Filmmaker: Matthew Barr
A true David versus Goliath story, “Union Time” is a promotional teaser for a documentary in production about the successful fight to unionize the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, located in Tar Heel, NC.
Category Archives: Immigrants/Immigration
Union Time
Bread and Roses: The Lawrence Textile Strike
6:17m
The Lawrence Textile Strike was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World. Prompted by one mill owner’s decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week. The strike, which lasted more than two months and which defied the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized, was successful; within a year, however, the union had largely collapsed and most of the gains achieved by the workers were lost.
Small Homeland
2013
Drama
Italy
Director: Alessandro Rossetto
Writers: Caterina Serra, Alessandro Rossetto, Maurizio Braucci
111 Minutes
Bread, Concrete, and Roses
2013
Documentary
Turkey
Director: Yonetmen
The film is about the dangerous life of construction workers in a foreign land far from their homeland, and their social problems.
–Written by Steven Zeltzer
The Southeast of Ankara
2013
Documentary
Director: Yonetmen
22 Minutes
The families of those immigrated for various reasons live in the four edge districts of Ankara which are located in the boundaries of Çankaya. The families who have lived for years in this region are exposed to an enforced immigration for urban transformation. The movie expresses the urban transformation and immigration subjects through the viewpoint of the children of those families.
Cesar Chavez
2014
102 min
Biography
Director: Diego Luna
Writers: Keir Pearson (screenplay), Timothy J. Sexton
Stars: Michael Peña, America Ferrera, Rosario Dawson
The film follows Chávez’s efforts to organize 50,000 farm workers in California, some of whom were braceros—temporary workers from Mexico permitted to live and work in the United States in agriculture, and required to return to Mexico if they stopped working. Working conditions are very poor for the braceros, who also suffer from racism and brutality at the hands of the employers and local Californians. To help the workers, César Chávez (Michael Peña) forms a labor union known as the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chávez’s efforts are opposed, sometimes violently, by the owners of the large industrial farms where the braceros work. The film touches on several major nonviolent campaigns by the UFW: the Delano grape strike, the Salad Bowl strike, and the 1975 Modesto march.
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