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Category Archives: Genre

Red Metal: The Copper Country Strike of 1913

23 Dec

By NEIL GENZLINGER in The New York Times
Published: December 16, 2013

This has been a year of notable 50th anniversaries, but time didn’t begin in 1963. A sorrowful PBS documentary on Tuesday night notes the 100th anniversary of an event forgotten by much of the country but not by the people of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: a miners’ strike that led to a catastrophic stampede in which 73 people died, most of them children.

The program, “Red Metal: The Copper Country Strike of 1913,” is fairly generic as documentaries go, but in an age of battles over the minimum wage and concern about the distribution of wealth, it resonates. An organizing effort by the Western Federation of Miners led miners in and around Calumet to strike in July, and the companies (the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company was the biggest) were unyielding.

Wages — $3 a day — were an issue, and so was a new one-man drilling machine. Previously miners had worked in pairs, and they saw the new technology as both costing jobs and increasing risk in an already dangerous profession, since without a partner an injured miner could go without aid for hours.

At first the workers and their families plunged into the strike with an enthusiasm that is seldom seen in today’s more timid labor groups, and women took an uncharacteristically vocal role, partly in the hope that company enforcers wouldn’t beat them the way they were beating their husbands.

“These women would be out there shouting rude things that women shouldn’t be saying,” notes Alison K. Hoagland, a historian. “They would dip their brooms in the outhouse and smear the strikebreakers with it.”

On Christmas Eve an ugly strike turned far uglier when, at a party for miners’ children in a building known as the Italian Hall, someone — a prankster? a strikebreaker? — yelled fire. There was no fire, but there was a deadly stampede.

Steve Earle sings Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” to end the film. In a new age of inequality, it feels like both a remembrance and a warning of what happens when opposing sides won’t talk.

 
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Posted by on December 23, 2013 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Technology

 

Coming For A Visit (On Vient Pour La Visite)

01 Nov

2013 | French | 58 min | HDcoming-for-a-visit | French with English subtitles
Director Lucie Tourette

Undocumented migrants win the battle to get their papers. A historic strike filmed from within.

Paris, 2009. More than 6000 undocumented migrants (sans-papiers) go on strike to demand their legalization. Despite being illegals, Mohamed, Diallo, Hamet and others have worked and paid taxes in France for years in restaurants, cleaning companies, or construction. They have invested all their energy in this battle: now that their status has been disclosed publically, there is no way back.

http://www.vezfilm.org/comingforavisit/
Trailer : http://vimeo.com/53048336
lucie tourette lucie_tourette@yahoo.fr

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Blacks, Documentary, Immigrants/Immigration, Migrant workers

 

On The Art Of War

01 Nov

2012, ItalyArt-of-War
directed by silvia luzi, luca bellino

Synopsis
Milan, Italy, August 2009.
Four workers climb a 20 metres high gantry crane inside the hangar of the INNSE, the last active factory in Milan. They threaten to throw themselves down to stop the dismantling of the machineries and the closure of the factory they work in. The hangar is surrounded by dozens of policemen and supporters from all over Italy.
It is not a simple struggle.
They have a clear strategy.
They have an organized army.
They know perfectly their territory and their enemy.
There are clear rules, it is a war with a workable paradigm for all forms of struggle.

http://dellartedellaguerra.com/index.php?lang=en
Luca Bellino tfilm.luca@gmail.com

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Documentary, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

The Women Workers’ War

01 Nov

Director Massimo Ferrari | Italy, 67min.Women-Workers-War

When an Italian factory fires its all-female workforce, workers take over the factory for over a year. When one of those workers, Rosa, meets Margherita – who owns another factory – new possibilities are hatched.

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Women

 

Farewell to Factory Towns?

01 Nov

Director Maynard Seider | USA, 61 min.

When a New England town creates an art museum in an old building, it fails to produce the jobs promised, and the city’s downtown remains semi-deserted. Should national policy change to bring a new “New Deal” to such towns?

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Cities-Urban, Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Retail

 

The Road to Rock Bottom: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

03 Jul

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.

 

 
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Posted by on July 3, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Blacks, Children, Cities-Urban, Class, Documentary, Environment, Farm & Food, Labor History, Migrant workers, Self-Employed/Freelance, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Working Class

 

A Job at Ford’s: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

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.

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Available Online, Blacks, Cities-Urban, Class, Consumerism, Documentary, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Politics, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Themes, Transportation, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

 

Arsenal of Democracy: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #7

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

53 minutes

The seventh and final installment in the PBS Great Depression series, this film links the onset of World War II and the role of the United States as the primary producer of war materiel with the lingering struggles of the Great Depression. Blending oral history with photos from Dorothea Lange and others, archival films, and audio clips, “Arsenal of Democracy” details the persistent plight of the poor throughout the 1930s, especially for migrant workers, farmers, and the homeless who, despite the historical attention they received, often remained outside the public and political scope at that time. It also explores the social, cultural, and economic changes that the transition from peace to war wrought, such as the racism and discrimination that African Americans and Asians experienced during the 1930s and in hiring and job opportunities; the internment of Japanese Americans after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; the use of racist imagery in wartime propaganda; greater employment opportunities for women and African Americans in wartime production; California’s incredible growth due to massive outlays of federal spending; and the end of the Great Depression.

 

 

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Blacks, Class, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Documentary, Labor History, Manufacturing, Migrant workers, Politics, War, Women, Working Class

 

Mean Things Happening: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #5

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

51 minutes

This documentary examines the efforts that tenant farmers and steelworkers undertook to organize and unionize amidst The Great Depression of the 1930s. Using interviews, film footage, and historians’ reflections, it recounts the privation and violent conditions facing H.L. Mitchell and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), and industrial workers who formed the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) of the burgeoning Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Racism, paternalistic company towns, heavy-handed anti-unionism and violent opposition posed grave obstacles to organizers in the Southern agricultural fields and Northern industrial cities alike. A key element to the success of the SWOC and CIO on the one hand, and the failure of the STFU on the other, was the legal framework protecting organizing, rights, and concerted activity for private-sector workers with the passage of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which expressly excluded agricultural and domestic workers who comprised much of the South’s workforce. The result was the rise of powerful unionism in much of the more industrialized North, Midwest, and West, and the concomitant absence of effective unionism from the more agricultural South and Southwest, in the Depression-riddled 1930s.

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Available Online, Blacks, Class, Collective Bargaining, Documentary, Farm & Food, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Organizing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Working Class

 

The Condition of the Working Class (2013)

19 Jun

Facebook link

This film is inspired by Engels’ 1844 book The Condition of the Working Class in England. How much has really changed since then?

In 2012 a group of working class people from Manchester and Salford come together to create a theatrical show from scratch, based on their own experiences and Engels’ book. They have eight weeks before their first performance. The Condition of the Working Class follows them from the first rehearsal to the first night performance and situates their struggle to get the show on stage in the context of the daily struggles of ordinary people facing economic crisis and austerity politics. The people who came together to do the show turned from a group of strangers, many of whom had never acted before, into The Ragged Collective, in little more than two months.

This film, full of political passion and anger, is a wonderful testament to the creativity, determination and camaraderie of working people that blows the media stereotypes of the working class out of the water.
– from the Progressive Film Club (Dublin) write-up

 

 
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Posted by on June 19, 2013 in Arts/Culture, Class, Communism/Socialism, Documentary, Labor History, Working Class

 
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