Amazon doesn’t want you to stream this documentary. You should.

Union, a documentary about the Amazon Labor Union’s successful organizing drive at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island, is a visually stunning movie that’s part underdog tale, part thriller, and part workplace dramedy. It’s also a valuable and too-rare representation of the relevance and power of union organizing in the modern world. But despite it receiving an award at Sundance and glowing reviews (including a rave from the festival in Slate), no major theatrical or streaming company has signed on to distribute the movie.

According to Brett Story, who directed the movie with Stephen Maing, this is at least in part because those companies don’t want to risk their relationships with Amazon Studios. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ billions of dollars and vast corporate ownerships mean he can go far beyond just fighting his employees’ union like a regular boss—he can effectively prevent most people in the country from watching and being inspired by the independent ALU’s historic, long-shot victory. This veto power is reminiscent of Bezos’ recent torpedoing of the Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, and of his and rival billionaire spaceship fetishist Elon Musk’s legal attacks on the constitutionality of the federal labor laws under which nearly all private-sector union organizing occurs—a trio of examples of how easily the extremely rich can distort the media and laws in their own interests.

Despite its lack of a distribution deal, Union is following the example of the ALU by promoting itself independently. From Black Friday through Giving Tuesday, you can stream it on a platform called Gathr.

Union contrasts Amazon, the enormous, faceless corporation, with the ALU, the scrappy, often messy, deeply connected community that Amazon workers built. The corporation is represented by shots of gigantic container ships gliding inexorably through the frame, and by cascades of Amazon packages hurtling down conveyor belts in cavernous, harshly bright warehouses. The only actual people associated with the company who make appearances are blandly threatening managers, anti-union consultants, and security guards. Jeff Bezos’ embarrassingly shaped rocket is also shown blasting off into space.

By contrast, the ALU campaign is headquartered in a tent on a sidewalk next to Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, and on Zoom. In the tent, organizers hand out meals (and sometimes weed), huddle around a fire in winter, and laugh with, cajole, and convince their co-workers to support the union as they head into or out of the warehouse, often in the dark.

The workers’ leader is the charismatic then-president of the ALU, Chris Smalls, who worked at Amazon until he was fired during the pandemic after protesting a lack of personal protective equipment. Another worker, meeting Smalls for the first time, points out that he’s “low-key famous,” and it’s true. Smalls testifies before Congress, appears on TV, and is the one who speaks during the ALU’s press conferences, thanking Jeff Bezos for going to space, “because when he was up there, we were signing people up.” In a painfully relatable scene, you also see Smalls trying to wrangle his three kids to participate in virtual school.

But the ALU is a union, not a one-man show, and other organizers play important roles. Natalie Monarrez is shown on hidden cellphone footage interrupting an anti-union “captive audience” meeting. The courage it must have taken to do this becomes clear when you learn that the company often fires warehouse workers for opaque reasons, with decisions apparently made by algorithms; turnover is 150 percent per year. What Monarrez is risking personally becomes even more stark when the film shows her going to sleep in her car in the early morning hours. She looks at her watch and calculates the amount of time she can sleep before she has to get up for work again. She tells herself “That’s enough,” even though it’s not, and pulls a sleeping bag up over her head. Monarrez later tells Smalls that she’s been living in her car for three years.

As the campaign trudges on, Monarrez becomes disillusioned with the ALU, telling another female organizer that the union is an “old boys club.” Union doesn’t shy away from portraying the tensions that arise within the union. With their deep bonds and deep clashes, the union leaders and organizers are reminiscent of the team in The Bear, if the goal wasn’t a Michelin star but a sliver of collective economic power.

When the movie shows the JFK8 Amazon workers voting for their union in April 2022, making theirs the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States, their triumph is euphoric. But that victory has been followed by uncertainty and struggle. More than two years later, the ALU has affiliated with the Teamsters and elected new leaders, but it has also lost two elections at nearby Amazon facilities and failed to reach a contract because of Amazon’s illegal refusal to bargain. Instead, Amazon, along with SpaceX, Starbucks, and other corporations, has launched legal attacks on the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, the almost 90-year-old federal law that governs private-sector unionization in the United States. With Donald Trump in the White House and avowedly anti-union SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joined to him at the hip, workers’ rights to form unions and bargain for better pay and working conditions will soon be besieged on all sides.

Union is a sorely needed representation of the relevance and potential power of unions in the modern world. Because the percentage of American workers represented by a union has been declining for decades, fewer and fewer people have personal or family experience with unions and what they can mean for people’s lives. Stories about unions in popular culture and media could help fill this vacuum, but these depictions are few and far between, and too often show unions as corrupt or ineffectual. Against that backdrop, the fact that Union won’t be marketed to a wide audience is bad not just for the filmmakers, but for all workers.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, at least some distribution companies liked Union but didn’t want to risk their relationship with Amazon by being associated with it. Jeff Bezos may not have nixed a distribution deal for Union as directly as he blocked the Washington Post’s planned presidential endorsement. But in both cases, his enormous wealth and power are the reason the public will be deprived of information that might shape their views and their own decisions. The legal attacks on the constitutionality of the NLRA by Bezos, Musk, and others magnify this pattern of taking regular people’s choices out of their hands. If successful, their attacks on U.S. labor law would weaken or eliminate private-sector workers’ ability to bargain with their employers, thwarting a vital tool workers can use to shape their jobs and their lives.

In his apologia for the Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years, Bezos asserted that readers might see his “wealth and business interests” as either “a bulwark against intimidation” or as “a web of conflicting interests.” But Bezos’ wealth is just raw power. It’s the power to influence what people around the world read and see and learn, what they can buy, and what laws govern them. It’s too much power for any one person to have.

But it’s not absolute power. In Union, at a key point in the campaign, the ALU projects messages onto the warehouse, acknowledging and rejecting Amazon’s autocratic, dehumanizing vibe: “You are not a number. You are not disposable. You are a human being.” The workers won their election, and they’re fighting for a contract. We are lucky to be able to watch them do it.

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