This story is part of True/False Conversations, a series of in-depth interviews with the filmmakers of this year’s True/False Film Fest. Find the rest of them here.
In Who Moves America, Filmmaker Yael Bridge followed members of UPS as they geared up for their first major contract negotiation in nearly 30 years.
The UPS union makes up the largest collective bargaining unit in America — nearly 340,000 Americans work in organizing and delivering the country’s packages. As working conditions continue to worsen amid climate change and wage stagnation, everyone from Teamsters president Sean O’Brian to UPS’s rank-and-file members prepare for a strike that could bring America’s economy to a grinding halt.
Who Moves America premiered this past weekend at True/False Film Fest.
KBIA’s Scout Hudson spoke with Bridge about her film. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
Scout Hudson: The last time UPS went on strike was in 1997. In “Who Moves America” we see a bit of this through archival footage. Now of course in 2026, we’re living in a very different time, but I’m curious what you think are some of the holdovers between those two eras of collective bargaining for UPS?
Yael Bridge: Right, like you said, the last time that UPS Teamsters went on strike was in '97, and similarly we were facing serious constraints within the workforce and rights were being taken away, people were being paid less and working conditions were getting worse and worse. And so, the Teamsters at the time were at a breaking point. They felt like this was what they needed to do in order to really get the compensation and the workers safety and stuff that they really deserved and needed. And so we are seeing that again — especially with the gigification that’s happening that we are seeing across Amazon and un-unionized labor just growing and growing — that workers' rights are dwindling and dwindling and so more and more unions are becoming important, and their actions are becoming more important as well.
Hudson: Could you touch a bit more on that gigification?
Bridge: So one of the things that they were advocating for in this past contract was air conditioning. We are seeing heat temperatures rising across the country and the world as we know with global warming and climate change and it's getting hotter and hotter in the cars, but these trucks don’t have air conditioning. So you could go to your supervisor and say "Gosh, it's like 120 degrees outside, I’m really hot, could I please get air conditioning?" And your supervisor isn’t going to do anything about it. They’re gonna say, "I’m sorry it’s so hot. Good luck." But if you are able to collectively organize with everyone else in your workforce, and say, "If we don’t get air conditioning in these trucks, we are just not going to work," then you’re able to really flex that muscle, the solidarity strength, and be able to improve those working conditions. And we’re seeing that as more and more companies are using gig workers, you don’t have the ability to organize, you don’t even necessarily know who the other people are that you’re working with.
Hudson: So much of the work in this film is a bit invisible and kind of monotonous — sorting and shipping, obviously, but oftentimes so can organizing. How did you want to capture these two tasks, especially as they are happening in parallel?
Bridge: Those are both things that we don’t normally see, but we generally don’t think too hard about the labor that goes into getting that package to your house. And similarly, unless you’re in organizing, you don’t think that much at all about all the labor that goes into getting strike-ready. I think some people think, "Oh, well, we will just go on strike, and we will tell everyone, and then we just won’t go to work tomorrow," and it’s as easy as just making a few phone calls or having a text thread. But it’s impossible, or nearly impossible, even just to get everyone’s phone numbers, right? The company doesn’t just give you a directory of everyone. And so really, trying to show how much work goes in and how to do that work, and our goal was really both to make the invisible visible and to leave you feeling really empowered to understand that process and to feel yourself as a potential participant in that.
