Interview with “Union” Co-Director Stephen Maing

In the new documentary Union, directors Stephen Maing (Crime + Punishment) and Brett Story (The Hottest August) collaborate on an in-depth portrait of workers at an Amazon warehouse on New York’s Staten Island attempting to unionize in 2021 and 2022. With impressive access and sharp filmmaking skills, the two create a nonfiction thriller with high stakes and valuable payoffs. I watched the film at DC/DOX 2024, where I wrote a brief capsule review, and I recently had a chance to speak with Maing via Zoom. Below is that interview, edited for length and clarity. The film debuts on PBS today as part of its POV series.Christopher Llewellyn Reed: What challenges did you face filming in and around Amazon premises?

Stephen Maing: The ALU—the Amazon Labor Union—was very careful about making sure their organizing did not ever put them in harm’s way. Amazon has been notorious for working closely with the NYPD to coerce and threaten workers who are organizing. So that was something that they were very mindful about, making sure that their organizing base, which was really a tent next to the bus stop, along the main access road outside of the Amazon facility on Staten Island, was always where they situated themselves. That said, as the organizing intensified, they did have to meet workers closer to where they were and would move into the vicinity of the building.

And so that definitely presented some stresses about making sure that we could be there if and when Amazon did try to use that as an opportunity to threaten and more forcibly thwart the organizing. This plays out in a scene in the film when [union leader] Chris Smalls is there with a contingent of other organizers speaking to a journalist as they’re supporting the organizing committee inside the break room. And then one of his former managers comes out and with the help of the NYPD, Chris and his cohort are arrested. So that definitely was really an ever-present kind of challenge. That was actually maybe the third or fourth engagement with the NYPD that the organizers had, which was really just staggering to watch. Did you mean other kinds of access questions?

CLR: There are always the usual access questions in a documentary, but I meant specifically things like that because it’s a fraught subject and your camera’s right in the middle of it.

SM: Yeah, I mean, one of my previous films was a very long-term, seven-year exploration of the NYPD’s abuse and coercion of minority communities.

CLR: I remember! [this was Crime + Punishment]

SM: It was a very familiar sight to watch police try and squash these sites of resistance throughout the city. So that was nothing new to me to see, and I feel like that previous work really prepared me well to be present, to be responsive and unafraid to document in that moment. 

CLR: Have you faced any legal challenges related to the film’s content leading up to its release? After all, you’re focusing on Amazon, which is a big, very powerful, very wealthy entity. Did you have to have teams of lawyers, especially maybe from POV, to make sure that you were on solid ground?

SM: We worked very closely with our attorneys throughout the production and definitely in the pre-publication of the film, not surprisingly, right after the ALU’s victory. Their legal team included our documentary team as part of their objections to the ALU’s victory, citing, essentially, that we were hired as outside agents to coerce workers into voting in favor of the union. They tried to revisit these kinds of claims in a follow-up set of objections, and both times a judge unilaterally dismissed those, but it goes to show that they’re a company that will do whatever it takes to discredit truthful on-the-ground reportage and documentary filming of these issues.

CLR: Have you made any changes—tweaked anything in the film’s content— between its festival run last year and the upcoming release, reflecting perhaps the changing political landscape around us? For example, the NLRB is very different from what it was when you made the film …

SM: As far as the NLRB goes, that agency is one of the last bastions and defenders of legal organizing in this country. Still, despite it being a kind of appointed position based on whatever presidential administration is in power, during the Biden era there was still a need to really overhaul and hold it to account in terms of the kinds of rulings it was making. The union really acted in its best effort, despite the NLRB’s often-biased rulings in favor of corporate power and Amazon. And so the ALU was very frustrated at times with the NLRB, even though now, years later, after everything we saw unfold there, the NLRB is a real target of this new administration’s relentless targeting of labor organizing and anything that empowers the people in their pursuit to hold corporate powers more accountable.

The one big thing that we knew we were going to want to follow up on was to document the kind of further organizing that was happening. So we did a follow-up short film, Local One, that published on Field of Visionand is doing a little bit of a festival run, about the first major strike action that started in New York City and unfolded in eight other states after the Teamsters—with whom the ALU affiliated after the completion of our film—issued a demand that Amazon show up to the bargaining table. And then of course, lo and behold, Amazon did not. So that was last December and then the ALU- IBT Local 1, which is what the new affiliation between the ALU and Teamsters has grown into, authorized a strike action, which was amazing to see. It was like a really powerful show of force and the first of many that, I understand, the organizers intend to conduct. 

CLR: Speaking of labor, how would you describe the division of labor between you and your co-director, Brett Story? Who did what?

SM: So, I’m a shooter and an editor, and I like to be on the ground. I was local, so producer Martin Dicicco and I were doing on-the-ground production a lot. We would have these very robust conversations about what was unfolding, and then Brett would swing through and we would do a little bit in the field, and I would say the center of the collaboration was working through this immense amount of material in post-production. We were very lucky to work with two editors, Blair McClendon and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, and it was a really intense and rigorous edit that really demanded a lot of us. So it was nice to have this kind of hive mind, very politically aligned—but different—kinds of thinkers to stress-test the film that we knew we wanted to make and needed to make to live up to the moment.

CLR: Going forward, would you be inclined to work again as a sole director or have a co-director, or would it depend on the subject?

SM: Well, I actually started a film before this, which is a co-directed project that now I am resuming and finishing I think it really depends on the project and the subject. I’m looking forward to directing singularly again. I think that collaboration is incredibly meaningful and also requires a lot of care. So I think that it really depends on the project.

CLR: The history of cinema is filled with examples of wonderful collaboration, and so that clearly is an important part of the process. And of course, even when you’re a single director, you’re collaborating with others.

SM: I’ll just say I think it really is a meaningful thing, because we all have these blind spots in how we make work, and I think that the most effective films and the most impactful ones move in ways that are unexpected even to the directors themselves, and that when you activate a creative collaboration, it pushes you to achieve things that you might not have otherwise. I think that that was definitely true in this. I think we really brought very different skill sets, and it was all for the betterment of the film.

CLR: We’re in a very fraught moment right now. We all know this. What do you see at this present moment in our history as the future of organized labor? We were in a period of decreased interest for many years. From the outside, it seems now that we’re seeing an increased interest. How does it appear to you, as somebody who’s been far more directly involved in observing and participating in this process than I have?

SM: I think that in the big picture, Americans are really frustrated. The headwinds have been moving in a political direction where people are ready to stand up to corporate interests and want to see more representation. In a lot of ways, Trump was an anti-establishment vote, one with a very powerful kind of anti-establishment message, which, whether you believe it or not as authentic, speaks to this idea that people are realizing that there is so much course-correction to happen in this country. People are hurting, the working class is hurting, and I think Americans feel profoundly underrepresented. And so you see this kind of idea of people finding their political voice, or political power, in ways that we haven’t seen activated, particularly in the labor movement, in the last 50 years, where small shops, schools, universities, warehouses, postal workers, grocery-store workers, everyone is realizing that resistance is vital to their future survival.

And so you see young people, old people, all starting to understand that we can bridge our differences and actually embrace these larger visions of collective good and common good. And it’s kind of an exciting moment. Despite how scary things are and how much more vulnerable people are than they ever have been in the last 50 years, these sites of resistance and these pockets of hope are emerging everywhere. And I think that that’s something we have to pay close attention to because there’s so much to be addressed, and yet so little time.

We have a huge billionaires problem. It’s great to see that Elon Musk has been sent packing, but it doesn’t change the essential fabric of how politics work right now and how the well-being of workers is determined, right? It is all about capitalism. It is all about this kind of neoliberal era of unregulated, unfettered power that comes at the cost of the survival and sustainability of working-class people, workers across all industries.

I think we in the film industry are clearly feeling the highest levels of unsustainability then we ever have, making this kind of work. If your work has even a slight political kind of focus or message in it, forget about it. These streamers and studios are so risk-averse right now that I’m just incredibly grateful that at places like PBS there are still some really thoughtful, engaged advocates who understand documentarians striving to make work that is not politically biased, but rigorously vetted to represent just the unfolding reality that is playing out, which affects people across political divides.

CLR: Well, we won’t be seeing your film coming to Amazon Prime anytime soon, that is for sure. Thank you so much for making the movie and for chatting with me.

SM: Thank you!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.