When was the documentary the union made

Details Edit. Release date February 4, United States. United States. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 50 minutes. Black and White. Related news. Aug 7 HollywoodChicago. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. What is the Spanish language plot outline for Union Maids ? See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. See the full list. Watch the video. Guess who wins that argument? When the mine owner obtains an injunction against the striking workers, the women step up and maintain the picket lines.

Cobb and a disillusioned dockworker Marlon Brando was their first introduction to the idea of a union and it was not a positive image. Kazan, who had just testified before the Un-American Activities Committee, where he named names of possible Communists, was clearly trying to make a point about the heroism of standing up for what you believe against overwhelming odds. But union workers know that the power of a Johnny Friendly pales in comparison to the power of the people that run the companies that ultimately pay the workers.

Perhaps it would have helped to know that Johnny Friendly was based on an actual ILA leader who severely disciplined by the American Federation of Labor for his violent tactics. Doris Day plays the union steward in a pajama-making factory who has been pushing for a raise. John Raitt is a superintendent. These representatives of labor and management begin a love affair, but their work roles drive them apart, and after Day damages some machinery during a slowdown, Superintendent Raitt fires her.

But then through the magic of movies , Raitt discovers nefarious doings in management and manages to bring Doris back to work and to him , get everyone the raise and they all live happily after. Co-directed by George Abbott also a co-writer and Stanley Donen.

The whole thing is played for broad laughs, most of them generated by Peter Sellers as the union boss with Bolshevik sympathies and a Hitler mustache.

A cynical look at union leaders and management both, in the end it is clear who has the real power. The Molly Maguires, led by Jack Kehoe Sean Connery , is a sort of proto-union that is at war with the mine owners in pursuit of better pay and working conditions.

A Pinkerton Detective Richard Harris infiltrates the group and attempts to uncover its secrets, with tragic results. Ritt would revisit the union theme in with Norma Rae. Confrontations between striking workers and hired strikebreakers quickly became violent, and even Kopple and her cameraman were beaten. The film reminds audiences that, even in the s, management tactics such as these were commonplace and the dream of a workplace where management and labor lived in perfect harmony was still far off.

We get the good, the bad and the ugly of the controversial union leader, both his tireless dedication to the workers he represented as well as some of the poor choices he made while in power. The film, a collective portrait of three women labor organizers active from the s to the present, focuses on the CIO organizing drive of the s. The three women were part of a community of working class Chicago socialists.

They all came to Chicago in their youth, two from farms and one from New Orleans. All entered industrial jobs in the early s and rapidly became rank-and-file activists, union organizers, and socialist leaders. Thus it is possible to find out even more about them than the movie tells us. In content as well as in conceptualization the movie is in some ways a cinematization of the book, and this is no slight to the film.

Rather, it suggests the importance of the kind of class conscious, political, oral history that the Lynds are doing. I am writing about this film mainly as an historian.

Many of my comments are more questions than criticisms, for being neither filmmaker nor film critic, I am unsure of the possibilities of filmic communication. I am stimulated to offer these comments because I liked the film very much, and hope that its showing will often be combined with discussions in which its political implications can be evaluated.

Sylvia Woods was born in New Orleans in , black, daughter of a craftsman roofer, a man proud of his skill. She is conscious of the political legacy given her by her father, who was an ardent union man and a Garveyite. As a schoolgirl she was already fighting racism and refusing to accept the acconmodationist ideology her school offered.

She grew up on a midwestern farm, leaving there in at age Her father had been a coal miner, a socialist who read Lenin and Gorky in Polish, while her mother was a practicing Catholic. This is one of several instances when the viewer senses that the filmmakers are not entirely in control of what their film says. Hyndman immigrated to Iowa from Croatia at age five in Her father was also a coal miner. Visually we meet these women only through contemporary interviews.

We never see them at their work - neither factory work nor organizing. These are not famous or rich people, and there are no old newsreels of them, only a few old snapshots.

The viewer imagines them as young women in the s by drawing on their current liveliness and vitality as they describe their past work. Those who already know some of this history can add to the film mentally, enthusiastically participating in the historical reconstruction.

On second viewing it is surprising to realize that this energetic movie is composed only of interviews edited together with historical images. We see what Chicago looked like in the Depression; we see mass strikes, sit-downs, demonstrations, eviction resistance, class violence.

The force of the class struggle of the s is shown, not just told. One feels inside this energy, and the music is important to this. But the specific political content of the film, the history that it teaches, is not precise as its more general communication of mood. The film is about a period of great working class power.

The three organizers reveal nostalgia for the feeling of that power. Sylvia Woods describes how in the laundry where she first worked it was only rarely that black women could get industrial jobs at that time , the workers conducted what she believes may have been the first sit-down strike of the Depression era.