WHO MOVES AMERICA (2026)

"The big word is just "strike "

Who Moves America does a good job of showing a lot (though probably not all) of the various levels of workers and upper-level parts of the Union representatives - Teamsters - involved in the lead up to what was potential strike in the summer of 2023 with UPS. Of course given how we take in news and stories, this may be an event (or a "near miss" sort of event) that you saw a headline about or some coverage depending on where you are at in America or the West or so forth, but it is important to have these people and their voices on film for now in the 2020s and for the future to see.

The director means to make that connection of What's Past = Prologue through On the Fly Camcorder footage from 1997 when there was a real UPS strike and how much it fully galvanized the workers and the public. The foorage is laid throughout this film like a thudding echo that means to reverberate in the 2023 drama: many (or just any) of the workers who were around for 97 are seeing this as very likely their last contract and/or strike, and there were already major issues from then that have just gotten embedded in the bullshit that is what the working class have to deal with as far as being "Part time" employees.

That last part is where the director has their most effective commentary and it is the issue that I think makes this film most relevant and important; the focus on the actual workers, like the women from Louisville (one of which *also* works as McDonald's at the same time, to give a clear idea of how little she is paid for so much work), gives teeth to what is unfolding as there is not so much a divide with workers but a possible imbalance for some of the employees: do the full-timers care about what the Part-Timers have to deal with enough to really side with them? (When you see how much the Full Time drivers make before the contract is ratified, whoa bob).

I do wish maybe a little more throughout was expressed about the poor working conditions; while there are a few parts, like the one guy who dropped dead of a heart attack at 24 or the footage of the driver running off the road from being overworked, some more specifics about the Part-Timers issues would have been even more dramatic. But there is enough to carry things until it gets to when the (and naturally we don't get interviews with the CEO and execs and f them naturally) company finally, at the last minute, offers up the contract, and that is actually when things get most interesting here.

That last section once the contract is offered and the various folks we have seen react and some are (decently if not effusively) with praise for it and others show more frustration, is where this marks as being a bit more unique than what I expected. There is also the footage of the one worker at the Secaucus branch who serves as a counter to the guy we have seen from Brooklyn throughout, and the fact that she and others were more mixed about the contract - which as reports said was voted Yes on "overwhelmingly" - and that adds an important gray area to what unfolds. And this is not to diminish what was gained ultimately for the workers, but the idea as one other worker says that Covid brought this new unprecedented time and this contract was not quite that is important to think about.

This is not quite on the level of what I can guess some or more of you think of when it comes to the definitive Union/Workers/Strike-Times documentaries by like Barbara Kopple, but it does give weight and voice to workers and their rights and why the lessons of 1997 shouldn't be lost on future generations and it worth seeing.