The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that in the week leading up to Christmas, 7,000 Amazon employees went on strike in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco, amounting to the largest labour action in the company's history. In a Globe special, Jason McBride writes that among those striking workers were employees at Amazon's JFK8 fulfilment centre on Staten Island, which two years ago became the company's first warehouse to unionize. Adding to the momentum of this movement, a documentary about JFK8's unionization, titled Union, was short-listed for an Academy Award the day before the strike. The film, co-directed by Brett Story and Stephen Maing, follows the small group of JFK8 workers that, with grit, ingenuity and almost superhuman self belief, manage to eventually form the Amazon Labor Union. The filmmakers eschew narration, instead patiently observe the slow, messy labour of organizing, as attentive to its frustrations as to its rewards. While the film inevitably focuses on the nascent union's first president, the charismatic and controversial Chris Smalls, it provides plenty of room for his fellow organizers and their particular perspectives. Mr. McBride calls it a political film of rare intimacy.