12m; Canada
Synopsis: The life of an injured worker is seen through her challenges, both personal and the bureaucratic.
Category Archives: Safety & Health
Workers In Peril, Union In Action (2009)
44m; Canada
Director: Michael Connolly
Synopsis: Covers the recent recession’s effect on workers, auto workers specifically. Also touches on pension and severance issues. Great footage and editing. Narrated by Jian Gomes.
The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La classe operaia va in paradiso) aka Lulu the Tool (1971)
125m; Italy
Director: Elio Petri
Cast: Gian Maria Volonté, Mariangela Melato and Gino Pernice
Synopsis (IMDB): Lulù is a real hard worker. For this reason he is loved by the masters and hated by his own colleagues. The unions decide agitations against the masters. Lulù doesn’t agree till he cuts, by accident, one of his own fingers. Now, after he understood the worker’s conditions, he agrees the unions and participates to the strike. He immediately is fired and, not only is abandoned by his lover, but also by the other workers. But the fights of the unions allow him under a new legislation to be hired again. At this point his mind starts giving signs of collapse.
Working For Your Life (1979)
55m; U.S.
Director: Andrea Hricko and Ken Light
Synopsis: Covers working women and their problems and struggles to correct workplace hazards. Filmed in over 40 workplaces, the film interviews injured workers, including a woman who lost her finger in an industrial accident and another who has asbestos-related disease. Sterilization of women workers is discussed. Unlike many health and safety films, this one points out that organization is one of the best ways to protect one’s health.
eDump (2008)
20m; U.S.
Director: Michael Zhao
Synopsis: Poor countries like China and India are the victims of a nasty electronic waste dumping business. E-waste brokers make money by polluting the environment and harming public health in trash towns like Guiyu, Guangdong.
Contact: http://MichaelZhao.net zhaoyunfeng78@gmail.com
Sick Around the World (2008)
56m; U.S.
Synopsis: In the Frontline documentary, Sick Around the World, T. R. Reid, a Washington Post correspondent, raises the controversial and timely issue of how America’s heath care system might be improved. The filmmakers chose to investigate healthcare in five advanced industrialized capitalist countries instead of nations where “socialized” medicine is the norm. By providing Americans with valuable but little known information about the successes and failures of health care in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland, it offers a base of comparison for progressive health care reform in the U.S
Signed, Sealed and Delivered: Labor Struggle in the Post Office (1980)
By Tami Gold, Dan Gordon, Erik Lewis
1980, 45 minutes, Color and B&W, Video
On July 21, 1978 thousands of postal workers across the country walked off their jobs when their contract expired, saying “No” to mandatory overtime, forced speedups and hazardous working conditions. As a result of this wildcat strike, six hundred thousand postal workers won a better contract. But two hundred workers were arbitrarily fired by management to teach all postal workers a lesson.
SIGNED, SEALED and DELIVERED… is the story of the struggle these postal workers waged to win back their jobs. It follows their fight into the streets, onto the floor of the American Postal Workers Union’s National Convention and among workers and communities nationwide. But it took the tragic death of Michael McDermott, a 25 year old mailhandler who was sucked into a conveyor belt and crushed to death, to bring their hazardous working conditions to national attention.
SIGNED, SEALED and DELIVERED… speaks loudly and clearly to people everywhere who are organizing for safe and humane conditions in the workplace.
http://andersongoldfilms.com/films/documentaries/ssd.htm
Sicko (2007)
123m; U.S.
Director: Michael Moore
Cast: Michael Moore, Tucker Albrizzi and Tony Benn
Synopsis (IMDB): Documentary look at health care in the United States as provided by profit-oriented health maintenance organizations (HMOs) compared to free, universal care in Canada, the U.K., and France. Moore contrasts U.S. media reports on Canadian care with the experiences of Canadians in hospitals and clinics there. He interviews patients and doctors in the U.K. about cost, quality, and salaries. He examines why Nixon promoted HMOs in 1971, and why the Clintons’ reform effort failed in the 1990s. He talks to U.S. ex-pats in Paris about French services, and he takes three 9/11 clean-up volunteers, who developed respiratory problems, to Cuba for care. He asks of Americans, “Who are we?”
Rail Warning (2005)
43m; Japan
Director: Akira Matsubara & Video Press
Synopsis: Examines the cause of the disastrous Amagasaki rail accident in Osaka, Japan. This train wreck killed over a 100 people and the causes were directly related to the privatization and massive speed-up of railway workers.
The Reason Of The Weakest (2006)
80m; France
Director: Marc-Antoine ROUDIL & Sophie BRUNEAU
Synopsis: Men and women suffering from work-related illness.
Contact: Antoine Sebire frenchcinemawashington@yahoo.com Audiovisual Affairs Embassy of France – La Maison Française 4101 Reservoir Road, NW Washington DC, 20007 Ph: 202.944.6287 Fax: 202.944.6043 http://www.la-maison-francaise.org
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 