“Get up, get down,” a chant rings out behind the title card of Barbara Kopple’s Union Town, ​“New York is a union town!” Anyone who’s seen the director’s canonical documentary of labor strikes, Harlan County, USA, may recall how music similarly ties together that titular community through solidarity and shared song. Fifty years later in the United States, the words might have changed, but the tune remains the same as union organizers foster community under the eye of capitalism’s ravages.

Whereas many contemporary politically-minded documentaries resemble agitprop at worst or a book report at best, Kopple’s non-fiction filmmaking feels more akin to music itself. She’s less a director imposing her master narrative on the workers she follows. Instead, her role functions like that of a conductor assembling a polyphonic chorus of individual voices and bringing them into collective harmony.

Union Town continues in Kopple’s tradition of building stories of working-class striving and struggle by letting them tell their own story. It’s remarkable how little she relies on standard documentary storytelling techniques like newsreel montages or talking heads to build a coherent, propulsive narrative. Simply asking the everyday union worker to describe how they are fighting for fair wages and working conditions tells an audience most of what they need to know.

Kopple’s greatest strength lies in never mistaking the ​“grass-tops” for the grassroots. She identifies and interviews prominent Teamsters who serve as a more public face to the negotiations and protests. But she resists the temptation to turn them into protagonists or elevate their prominence for narrative ease. Union Town embodies the kind of democracy it wants to see practiced in the world by ensuring the voice of the common laborer gets heard even as they suffocate under impossible demands.

Union Town finds rich territory by following several tumultuous years in the battle for New York’s delivery drivers to receive commensurate compensation for the service they provide. Each day, they serve as the backbone of the city by delivering 2.5 million packages and dropping off 500,000 meals, but corporations remain hell-bent on breaking their backs. While traditional shipping giants like UPS have bent slightly to union demands over time, the latest threat to labor solidarity is tech-first outfits like Amazon and DoorDash.

As a conveyor belt of worker horror stories demonstrates, these optimization engines find every loophole to exploit and every lever to pull to maximize efficiency and profit. Kopple’s patient camera captures highs and lows in union mobilization, from bursts of incremental progress in 2023 to Amazon’s brutal crackdown in the wake of Trump’s 2025 restoration. What Union Town might lack in sensational revelations or intense confrontations, it more than makes up for in clarity as to how these negotiations intersect with everything from immigration to affordability.

Half a century after Harlan County, USA, Kopple once again finds the most powerful way to celebrate the life of the average worker is by reminding viewers of its finitude. A funeral – here, for a delivery biker killed in a traffic accident – serves as the film’s emotional center. ​“May he forgive that we couldn’t take care of him,” his widow laments over the casket. Kopple ensures that anyone who watches Union Town becomes part of that royal ​“we.” To bear witness is to bear responsibility.