A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge…
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-united-states-of-alec-a-follow-up/
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.
Canada, 2013
Directed by Charles Wilkinson
Home to one of the most controversial industries in the world—the Athabasca tar sands—Fort McMurray, Alberta, has seen a record population boom. Thousands of men and women from as far away as PEI and Labrador and as close by as local aboriginal communities, have flocked to the city to work in the oil patch, all attracted by the promise of good jobs and a high salary. The work is hard and the hours are long. The weather is harsh and the social life is sparse, and everyone must cope with the knowledge that many people worldwide—possibly even friends and family—object, sometimes strenuously, to what they do for a living. How do they cope? With karaoke of course! Oil Sands Karaoke profiles five Fort McMurray residents as they prepare to unleash their inner divas at Bailey’s, the local pub, in a vocal battle royal.
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.
2013 | French | 58 min | HD
| 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
2012, Italy
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
Director Massimo Ferrari | Italy, 67min.
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.
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?
A new TV drama series featuring labor inspectors and their work started broadcasting in Japan in 2013. This is the first time ever in Japanese TV drama history. The first episode concerns a “bad employer” who harasses workers and refuses to pay overtime. In recent years, people often talk about “black companies” that squeeze everything out of their employees, and that may be why the TV company thought this kind of show could attract audience.
In any case, we are hoping that young students will watch this TV and that the number of applications for an exam to become a labor inspector (which is a relatively obscure profession at the moment, to be honest) will increase. Unfortunately the series has not been translated from Japanese.
Info: http://www.ntv.co.jp/dandarin/
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgeD5LSXJhE
Post by Kayo Rokumoto kayo.rokumoto@mofa.go.jp
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.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 