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Category Archives: Occupation/Type of Work

Blood Fruit (2014)

11 Nov

DIR/PROD Sinead O’Brien. Ireland, 2014, color, 80 min. In English. NOT RATED

This moving documentary explains how a strike over the sale of South African fruit in Ireland became the focus of world attention as a key battleground in the fight against apartheid. The film takes audiences back to 1984, the height of apartheid in South Africa. Mary Manning, a 21-year-old Dunnes Stores checkout girl, refused to sell two Outspan grapefruits under direction from her union in support of the anti-apartheid struggle. She and ten other supporters were suspended and a strike ensued. The eleven knew little about apartheid and assumed they’d be back to work before long, but the arrival on the picket line of activist Nimrod Sejake changed everything, setting the strikers on a path never expected. His influence on the strikers and their struggle to bring about change proved to be the central turning point in their motivation for not only continuing the strike but advancing it to the international stage.

Nominated for Prix Europa 2014
Winner of Best Feature Documentary – Galway Film Fleadh 2014

Director contact: sinead.obrien.dublin@gmail.com
Find us on facebook.com/bloodfruit2014
Follow us on twitter.com/BloodFruit2014

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Collective Bargaining, Documentary, Retail, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Women

 

Hard Labor (2015) (Trabalhar Cansa)

11 Nov

Not rated
In Portuguese, with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes

Workplace tensions intersect with domestic stresses in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Hard Labor,” a tense drama inching toward stark metaphor. Otávio (Marat Descartes) is a middle-aged, middle-class apartment dweller in São Paulo, Brazil, who has just lost an unspecified white-collar job. He receives the news just as his wife, Helena (Helena Albergaria), is trying to get a modest grocery store business off the ground. Parents to a young daughter, they are an affectionate, mutually supportive pair, but the vicissitudes of their struggles exact a cost. Otávio attends a humiliating job interview in which he is questioned while seated opposite two younger men seeking the same position. An employment counselor tells him his search could take a year. Eventually he is reduced to telephone sales, cold calling customers to pitch insurance. His efforts pale beside the troubles of Helena, who faces thieving employees, strained relations with a young housekeeper (Naloana Lima) she has hired, leaky plumbing and something hidden behind a wall at her store that exudes a foul odor and might be alarming a dog across the street. The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect — at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.” That Mr. Descartes and especially the skilled Ms. Albergaria are devoid of movie star airs elicits our sympathy. As does a lingering shot of a line of applicants for store employment, a group portrait of Brazil’s recessionary casualties.
– New York Times

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Cities-Urban, Drama, Farm & Food, Horror, Retail, Unemployment-Wages

 

Labour in a Single Shot

11 Nov

http://www.labour-in-a-single-shot.net

Starting in 2011 artist, curator, and author Antje Ehmann and filmmaker, video artist and author Harun Farocki initiated video production workshops in 15 cities around the world in which participants were to engage with the subject of ‘labour’: paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, traditional or new. The videos could not be longer than two minutes and they had to be taken in a single shot. The camera could be static, panning or travelling but cuts were not allowed. This concept references the Brother Lumière’s famous film Workers Leaving the Factory which was filmed in one continuous take from a fixed camera position.

The result of these workshops, which were organised together with local branches of the Goethe-Institut, are 400 films which show people engaged in all kinds of work, each film taking a different stance, literally and figuratively, towards its subject while also recording the diverse mental attitudes and bodily relation people have to their work.

Facing the challenge of filming something that might be essentially repetitive, continuous and boring, the films also foreground the work of the camera operator and his or her aesthetic decisions. In the multitude and diversity the films form a visual compendium and an archive of labour and cinema in the 21st century that is never boring or repetitive but enhances and simultaneously questions our perception and understanding of work.

All the films can be watched on a dedicated website, at random, or sorted by city, colour or type of work. A selection of 90 films was shown as an installation at the House of World Culture in Berlin from 27 February to 6 April 2015 with an accompanying conference. This exhibition also presented the project ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in 15 Cities’ (2011 – 2014), consisting of contemporary remakes of the famous film by the Lumière Brothers which were shot in 15 cities all over the world. Also included in the exhibition was the installation ‘Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades’ (2006), which showed scenes of workers leaving the factory throughout the history of cinema, from the Lumière Brothers (1895) to Lars van Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).

‘Labour in a Single Shot’ is a co-production of the Harun Farocki Filmproduktion with the Goethe-Institut.

www.harunfarocki.de

 
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Posted by on November 11, 2015 in Communications, Construction Trades, Documentary, Education, Entertainment Industry, Farm & Food, Finance, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Migrant workers, Philosophy, Public Sector, Retail, Self-Employed/Freelance, Service Workers, Technology, Textile Industry, Transportation, White Collar, Working Class

 

The Factory

09 Sep

2015
Documentary
India
Director: Rahul Roy

Indian documentarian Rahul captures the struggle of Maruti auto workers in New Dehli. For more than two years, 147 autoworkers there were kept behind bars without bail or charge sheet presented to defense counsel.

 
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Posted by on September 9, 2015 in Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Organizing

 

America’s Victory: The 1997 UPS Strike (1997)

05 Feb

 
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Posted by on February 5, 2015 in Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Transportation

 

Real Union Busting (1989)

05 Feb

1989 Pittston miners’ strike, 10 minutes  (civil disobedience)

 
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Posted by on February 5, 2015 in Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

Deadline for Action (A 1946 Call To Action Pt 1)

05 Feb

21 minutes
This film produced by The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) gives a taste of the post WWII politics that led to the Taft-Hartley Act that restricts the ability of workers to join unions.

 
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Posted by on February 5, 2015 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts

 

Strikes Threaten Industry (1946 strike wave)

05 Feb

Newsreel, 6 minutes
A wave of strikes occurred in 1946 after World War II ended and wartime wage-price controls began to erode. Here we see clips on labor disputes at Western Electric, Western Union, the auto industry, railroads, coal, ships, and trucking. The strike wave set the stage for passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which included injunctions for national emergency disputes.

 
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Posted by on February 5, 2015 in Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Transportation

 

Labor Unrest in Coal During and After WW2

05 Feb

Newsreel, 4 minutes
A strike in the coal industry during World War II leads to government intervention. After the war, another strike creates a pension fund. This video, made by the the United Mine Workers union UMW), features the union president, John L. Lewis, including congressional testimony. You can spot a brief shot of Congressman Richard Nixon at one point. Coal was a key industry in this era, supplying steel mills, railroad locomotives, electrical generators, and homes for heating.

 
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Posted by on February 5, 2015 in Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)

 

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

02 Feb

episode 1 (60 min.)
Just before the advent of the Great Depression, Henry Ford controlled the most important company in the most important industry in the booming American economy. His offer of high wages in exchange for hard work attracted workers to Detroit, but it began to come apart when Ford hired a private police force to speed up production and spy on employees. After the depression hit in 1929, these workers faced a new, grim reality as unemployment skyrocketed.

 
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Posted by on February 2, 2015 in Documentary, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo)

 
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