Category Archives: Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)
The Lithuanian Jungle – Upton Sinclair-inspired Documentary
Trailer for “The Lithuanian Jungle”, the documentary feature film from Storytellers International coming in 2011. The film is based on the characters in the book “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. Filmed on location in Chicago and told in a investigative journalism style by filmmakers Randy Richards, Giedrius Subacius and Risé Sanders, this documentary reveals the unknown characters behind the literary classic.
Al Jazeera World : Revolution Through Arab Eyes – The Factory
A glimpse into life inside Egypt’s Mahalla textile factory – a place renowned as a cauldron of revolt where striking workers first inspired the Egyptian uprising.
The Road to Rock Bottom: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)
PBS Great Depression Series, #2
Producer: WGBH, Boston
Narrator: Joe Morton
53 minutes
This film, the second in the PBS Great Depression Series, examines the plight of farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural workers before and particularly during the onset of The Great Depression. Devoting ample time to the hardships of agricultural labor, it focuses on the devastating effects that environmental factors such as drought wrought on farmers, migrant laborers, and sharecroppers alike. Sliding farm prices due to the glut of products on the market spurred a cycle of diminishing returns for most farmers, exacerbating their indebtedness and causing foreclosures, homelessness, privation, and starvation. “The Road to Rock Bottom” also devotes considerable time to the allure that Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd had among many impoverished Americans in the early Depression era. A bank robber, Floyd enjoyed popular support–and occasionally some protection–among struggling farming communities, for Floyd’s targeting banks tapped into their resentment at institutions that, on the one hand many blamed for causing the Great Depression and, on the other, were increasingly foreclosing on their farms and homes. The inability and unwillingness of the federal government to devote far more resources to battling the onslaught of poverty and desperation receives ample attention in the documentary as well. Many politicians, including President Herbert Hoover, believed that increasing the federal government’s role in the daily lives of its citizens would foster dependency that ran counter to the themes of individualism permeating both America’s political parties at that time, and long-standing American political traditions. Culminating the film is the Bonus Army’s march to and occupation of parts of Washington D.C. Its unsuccessful efforts to pressure Congress to pay the service bonus to military veterans earlier than promised resulted in violent clashes between the Army (led by Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur) and the Bonus marchers, sealing the fate of the Hoover presidency well before his overwhelming electoral defeat to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential elections.
A Job at Ford’s: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)
PBS Great Depression Series, #1
Producer: WGBH, Boston
Narrator: Joe Morton
51 minutes
The first film in the WGBH Great Depression Series, this documentary uses the rise of the Ford system of manufacturing and workplace control as a prism into the onset of the socioeconomic cataclysm by the end of the 1920s known as the Great Depression. Stocked with oral histories with workers, managers, and working-class families, as well as archival film footage, it analyzes the ways in which the automobile, as a product of labor and a catalyst for deep transformations in American society, dominated American life and dictated its economic fortunes. Cars offered far greater access to travel and cultural experiences, especially for women and rural residents, than ever before. Auto work also attracted migrants from across the country, as well as from Mexico, to manufacturing centers in Detroit and the industrial North. Crucially, “A Job at Ford’s” illustrates the repressive labor-relations system that governed not only the workplace environment of auto workers, but also the daily lives of their families in order to ensure compliance with Henry Ford’s desires for social control. Additionally, the film devotes ample time to Ford’s anti-Semitic, racist beliefs, to the worsening conditions of the Depressions, the struggles of everyday people to survive largely without the direct help of the federal government, and the community-based efforts of political radicals and neighborhood groups to respond to the crises. Culminating with the Ford Hunger March in which Ford security guards killed four marchers and wounded over sixty others, the film conveys violence as not only a real threat to organizing at this time, but also a thread through, and force mitigating, working-class daily life in the early twentieth century.
Stitched Together: Students, and the Movement for Alta Gracia (2012)
28:43; U.S.
Director: Will Delphia
Synopsis: A documentary film examining the Alta Gracia factory in the Dominican Republic, a new college apparel company attempting to challenge the sweatshop model of production by creating a factory with living wages, good working conditions, and an independent trade union.
Full Film
Seattle General Strike 1919
3:46-minute excerpt from Witness to Revolution: The Story of Anna Louis Strong contains original film footage from 1919, the only known footage of the strike. Produced and directed by Lucy Ostrander. The excerpt is part of an award-winning documentary film biography of Anna Louise Strong, Seattle’s most famous radical.
The General Strike began February 6 and ended February 11, 1919. It was called to support the shipyard workers demands for higher wages after a World War I ended.
The shipyard workers were represented by different crafts that composed a “Metal Trades Council” that had been on strike since January 21, 1919.
The Seattle Central Labor Council called the General Strike in support of the Metal Trades unions. The strike ultimately failed and many labor leaders were jailed and the only labor newspaper in Seattle was shut down.
1934 San Francisco Longshore Strike
1:39; U.S.
Synopsis: Newsreel footage on the 1934 longshore general strike in San Francisco which helped to birth the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU).
600,000 Miners Strike Led by John L. Lewis (1919)
1:54; U.S.
Synopsis: “In November, 1919, Acting President John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers led 600,000 miners in a five week strike that crippled the bituminous coal industry and the nation as well. The strike was in direct defiance of a court injunction against such action and Woodrow Wilson denounced Lewis as a dictator. This was John L. Lewis’ first clash with a United States president; he missed battle with no other president from then on up to Eisenhower.
On December 11, President Wilson and Attorney General Palmer presented Lewis with a proposal that would send the miners back to work: a 14% wage increase (they were getting $2.00 per day) and a commission to work out other questions in the dispute such as hours, health and safety standards. Lewis accepted immediately and the men returned to work, proving their loyalty to their country, he said. Attorney General Palmer commended Mr. Lewis for his wise and patriotic action.
The coal operators, however, charged Palmer with surrender and said that he feared a terrible situation if the government had been forced to jail the miners. A Congressional Committee decided to investigate the strike.”
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 