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Category Archives: Unemployment-Wages

Eat Sleep Die

19 Nov

2012
Directed by Gabriela Pichler
Sweden
104 mins

Nermina Lukac’s electrifying performance as Raša is the heart of director Gabriela Pichler’s feature debut. A Montenegrin-born young woman living in rural Sweden, Raša is laid off from her job at a food-packing plant. Her ensuing job search pulls us through the maze of limited prospects and frustrating bureaucracy facing the country’s working immigrant population. Affable, resilient, street smart and soft-hearted, Raša’s natural magnetism draws us in completely. We feel every ounce of her disappointment, fear and elation as she soldiers on, looking for work. An Audience Award winner at the Venice Film Festival, EAT SLEEP DIE’s assured naturalism and political conviction single out Pichler as a bold, exciting new cinematic voice. Her film is a positive rallying cry for low-wage workers who dream of a life that won’t merely add up to the three verbs that form the film’s title.
– Mike Dougherty, American Film Institute 

 
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Posted by on November 19, 2014 in Class, Comedy, Discrimination: Racism, Sexism, etc, Drama, Farm & Food, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Legal System, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

 

155 Sold

17 Jul

46 min; 2012, Greece, Greek in English subtitles
Directed by George Panteleakis
film website

Greece was selected to be the first European economic experiment with a massive austerity program to privatize and destroy social services. This destruction of jobs and public services led to a massive protest in May 2011 and this full contact documentary shows the struggle shot by the film maker and activists in the struggle. Thick clouds of smoke covered the angry protests around Syntagma Square (Constitution Square) on 28-29 June 2011, while a majority of 155 deputies of the Greek Parliament bowed down to the austerity agenda. The working class, retirees and students engaged in mass protests and faced violence against them by the police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7311fFPHCs

 
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Posted by on July 17, 2014 in Documentary, Politics, Public Sector, Unemployment-Wages

 

The Plundering

02 Jul

By Oliver Ressler (40 min.) 2013 Austria

Extreme levels of privatization can only be carried out under conditions where people are under severe pressure, as in the transformation of former Soviet republics towards independence and capitalism. Since the Rose Revolution in 2003, the former Soviet republic Georgia under went such a radical transformation. President Mikheil Saakashvili implemented one of the most extreme neoliberal projects in the world. Today, Georgia is 9th among 185 states on the World Bank list of “Ease of Doing Business” countries. This is creating an unstable situation in a radical, free-market economy with the liquidation of most social safety nets. Most Georgian residents are being driven into un-experienced levels of poverty.

The Plundering focuses on four cases of aggressive, state-property privatization policies in Tbilisi. Through interviews, it discusses the privatization of the water system in Tbilisi and of Tbilisi’s popular market, the Dezerter Bazaar. A newly emerging movement prevented the attempted sell-off of the National Scientific Library, and the destruction and conversion of the historical Gudiashvili Square in Tbilisi’s city center into a shopping mall.

Trailer: http://www.ressler.at/the_plundering/

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2014 in Collective Bargaining, Documentary, Unemployment-Wages

 

Expect Resistance

28 Jun

Looks at the “Take Back the Land” and Occupy Wall Street movements as they began to respond to the foreclosure crisis. The film follows Leonard Spears, a man fighting to keep his home after a foreclosure has passed and an eviction notice has been filed. We meet activists who are willing to put themselves on the line and take direct action to keep people like Leonard in their homes, and to even move homeless families into bank-owned homes that are sitting empty from previous foreclosures.

Directed by: Shane Burley

 

 
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Posted by on June 28, 2014 in Big Business/Corporations, Cities-Urban, Class, Documentary, Legal System, Organizing, Politics, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

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Under The Bus

23 Jun

Anthony has driven a school bus in Staten Island, New York for twenty-four years. His plans to retire suddenly grind to a halt when the Union (ATU 1181) goes on strike in response to a contract dispute with the City of New York. The film follows Anthony and his fellow drivers to the picket line, where they find themselves battling harsh winter weather, a media blackout, Union politics and a Mayor who refuses to negotiate.

Directed by: Peter Hass & Keif Roberts

http://underthebusfilm.blogspot.com/

 
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Posted by on June 23, 2014 in Children, Cities-Urban, Communications, Documentary, Occupation/Type of Work, Service Workers, Transportation, Unemployment-Wages

 

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Haymarket Martyrs–Origins of International Workers Day

03 Jan

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w-z8ud_9QU
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKkEl9XzjFc

 
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Posted by on January 3, 2014 in Documentary, Labor History, Organizing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

Sunlight Jr.,

03 Jan

In Laurie Collyer’s “Sunlight Jr.,” Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon play unmarried lovers with no way out of the minimum-wage working class.
http://nyti.ms/1aWuJWt

 
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Posted by on January 3, 2014 in Drama, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

Inequality For All (2013)

03 Jan

http://inequalityforall.com/

Jacob Kornbluth, 2013, 89 min
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich looks to raise awareness of the country’s widening economic gap.

 
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Posted by on January 3, 2014 in Big Business/Corporations, Documentary, Finance, Outsourcing, Technology, Unemployment-Wages

 

On The Art Of War

01 Nov

2012, ItalyArt-of-War
directed by silvia luzi, luca bellino

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.

http://dellartedellaguerra.com/index.php?lang=en
Luca Bellino tfilm.luca@gmail.com

 
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Posted by on November 1, 2013 in Documentary, Global Economy, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Manufacturing, Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Unemployment-Wages, Working Class

 

A Job at Ford’s: PBS Great Depression Series (1993)

02 Jul

PBS Great Depression Series, #1

Producer: WGBH, Boston

Narrator: Joe Morton

51 minutes

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.

 
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Posted by on July 2, 2013 in Available Online, Blacks, Cities-Urban, Class, Consumerism, Documentary, Global Economy, Immigrants/Immigration, Industrial/Mine/Manufacturing, Labor History, Manufacturing, Politics, Streaming Online (Youtube, Vimeo), Strikes-Strikebreaking-Lockouts, Themes, Transportation, Unemployment-Wages, Women, Working Class

 
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