“A Gatorade at 11 in the morning—someone must have a hangover,” a grocery delivery worker remarks dryly. He knows his customers, but they don’t know him. Every day, some 2.4 million packages and 300,000 meals are delivered to homes across New York City. Yet the many delivery and warehouse workers behind them remain an anonymous mass to most recipients. Severely underpaid and without employee protections (they are, after all, “independent contractors”) they do their jobs in sweltering delivery vans, warehouses thick with particulates, or on bicycles in snowstorms.
Oscar winner Barbara Kopple follows three fronts in the union fight to change these degrading conditions, in a successor to her acclaimed earlier films about workers’ rights, Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1990). In New York, America’s union stronghold, workers take on seemingly invincible corporate giants such as Amazon, UPS, DoorDash, and Grubhub, and even manage to score some victories. Can humanity and solidarity stand up to the relentless pursuit of profit?
