Luis Feliz Leon reviews Who Moves America, Yael Bridge’s new documentary on the Teamsters’ 2023 contract campaign at UPS. It covers the largest private-sector union contract in North America — 340,000 workers — and it deliberately spends its time below the leadership, on the slow work of building a strike-ready membership.

The scale is the point. UPS Teamsters move twenty-five million parcels a day, roughly 6 percent of US GDP. Their conditions are punishing enough that two drivers had died of heat in the year before the campaign.

Then the strike wasn’t called. After a practice-picket campaign and a membership that wanted to walk, the union reached a tentative agreement and members ratified it by five to one. The contract runs to July 31, 2028.

What the film documents instead is infrastructure:

  • Teamsters for a Democratic Union running online and in-person meetings for tens of thousands of UPS members
  • Strike pledge cards, contract education, and workplace actions taught worker to worker
  • Practice pickets — marching in small circles outside UPS hubs to build muscle memory and show management the union was serious
  • Rank-and-file networks woven “across lines of race and immigration status and age and job type”

The 1997 strike, the last one, hangs over all of it. Fifteen days, real gains against subcontracting, and a concession that outlasted them: a five-year contract term instead of three or four, which structurally reduces how often workers can strike. Veterans of that walkout are retiring, and the institutional memory goes with them.

Feliz Leon’s sharpest observation is that a strike is a school as much as a weapon. Workers who never walk out wonder what they missed. One compares the charged-up momentum to a wind-up toy car whose wheels spin but never touch ground.

He ends with A. J. Muste: the union combines “two extremely divergent types of social structure, that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.” What the film shows is the lower frequencies — workers teaching each other what it means to move like a class.