Directed By: Julia Reichert
Runtime: 50 min
Stars: Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki, Sylvia Woods
Synopsis: actions of the time and the current state of the labor movement. Accompanied by a lot of vintage folk music.
Category Archives: Unemployment-Wages
Union Maids (1976)
Industria Argentina (2011) (Argentine Industry)
Directed by: Ricardo Díaz Iacoponi
Country: Argentina.
Running Time: 96 minutes.
Starring: Aymará Rovera, Carlos Portaluppi, Cutuli.
http://www.indargentina-film.com.ar/indexar.html
Trailer: http://indargentina-film.com.ar/trailer.html
At Arlumar, a spare parts factory, workers resist to lose their only means of earning their living. Juan, as well as many other employees, has not collected his salaries for months. His pregnant wife and his debts make him foresee a very dark future ahead. Little by little, taking control of their desperation, Juan and his coworkers begin to organize themselves to keep running the company that has been abandoned by its owners. In that way, they assume the rebuilding of a company that has no employers, which proves to be a heavy burden to carry.
Crisis Document. A Survival Guide (2015)
Filmmakers: Elisabeth Marjanovic ́ Cronvall and Marta Dauliute
Sweden, 2015, Documentary, 15 minutes
Recipe for fascism: Half a generation unemployed, doctors forced to choose whom to treat, social security disappearing, the public on discount.
We ask our friends in Greece to make a list of their images of the euro crisis. It becomes a warning list for the North.
2015 Brazilian International Labour Film Festival; http://www.bilff.org
Hard Labor (2015) (Trabalhar Cansa)
Not rated
In Portuguese, with English subtitles
Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes
Workplace tensions intersect with domestic stresses in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Hard Labor,” a tense drama inching toward stark metaphor. Otávio (Marat Descartes) is a middle-aged, middle-class apartment dweller in São Paulo, Brazil, who has just lost an unspecified white-collar job. He receives the news just as his wife, Helena (Helena Albergaria), is trying to get a modest grocery store business off the ground. Parents to a young daughter, they are an affectionate, mutually supportive pair, but the vicissitudes of their struggles exact a cost. Otávio attends a humiliating job interview in which he is questioned while seated opposite two younger men seeking the same position. An employment counselor tells him his search could take a year. Eventually he is reduced to telephone sales, cold calling customers to pitch insurance. His efforts pale beside the troubles of Helena, who faces thieving employees, strained relations with a young housekeeper (Naloana Lima) she has hired, leaky plumbing and something hidden behind a wall at her store that exudes a foul odor and might be alarming a dog across the street. The filmmakers, largely forgoing a soundtrack, skillfully manipulate stillness, silence and anomie to unsettling effect — at times evoking the ambient dread and decay of, say, Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion.” That Mr. Descartes and especially the skilled Ms. Albergaria are devoid of movie star airs elicits our sympathy. As does a lingering shot of a line of applicants for store employment, a group portrait of Brazil’s recessionary casualties.
– New York Times
We Have a Plan: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)
Episode 4 (60 min.)
By 1934 challenges to the New Deal came from both sides of the political spectrum. In California Socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor promising to turn idle land and factories into self-governing cooperatives. Sinclair’s campaign ended in defeat, but one year later President Roosevelt’s signing of the Social Security Act signaled America’s emergence as a modern welfare state.
New Deal, New York: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)
Episode 3 (60 min.)
In his first one hundred days in office, in a effort to stem the effects of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created many new federal agencies giving jobs and relief to people and transforming the American landscape with public works projects. Nowhere was this transformation more apparent than in Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s New York City. Together Roosevelt and La Guardia expanded and redefined the role of government in the lives of the American people.
Bonus March on Washington, DC: 1932
In 1932, unemployed veterans marched on Washington, DC demanding payment of a bonus due in the future. The “bonus marchers” were routed by the military on orders of President Hoover. The idea of World War I veterans who had come home as heroes being confronted by the army was a national shock and doomed whatever hope Hoover had for reelection.
THE LABOR FILM DATABASE 