In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in. We’re here at 7 pm on Sunday nights.
In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about organized labor and collective action.
With the threat of a rail strike, union contracts, negotiations, and benefits have been much in the news. It’s been a pretty good couple of years for organized labor, apart from the shit deal for railroad workers.
What are the most impactful artistic representations of unions, strikes, strikebreaking, and, more generally, collective action?
WaterGirl
What’s Matewan about?
BGinCHI
Image at the top is from John Sayles’ great film, Matewan.
I’ve loved this film since it came out and have always wished that Sayles had made half a dozen films chronicling major US labor actions (and their violent repression, in almost every case).
FelonyGovt
I recently saw a show on BritBox called Sherwood. The backdrop was a miners’ strike during the Thatcher era. Showed how the deep divisions it caused persisted for years later.
BGinCHI
@WaterGirl: Coal mine strike in 1920, WV. Amazing cast of characters and cast. Terrific music and exploration of the ways the companies set minorities and immigrants against one another.
Based on true events. Even the sheriff who sided with the miners.
Alison Rose
I can’t think of any artistic representations off the top of my head, if you’re meaning fictional ones, but the nonfiction book by Philip Dray with the same title as this post is quite good. It’s a chunker, but very accessible and engaging
ETA: Oh, there is the novel In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck, about striking migrant workers on apple orchards in California. I read it a decade ago and don’t recall details, but I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, so it must’ve been good!
BGinCHI
@FelonyGovt:
I heard that’s very good and would love to see it, but DAMN I have so many subs already!
BGinCHI
@Alison Rose:
Sure, any kind. I don’t know that book but I’ll check it out.
I did a lot of labor history as an undergrad and have always been fascinated with this subject. Helps, maybe, too, to grow up in a union/working class family.
E.
Well there is Swimmy the Fish. Anybody remember that one? Still in print too!
Scout211
Norma Rae (1979) with Sally Field and Beau Bridges.
BGinCHI
@Scout211: Hard to forget her ringing that bell.
Martin Ritt made a lot of good movies.
p.a.
USA trilogy by John Dos Passos are excellent novels, snapshots of the US in the robber baron era.
We Shall Be All is a history of the IWW that has probably been superceeded by more recent histories, but I’m old.
Herbert G Gutman wrote some fine books on the American working class.
Scout211
On the dark side of unions from the past, one of my favorite movies from way back, On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando. What an emotional movie. What a great actor.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I always liked the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art. And if your question includes music, there are lots of union songs, starting with Solidarity Forever. The only literary depiction I can think of off the top of my head is the streetcar strike in Sister Carrie.
Alison Rose
Another nonfiction item, which is old but the themes are still relevant: a 2006 essay by Chris Hayes called In Search of Solidarity. He based it off a transit strike in New York City, but broadens it to the larger human concept of solidarity–where it comes from, what forms it takes, what it truly means. I remember being very struck by it when I first read it when it came out, and I’ve gone back to it many times since
BGinCHI
@Alison Rose: That’s terrific.
martha
@FelonyGovt: I thought Sherwood was excellent…plot, acting, etc. (love love Leslie Manville, of course). I liked how it demonstrated how long and deep divisions over labor issues (in this case, Thatcher’s efforts to destroy the coal labor unions) affect a community, multiple generations later.
Grumpy Old Railroader
I keep seeing comments like this. Just as background in my working days, I was a full time union officer representing conductors, brakemen, switchmen etc in the 7 southwestern states from Portland OR to El Paso TX. So I am acutely aware of the conditions set forth in the Railway Labor Act (RLA). There are actually 3 parties in the RLA. the Railroads, the 12 railroad unions and the U.S. Government
In this round of bargaining, negotiations began in 2019 and each step of the way has been a slog. I’m not gonna look up the actual timeline but I recall that the Railroads and the unions reached an impasse in December 2021 and the National Mediation Board (U.S. Government) assigned a mediator. Now the mediator has no obligation to release the parities from mediation and in theory can hold them in that status forever. But by July the mediator saw that an agreement could not be reached so released the parties. This started a 30 day cooling off period before either party could seek self help (strike by the unions or lock-out or imposed agreement by the railroads)
Before the end of that Cooling off period, and in accordance with a provision of the RLA, POTUS assigned a 3-member Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to make recommendations. 30 days later the PEB came out with its proposed agreement. In essence it split the baby on what the railroads wanted and what the unions wanted. Most importantly it failed to address the issue of workers being able to call in sick. When the PEB issues its recommendations, that started another 30-day cooling off period in which the unions decide whether to accept the proposed agreement.
Keep in mind that because there had not been any raises for about 6-7 years, the PEB’s recommended wage increase was 24% over the life of the contract which was more than the railroads offered and less than the unions demanded. So the 12 unions individually voted their membership and the results were that 8 unions accepted the proposal and 4 unions rejected the proposal. I do not know what the votes were on 3 of those that rejected but I can cite the largest union SMART representing conductors, brakemen, switchmen, firemen and yardmasters. In the SMART union, their constitution calls for craft autonomy (a result of former unions consolidating into this merged union).
In craft autonomy, each craft votes separately and if ANY craft Rejects the proposal, then the ratification fails for all the crafts. In the vote every craft voted in favor of the agreement except the Switchmen who rejected it. The switchmen in SMART are a minority of the membership so if one just looks at raw numbers and disregards craft, the majority of all members voted in favor of the agreement. I am going to take a wild-ax guess that between the 8 unions voti9ng in favor and the majority of SMART voting in favor (if not for craft autonomy) then we actually see a majority of railroad workers favored that agreement.
So it pisses me off when I hear some infer that it was a shit agreement. Could it have been better? Hell yeah. Could it have been worse. Well if GOP controlled both houses and the Presidency why yes, it would have been much worse.
Now a few words about sick days. What this dispute highlighted was something that happens in many industries and only in America of all the industrialized nations. In days of old, train crews worked on call from a rotating board. You would be place on the bottom of the board and as crews were called you eventually rotated to the top of the board and took a call for work. If you were sick or a kid’s B0day or something, you could just lay off and they would drop you to the bottom of the board and call the next person. No problem You lost some pay but you knew that when you layed off. Fast Forward to bean counters who figured out that they could cut the work force by 30% and still run trains. Now you try to call off sick and they threaten you with discipline. Everybody is on a point system and an unexcused absence costs points and eventually a walking the plank. Oh but they have personal leave days the railroads explain. Well that is true. If you know a month from now that you are going to be sick on a certain day. What? You want that PL Day today because you are sick. No way! There is nobody else behind you on the board to take the call cuz the company laid off 30% of the work force.
So the dispute isn’t even about paid sick leave or how many days sick leave. I just want an unpaid absence when I am sick!
But most importantly, thank railroaders for making this an issue for ALL workers, not just railroads. Like every other great industrialized nation, American Workers need a sick leave policy enacted by law.
End of Rant
prostratedragon
First I’ve thought of that’s not been mentioned, the lyrics to “The Bells of Rhymney” were inspired by a failed general strike in Britain in 1926. I’d wondered what Sherwood was about, might try it out.
Kay
@Scout211:
You see a poster from Norma Rae in union halls- the photo where she’s standing on the shop floor holding the “union” sign above her head.
BGinCHI
@Grumpy Old Railroader: I knew when I wrote it that it wouldn’t capture the subtleties & complexities of all that’s going on there. I’ve been following it from afar (I learned a LOT from Erik Loomis’s writing on this over at LGM: here for example), and didn’t really know how to refer to it not being perfect (of course) but not being terrible either. So of course I got it wrong.
Mea culpa.
Nancy
@Grumpy Old Railroader:
If not for unions, life would suck for even more citizens of the US. I was a union rep.
prostratedragon
@Grumpy Old Railroader: Speaking for myself, I enjoy rants with clearly-provided explanations. Thanks!
Grumpy Old Railroader
Professor Loomis has a good grasp of the issues. And no Mea Culpa necessary, it just gave me an opportunity to get on my soapbox so I seized it. I have been retired since 2008 so I probably have a lot of details wrong.
eclare
@Grumpy Old Railroader: Thank you for this explanation.
zhena gogolia
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South. Also the miniseries with the great Richard Armitage as well as sinead cusack and Lesley manville
billcinsd
Billy Bragg has many good songs about Unions. etc.
Here’s There is a power in Union
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwbzxemJZIc
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia: and Brendan Coyle as the union leader
Spanish Moss
@BGinCHI:
Does Martin Ritt like to make movies about laborers/unions? He directed “The Molly Maguires” too. I don’t know if the Molly Maguires called themselves a union but they were a secret organization trying to improve their working conditions. With a lot of violence as I recall. It’s been a very long time since I saw it but I remember enjoying it.
Spanish Moss
@zhena gogolia: I loved North and South!
Grumpy Old Railroader
What folks do not understand about the Railway Labor Act is that before it was enacted in 1926, the railroads were the prime mover of every commodity. In some locations, there were not even any roads, just wagon trails. But the railroad ran through it so they had access to all the goods that railroads carried.
So quite rightly, the government did not want a railroad strike because it could potentially destroy the entire economy. The RLA was purposely designed to slow the process way down and at the tail end, if they had to, the government could step in and force and agreement. In 1934, the RLA was expanded to include airlines also.
Of course today, we have interstate freeways and a lot of trucks but still most goods are carried by the railroads. One example is fertilizer. Although the strike was set to start Dec 9, the railroads notified fertilizer manufacturers that rail shipments of ammonia would be embargoed on Dec 5 because it was too dangerous to have that sitting around someplace. There were other commodity embargoes set also. This is just one example. This is why congress acted when it doi and did not wait for the strike to actually start (like happened in 1992)
zhena gogolia
@Spanish Moss: it’s great
Damned as Random
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. I think the author was Kenny Kinny. It wasn’t about unionization, it was about the conflict between labor and management as mining became more reliant on capital and the workers struggled to maintain their status (and income) in a changing industry. The Mollys might have killed some of the corporate enforcers or some of the accused may have been targeted by law enforcement to keep the migrants in line and ensure a compliant labor force. I read this book years ago and never got it out of my mind, possibly because one of my grandfathers was a coal miner for a time.
BGinCHI
@Grumpy Old Railroader:
Medium Cool: Free Soapboxes since 1927.
PaulWartenberg
@WaterGirl:
Coal miners fight back in the 1920s. My grandmother was a young teacher in that region when the fighting took place. She heard the gunfire of the main fight at Matewan from another town away. She wasn’t in town when Sid Hatfield was assassinated but she was there for his funeral, she said it was two miles long.
khead
Harlan County, USA
Damned as Random
@khead: Great documentary. Seriously depressing
Sure Lurkalot
The Overstory by Richard Powers, weaves together trees, lives, concerted action.
The Milagro Beanfield War. Don’t piss off the wrong town. I liked both the book and the movie.
Princess Leia
Jess Walter “The Cold Millions” about the Wobblies in early 1900’s Spokane. Great book, and has some historical characters.
piratedan
@WaterGirl: I’ll chime in here because it’s family wheelhouse stuff…
The Matewan Massacre involved a confrontation between the newly established UMW Miners union and the Baldwin-Felts organization of hiring union-busters to put unions down and get the product out.
The film is mostly accurate in that it details the efforts made by the owners of the mine to bring in immigrants and blacks to get the coal out and break the union. Then to use intimidation and violence to keep them in line and in control.
The performances are absolutely top notch and representative of the region in regards to where the film was made and in capturing the essence of who and how the people are.
The film illustrates the beginning struggles of labor and fair play and what unfolded afterwards informs those how stacked the field is to this day, but without the confrontation, how would the rights of workers be today.
I would also point out the awesomeness of Hazel Dickens singing and especially her graveside rendition of Gathering Storm.
The movie is personal for me as that’s the part of West Virginia my family comes from (As Oceana and Copperston are just down the road a piece from Matewan itself) and my family background in the union stretching back to these times. Brought home in the recent death of my Uncle (in the mines for 30 years before moving into “Management” for another 30). The items you would think of as embellishment are true (The death of the Mayor and the gunning down of Sid Hatfield) and while it’s hardly kitchen table conversation these days, in quiet moments in the backyard when the fireflies are out, the olds still used to have hushed conversations about those times that they experienced as kids.
It’s a powerful film with incredible performances (both the good guys and the bad guys), watch it.
UncleEbeneezer
Not sure I could tell you a specific lesson, but Terrence Malick’s classic Days of Heaven, is one that I always associate with labor.
David Simon’s second season of The Wire and his most recent series We Own This City both have unions as central plot focus. The former centered on the corruption of the Port Authority and the latter on the wretched police union.
BlueGuitarist
@khead:
great film for the which Barbara Kopple got an Academy Award for best documentary. Got a second for her next film, American Dream about the Hormel strike 1985-6.
More recently she made a documentary about the musical group now known as The Chicks, “Shut Up and Sing”
BlueGuitarist
Julia Reichert, who died a few days ago, made
“Union Maids” and “9to5: the story of a movement” and as number of other labor films
Steeplejack
@Grumpy Old Railroader:
Thanks for this excellent overview!
Salt Water
Pride – the Welsh miners strike in Thatcher’s Britain
Eight Men Out – John Sayles again. It’s not a baseball movie, it’s labor versus management
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair – read it in high school and remember nothing about it except it made me a believer in collective bargaining
Damned as Random
@Salt Water: Eight Men Out is one of my favorites. Great cast plus Studs Terkel.
James E Powell
@Alison Rose:
In Dubious Battle is my favorite Steinbeck that almost no one has ever heard of. There is a film, but I haven’t seen it, got a pretty low rating on RottenTomatoes.
AliceBlue
@Salt Water: I remember a lot about that book, especially the last line: CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!
Upton Sinclair meant to call attention to the plight of the workers in the meat packing industry but he described the filthy working conditions in such detail that Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in response. Sinclair said something along the lines of “I meant to touch the nation’s heart but I got its stomach instead.”
Salt Water
@Damned as Random: Yes! Whenever anyone asks my favorite baseball movie, that’s it. Then I tell them “it’s not really a baseball movie”
cope
“Silkwood” is a good movie with a union component.
raven
@James E Powell: One of my favorite books, the film is not very good
raven
One of the great lines in Matewan by James Earl Jones
“You can call me a nigger because you don’t know no better but don’t you EVER call me a scab.”
frosty
@Grumpy Old Railroader: Thanks for that (detailed) rant. I agree that working conditions re: days off when you’re sick are terrible. Railroads aren’t the only industry that make life impossible for workers.
raven
@piratedan: My grandfather was a coal miner in Southern Illinois and knew many of the people involved ins the Herrin Massacre. He wrote a compelmentary piece to “Bloody Williamson”
Paul Begala's Pink Tie
@Dorothy A. Winsor: came to say Sister Carrie. Such a moving depiction of economic desperation and how scabs/strikebreakers, while usually indefensible, have historically been reduced to it because of a lack of union protections. It’s one of my favorites that I reread every few years.
also, per the post title, Billy Bragg’s music. “World Turned Upside Down” particularly.
raven
@raven: The line is a little different than I remembered but still powerful.
BGinCHI
@Princess Leia: I LOVE Jess Walter and have read all his books.
GREAT writer.
BGinCHI
@piratedan: You should also read John Lingan’s first book (Homeplace), about Patsy Cline and her roots in the region (a bit further east).
And thanks for this. Great connections to that film. It’s meant a lot to me for a long time.
BGinCHI
@BlueGuitarist: Saw that over at LGM. Sad, but what a life and so much great art.
piratedan
@raven: when I was in College, learning about US History and the evolution of labor in the US and workers conditions overall, my prof once stated that without mine workers and their inherent intransigence to being screwed over, its obvious that the US labor movement would not have been able to bring the US Government to bear on the injustices of the system and working conditions if they hadn’t armed themselves and been willing to die for their causes.
Granted, the government was complicit in many of the injustices but without those confrontations, the issues would not have seen the light of day. When FDR happened, it signified a change in the self worth of a person performing a day’s worth of labor. Who could have known that a rich yankee political family would end up being perceived as looking out for the rights of ordinary Americans (were they perfect, no but hell up til then?)
Kristine
@piratedan:
Just wanted to say, gorgeous, evocative sentence.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@E.: Swimmy! Five by Lionni is a favorite in our house, first my children, now my grandchildren
P.S., thanks, Grumpy Old Railroader
piratedan
@BGinCHI: for me, the most powerful moments in the film are carried not only by Chris Cooper (his debut! can you believe it?) but the awesomeness of the entire cast, Straitharn, Mostel, McConnell and Jones but the villians, Tighe, Clapp and Guinton are so real as to almost be beyond words.
NotMax
A few perhaps less well-known films.
Chance of a Lifetime (1950)
Salt of the Earth
Brassed Off
AnonPhenom
Railroad workers are federal contractors employees but are currently exempt.
Biden should change the EO and make them *not exempt*.
J R in WV
@piratedan:
Family wheelhouse stuff indeed!
I grew up in part at my grandma’s house, where my parents would drop me off after school Fridays until Sunday afternoon, so they could have some adult time together. Plus my grandmother lived on a tiny farm in Harper, the community just outside the Coal Camp of Eccles, where my Grandfather was hoist engineer, who in the beginning built the tipple with a steam powered crane, and ran the steam engine that ran the hoist, which dropped the men 555 feet to the operating seam being mined, and then lifted the mined coal to the tipple where it was cleaned and processed into RR cars. Grandpa started as a blacksmith, which is where mechanics and steam engineers came from in the beginning of the industrial age.
In the attic of grandma’s farmhouse, where we would play on rainy days (along with the basement, where grandpa’s blacksmith tools were piled in giant tool chests, we found dozens (if not hundreds!) of .30 caliber brass shells, which when we asked we were told “Billy (my uncle Bill who ran moonshine into town before WW II and ran a machine gun turret on heavy bombers in the South Pacific during WW II) gathered those after the mine strikes.” No further details provided as it was a time of trouble no one wanted to remember too clearly. But even to little kids, that carried real visual clues to a violent past.
And on Sunday afternoons grandma would drive us home not the direct 7 mile trip home to town, but we would drive any one of dozens of circuitous routes through the coal fields, through Oceana, Copperston, Bolt, all little country coal towns with burning slate plies and highwalls from strip mining along the otherwise beautiful mountainsides. One lane paved once upon a time country roads, with tiny stores every few miles, just like the one grandma ran from 1932 til the mid 1950s. We would take sandwiches and stop at a store for cold pop, and sit on a creek bank to eat lunch.
I grew up in a small industrial town in the coal field, where the hardware people handled screws and hinges and giant winches and fans to ventilate deep mines, and most stuff came to town on the C&O railroad. As a child the folks took me and my cousins on the RR from Harper to Mullens and the steam train, through dozens of tunnels, in which it was DARK and smokey from the coal fired steam engine, just before the local passenger service was killed off in rural WV. Of course, the real money was in moving the coal.
When there were wildcat strikes, which were pretty common, it was the only way to get grievances addressed, strings of coal cars parked on rural sidings in the country would have the brakes released, allowing the millions of $$ worth of coal cars to roll downhill, gathering speed until they left the tracks and piled up into a huge pile of scrap steel. For one example of union solidarity. When I was high school age, the strikes were to get black lung benefits for miners dying of coal dust packed into their lungs. The mine owners claimed it was good for you to smoke tobacco, it made you cough and all the coal dust would come out, which was three kinds of evil lying.
I had a college professor named Don West, who wrote some pretty popular poetry about working men in the southern mountains. HE was tall and thin, a Marxist and biblical preacher, and was maimed in a brutal beating in one of the many Harlan county organizing drives, and left for dead in a winter ditch. He was rescued later that night by a school teacher who saved his life by keeping him secretly at his home while he recovered.
The coal fields were as wild as the country out west, only the fights were between union miners and the mine owner’s thugs, not between cowboys and natives being driven off their ancestral lands. It was a strange place to grow up in, for sure.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Surprised I didn’t see John Ford’s How Green Was my Valley mentioned yet.
BGinCHI
@J R in WV: Amazing memories here. Thanks for this.
Miss Bianca
Well, late to the party as usual, but one takeaway is, “Gee, I really ought to watch Matewan again”.
ETA: As to story and song, British folk music, like American, is full of union songs. One of my favorites is Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span singing Blackleg Miner. (A “blackleg” is a scab.)
Shana
@piratedan: I have loved John Sayles’ movies since Return of the Secaucus Seven a much better movie than The Big Chill.
no one else seems to have mentioned Billy Elliott as a union movie.
BillD
It’s about a lot more than the Western Federation of Miners, but Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas is a fantastic book about the union’s struggles with mine owners all tied together by the murder in Caldwell, Idaho, in 1905 of the former governor. Typical of Lukas, it’s 754 pages plus almost 60 pages of notes. Characters include Bill Haywood if the WFM and founder of the IWW “Wobblies,” Clarence Darrow, Sen. Borah of Idaho, E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific RR, Gifford Pinchot, Eugene Debs, Upton Sinclair and many more. I’ve read it twice and posting this has me primed for a third go-round.
Jack the Cold Warrior
@piratedan: my mother’s side of the family is from that area- Mingo County, WV, often known as “Bloody Mingo”. My grandfather was a clerk in a coal company store and slept in a bedroom on the second floor. One night, during labor unrest, the union blew up the store. Mind you, those boys knew how to handle explosives, so that the second floor pancaked down on the first. Granddad was in bed, a very thick featherbed, and other than his ears ringing, he wasn’t hurt. He went over to the boarding house to get a room, and met my Grandmother whose family ran the boarding house..
He was very lucky, and they married and had my mother and her 9 brothers and sisters.
piratedan
@Jack the Cold Warrior: Jack, I hear ya, part of the reason that the movie resonated so deeply with me is that Sayles found actors (and many locals apparently) that helped with the dialog choices and speech cadences. Those folks sounded like SE West Virginia and the terseness of how people communicated there. Yesterday I was speaking to my father’s side of the family in Wyoming county and I spent more than a few summers with my toes in the Tug Fork when visiting grandparents, aunts, uncles and assorted cousins.
I don’t want to get into those comparisons of one region versus another, but I think we all can agree a few generations back, there were lots of difficult manual labor and skilled positions where long days in less than optimal conditions were the norm and without the labor movements in the early 20th and in many cases, the very real sacrifices that they made; had a lot to do with the fact that fascism was less able to thrive here as it did in Europe.
that dotted line doesn’t get connected as often as it should. Nazi’s don’t believe in “power to the people”, they’re much more of the top down power structure, just with themselves at the top, ‘natch.