-and-file network that can take action. As shown in the film, that’s largely the work of the rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

TDU members and staff led online and in-person meetings for tens of thousands of UPS Teamsters across the country. Member leaders are seen collecting strike pledge cards, explaining contract demands, answering questions, and training co-workers to carry out workplace actions to put pressure on the company.

We meet Tim Peppers, a veteran of the 1997 strike, and Justin Alo from San Marcos, California, who is classified as a “22.4” worker, a reference to a section of a previously ratified UPS contract that created a classification of drivers who deliver packages for less pay than regular drivers with fewer contractual protections.

Alo has banded together with his co-workers to hold meetings at a local coffee shop to learn about their contract and prepare for the fight with UPS. We watch him and his wife talk with quiet anxiety about saving money in case he goes on strike, and their decision to pause their autistic son’s daily therapy sessions if Alo strikes because they won’t be able to afford them. That’s the stuff of real sacrifice, multiplied an untold number of times over by every worker considering a strike.

Alo is among the newbies, but he has helped organize these social gatherings alongside other UPS Teamsters with experience in the 15-day 1997 strike. That strike was transformative, reducing the reliance on subcontractors and boosting wages. But it also contained a concession: a five-year contract term, instead of three or four years. Now that the contract terms are longer, workers have fewer opportunities to strike than earlier generations did.

As workers debate whether to ratify their tentative agreement, a worker in California compares the momentum they built up to a wind-up toy car whose wheels are charged up but never allowed to take off. Workers wonder if, by not striking, they’ll miss out on the transformative experience their co-workers had in 1997, especially as the institutional memory fades once veterans of that strike begin to retire.

As A. J. Muste once wrote, “the trade union seeks to combine within itself two extremely divergent types of social structure, that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.” In the lead-up to a strike, these divergent forms can temporarily work together through the picket line discipline of the union as a combat organization and the union hall as a democratic town meeting where workers deliberate about their contract demands. “Who Moves America” takes us to the lower frequencies where workers educate each other on what it means to move like a class.

A longer version of this review appeared on Lower Frequencies and Jacobin.