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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
55m written/directed by Tommaso Facchin and Ivan Franceschini website
The dreams and rights of a new generation in the world’s factory. In the suburbs of Shenzhen, in Guangdong province, young workers talk about their lives, existences built on a precarious balance between hope, struggles and wishes for the future. Around them activists and ZNGOs strive to give sense and meaning to works like rights, dignity and equity.
Goes to the front lines over the future of America’s middle class – by insightfully tracking the recent battle over union rights in Wisconsin, and by focusing on the hometown of the former Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. First, General Motors shut down Janesville’s century-old auto plant, leading to massive layoffs. Then, newly elected governor Scott Walker ignited a firestorm by ending collective bargaining and unleashing a protest movement that led to his recall election. Director Brad Lichtenstein followed the lives of Janesville’s auto workers for over three years, as they tried to save their jobs.
Synopsis: In 1864, George Pullman began selling his famous railroad sleeping cars which helped him build a vast industrial empire that was supposed to last forever. In 1981, however, Pullman workers found themselves in the midst of a fight not only for their jobs but the future of the American rail car industry. One hundred years of government, union and corporate policies are traced in this engaging story.
Contact: Available from New Day Films 22 Riverview Drive, Wayne, NJ 07470.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 