Labor on the Screen

Maids, miners, citizen soldiers, cubicle trolls and Dolly Parton. Here are fourteen great films about workers, working and workplaces.

Americans work harder than any other industrialized nation. We spend the majority of our waking lives working. But we don’t spend much time talking about the culture of work.

September 15 through 21, the AFL-CIO and the American Film Insitute came together to sponsor the DC Labor FilmFest.

The films explored working life, from the struggle of undocumented workers to union drives, from the costs of globalization to corporate cubicle life and working as a soldier in Iraq.

Campus Progress gave out free tickets to some of the screenings- hopefully a few of you made it to a screening yourself!

Even with the festival over for the year, take a read through Campus Progress’ list of fourteen great films about workers, working and workplaces. Pick two or three of your favorites and screen them on your campus, or talk about your favorite labor films on the Campus Progress blog.

Harlan County, USA
Barbara Kopple’s Oscar winning documentary set in Appalachia documents a coal miners’ strike in “bloody” Harlan County, Kentucky. This is required viewing. Koppel got inside jail cells, courtrooms and stockholder meetings to film this risky documentary. Women play a particularly prominent role in this strike, which features corporate bad guys so nasty that they seem to have been hired out of central casting. The film also has an interesting soundtrack, featuring the song “Black Lung,” where Hazel Dickens sings, "The die has been cast now, and a good man is gone."

Office Space
Anyone who has had a mindless job (or internship) in cubicle-land loves this movie, which perfectly documents the small humiliations and indignations of the work place with dead-on satire. Office Space introduced the shudder-inducing “TPS report cover sheets” and “pieces of flair” into our modern movie vernacular. With the tagline “Work Sucks,” the film savages white-collar crap work in the era of corporate standardization and interchangeable workers. It’s sort of like a low-brow version of Chaplin’s Modern Times, but, you know, more modern.

Nine to Five
Dolly! Jane Fonda, a housewife dumped by her husband for his secretary, becomes a secretary herself alongside Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, at a huge corporation where she serves a sleazy, chauvinistic boss who spends most of his time checking out Dolly’s rack. The women of the office are all underpaid and underappreciated. Basically, after a night spent eating barbeque and getting high, the group of women come up with a revenge scheme that results in a mix-up with a poisoned cup of coffee and a kidnapping. After they kidnap their boss, the women affect some changes around the office like adding flextime and a child-care center. Nine to Five, which is celebrating its 25 th anniversary, pokes fun at the limits of “pink collar” work.

Roger & Me
This now iconic Michael Moore documentary follows his hometown of Flint, Michigan, in its decline after the huge General Motors plant that economically anchored the town packs up shop. The film is powerful as it documents the impact of one plant closing on one town and the wide gulf between average citizens and the powerful elite. Despite the somber subject matter, there is plenty of gallows humor, including a scene where the “Miss Michigan ” contestant tries to boost morale of GM employees by reminding them to root for her in the Miss America pageant.

Il Posto [The Job]
A teenager leaves his small Italian village for Milan to begin his life at the bottom of the bureaucratic ladder for a huge, anonymous company. Things start out promisingly. He aces their various tests, including doing knee-bends and fraction problems and answering mental-health quiz questions like, “Does the future seem hopeless to you?” And he begins to find romance in the workplace. Ultimately, the film is a both a coming-of-age story and an absurdist satire workplace alienation, rude awakenings, and corporate doldrums.

Off to War
Brothers and documentaries Brent and Craig Renaud embed with the 39 th Brigade of the Arkansas National Guard for 18 months beginning in October 2003, when their deployment to Iraq is first announced. We watch these 57 weekend warriors or citizen soldiers, who include a former gang member who is serving alongside his dad and a minister, leave their homes and jobs to serve in Iraq. Though most support the war, after arriving in Iraq, the men seem to lose their sense of purpose and direction while their families struggle back home.

Modern Times
Charlie Chaplin stars as an assembly-line factory worker driven to the brink of sanity by his difficult and monotous job in his last silent film, that actually isn’t totally silent. The satire of the Machine Age follows Chaplin and a wide-eyed gamine (before the wide-eyed gamine was a tremendous cliché) after his release from an asylum. He searches for work to support the pair, but he keeps getting fired or arrested, once as a Communist agitator. Still, it ends hopefully, the last image is of Chaplin and The Gamine shambling down a highway towards new horizons in California.

Domésticas [Maids]
The comedy, directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardner fame, follows six different women, coping with their lives as frustrated, low-paid domestics. Some cope through religion or obsessive reading of their horoscopes or waiting for a man. One plans to become an actress/model but accidentally detours through prostitution after singing up for what appeared to be a modeling course that was actually an escort service. The sprawling, wistful film is set in Sao Paulo. As always, Meirelles, vividly shows us different worlds – the world of privilege where the maids work and the world of poverty where they live.

Where Do You Stand? Stories From an American Mill
On June 23rd, 1999, after a quarter century of struggle, textile workers in Kannapolis, North Carolina, won the single largest industrial union victory in the history of the South, a region long known as a bastion of anti-union sentiment. This documentary follows bosses who pledge loyalty to the company while planning layoffs that leave many community members taking on poverty-level retail sector jobs that are their only choice. Though industrial unions aren’t always a sexy topic, they are compellingly documented here primarily through workers’ voices.

On the Waterfront
Yes, this is the cinematic gem from where pop culture has harvested Brando’s famous line: “I coulda been a contendah.” This is the classic story, directed by Elia Kazan, about a washed-up boxer turned mob informer who works the docks of New York and New Jersey. After witnessing a mob related murder, at first, he is willing to keep quiet to hold onto his errand-boy job. But then he meets the (naturally gorgeous) sister of the dead dockworker, and he begins to change his mind. After the “waterfront Priest” gets beaten up by gang goons, Terry does what’s right and testifies. Note: Elia Kazan infamously informed on suspected Commies during the McCarthy witch hunt, and some have read this movie as an allegorical defense of the informer.

I Compagni [The Organizer]
Directed by Mario Monicelli, this is a completely uplifting tale of impoverished workers in 19th C. Italy standing up to the callous factory. (“Write to me, write to me,” implores the woman to her lover leaving town by train. “But you can’t read,” he shouts back.) It stars Marcello Mastrioanni of La Dolce Vita fame, who is not in his usual dapper and handsome form as he sports Lenin-style glasses, a beard and shaggy hair while fighting the horrible conditions of a small town’s textile mill.

The Grapes of Wrath
Based on the John Steinbeck classic, this adaptation focuses on the poorest of the poor Dust Bowl migrants who move from their decimated and no longer profitable farmland in Oklahoma to strike out for California in search of difficult to find work opportunities. After stopping through the poverty and devastation of migrant camps, the main character, Tom, says goodbye to his mother, and delivers the film’s most famous line: "I’ll be all around…Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat…Whenever there’s a cop beating a guy, I’ll be there…And when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build. I’ll be there too."

These Hands
This unique short-form documentary has no narration as it follows women quarry workers outside of Dar es Salaam, Mozambique. Most of the women are refugees from Mozambique who spend their days painfully, painstakingly and manually mining gravel from the scarred landscape to be used for concrete and urban building projects. The film has an almost meditative quality as these women, who represent the lower ranks of the global economy, share endless work, collaborative childcare and singing and dancing and the end of a day’s work.

Matewan
Indie hero John Sayles depicts Matewan, a 1820s coal town that is controlled by the Stone Moutnain Coal Company who indulge in such practices as importing immigrants as cheaper labor sources or reducing workers’ wages while raising prices on goods at the local supply and grocery stores which, of course, they own. Soon Chris Cooper (Adaptation, American Beauty) unites the miners for a strike that quickly turns bitter and hostile. The film portrays one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of the Coal Wars, which some described as “The Alamo” of the struggles in the coal fields of West Virginia. It ends with the inevitable shootout along Main Street that is now called the “Matewan Massacre.”

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