Musical
United States
Writer and Composer: Si Kahn
Musical Direction: Jim Peterson
45 Minutes
In this innovative one-woman musical by the legendary singer, songwriter, and activist Si Kahn, Mother Jones awakens in Heaven which, to her surprise and delight, turns out to be an Irish pub. There, she meets a trio of musicians who recount the events of her life through music and stories.
Si Kahn contact: sikahn36@gmail.com
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.
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.
1937, Flint, PBS, Walter Reuther and the Rise of the UAW, 15 minutes
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.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 