Labor goes to the Movies

Among those turning out to support the strike by Hollywood writers -- now in its 10th week-- have been members of the Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839); back in March, the animators staged a “solidarity walk” around Walt Disney Studios in Burbank with dozens of the studio’s animation production workers protesting Disney’s refusal to voluntarily recognize its unionization efforts. Those who know th...

The new documentary Americonned traces the history of the labor movement, as well as the devious political tactics of a select few who have influenced the course of history. But radical inequality leads to radicalization, and this powerful documentary depicts what happens when America hits its tipping point. Labor Goes to the Movies co-host Chris Garlock talks with director Sean Claffey about the...

AFI Silver Theatre’s Todd Hitchcock and Abbie Algar preview the first week of this year’s DC Labor FilmFest , including the Opening Night screening of BLACKBERRY with director Matt Johnson on Monday, May 1 at 7p. FREE for Labor Heritage Foundation Supporters & AFI Silver Cinema Club Members; you must CLICK HERE to RSVP and admission is first-come-first-served; doors open at 6p.   Hosted by Elise B...

Carnegie Mellon professor Kathy M. Newman on how White Lotus muddies the class struggle, and argues that most of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees are about working class characters. Produced by Chris Garlock. @dclabor @LaborHeritage1 @_kathymnewman --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/labor-goes-to-the-movies/message

Actor Harold Phillips sorts through this year’s Screen Actors Guild Award nominees for laborific films and television shows, from Everything Everywhere All At Once to The Fabelmans, Severance, The Bear and Abbott Elementary. Produced by Chris Garlock. @dclabor @LaborHeritage1 @haroldPDX @sagaftra #SAGAwards @netflix --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/labor-goes-to...

"It's definitely a woman's story and I think that's appropriate, obviously, because the story of the Me Too movement is also a woman's story, but also because journalism is increasingly a woman's story." Award-winning journalist Eric Alterman, The Nation’s “Liberal Media” columnist for 25 years, on “She Said,” the “embattled craft of journalism” and his favorite films about journalism. Click here...

“It’s intriguing that two biopics of the 20th century’s most famous —and most working-class—superstars have appeared in 2022,” says our guest on today’s show, Carnegie Mellon professor Kathy Newman, who wrote about the films “Blonde” and “Elvis” on the Working-Class Perspectives blog in a piece entitled Marilyn and Elvis: Dead Labor in the Age of Streaming . But Elise wants to know Where are all t...

Peter Dreier on " 5 unsung films that dramatize America’s rich labor history ": Northern Lights (1978), North Country (2005), The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), 10,000 Black Men Named George (2002) and Salt of The Earth (1954). Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and Professor, Urban & Environmental Policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Edited/produced by Chris Garlock....

"I don't love economic exploitation, but I do love Christmas and Christmas movies. They work to sell me stuff and ideology, but they also critique commercialism and exploitation. See what subversive messages you can find in a holiday classic. I triple dog dare you!" That’s Kathy M. Newman, a frequent guest here on Labor Goes to The Movies; Kathy’s an associate professor of literary and cultural st...

Julia Reichert’s death from cancer on December 1 at the age of 76 made headlines across the country. Most of them called her an “Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker” and that was certainly true: she was a four-time Academy Award-nominated director, for 1977’s Union Maids, Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists in 1984, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant in 2010 and American Factory, for whi...

The 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame -- presented by legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow on CBS -- was revolutionary in its raw portrayal of poverty amongst migrant farm workers. Originally aired just after Thanksgiving Day in November 1960, it was "the first time millions of Americans were given a close look at what it means to live in poverty" on their televisions. On today’s show,...

Ellen Cassedy, one of the founders 9 to 5, the national association of women office workers, talks about her new book, “Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie,” and she shares some insider stories about the 1980 hit film 9 to 5 (hint: Dabney Coleman wasn’t just acting his iconic role as a bad boss!). Produced by Chris Garlock @dclabor @LaborHeritage1 @ellencassedy...

Elise and Chris talk with Kathleen M. Newman and Tom Zaniello about one of those lists of “10 best labor films” ; which films make the cut, which don’t, and why. Movies discussed include 9 to 5, Support The Girls, Modern Times, Newsies, and The Pajama Game. A regular with us here on Labor Goes to the Movies, Kathy’s a professor of English, literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon Universit...

We’re back! Elise and Chris got a bit busy with other projects this past summer but we did get a chance to chat with Kathleen M. Newman back at the end of July. A regular with us here on Labor Goes to the Movies, Kathy’s a professor of English, literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches and writes about labor, class, film, and media. We’d run across one of those...

This week’s guest is Juliana Barnet, an “anticolonial anthropologist” who’s been active in a wide range of movements in the United States and in Mexico. Earlier this year she started a blog called Activist Explorer , where she writes about how activists and social change movements are depicted in fiction, including films. Reminder: LGTTM co-host Elise Bryant will conduct a Q&A with 9to5 co-founder...

Labor Goes to the Movies co-host Elise Bryant recalls the impact of seeing the 1980 hit film 9 to 5 as a working secretary; she went on to a career as a labor educator who worked with 9 to 5 co-founder Karen Nussbaum and now leads the Coalition of Labor Union Women . Elise will conduct a Q&A with Karen Nussbaum at the May 23 DC Labor FilmFest screening of 9 to 5: The Story of a Movement at the AFI...

Soleil Ho and Amanda Yee teamed up to write BLACK DINNERS MATTER for Whetstone Magazine, in which they examine the films Moonlight, Do the Right Thing and The Color Purple, arguing that “the dinner table is erected as a potent metaphor for ownership and communion… With four centuries of slavery as the backdrop, what’s eaten and where depicts how enslaved Africans and their descendants reclaimed th...

Last year, 1,500 steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania went out on strike for four long months. If you don’t remember hearing about the strike, don’t worry, we hadn’t, either. It was against a company named ATI, Allegheny Technologies Incorporated, and even though the strike involved 1,500 steelworkers at nine different locations, it never really made the radar on the national labor scene in a year...

LGTTM co-host Chris Garlock got to know Harold Phillips a couple of years ago when he started working with Chris to build the Labor Radio Podcast Network. Harold, who now co-hosts the Working to Live In Southwest Washington podcast, has been a working actor for more than thirty years, with dozens of movie and TV credits . On today’s show, we find out how Harold got into acting, the huge amount of...

Harold Meyerson, Editor At Large for The American Prospect , writes some of the best political analysis around, but every so often he’ll drop a fascinating column about a film; it was a recent piece he did on Mank that prompted us to invite him on the show, but it turned out that what he really wanted to talk about was When Tomorrow Comes, a 1939 film that we had never heard of, but that Harold in...

When iconic and groundbreaking actor Sidney Poitier died last month, most of the tributes focused on his brilliant acting, for which he received innumerable awards, as well as his advocacy for Civil Rights. But as Kathy Newman pointed out in a column for Working-Class Perspectives , before he became an actor, Poitier worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, and longshoreman. Famously choosy ab...

In March 1970 the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin went out on strike for twenty-four days. It was the first TA strike in the history of the United States; the union went on to represent Wisconsin TAs for over fifty years. The film that those students made back then has just been re-edited and re-released, so we sat down with legendary organizer Bob Muehlenkamp – who...

Five labor-related films were inducted into the National Film Registry last year: The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), Requiem-29 (1971), The Wobblies (1979), Chicana (1979) and Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987). Films in the Registry are selected for their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, and the Library of Congress, which maintains the Registry, says...

Today’s film is a short documentary that should have been made in the nineteen-thirties, about women who played crucial roles in the sit-down strikes at General Motors factories in 1936 and 1937, strikes that changed American history. Instead, With Babies and Banners was made in the nineteen-seventies, by a group of women who were not filmmakers but who realized that film was the most powerful way...

The recent Netflix series Maid, based on Stephanie Land's memoir, highlights the challenges that poor and working-class mothers face in juggling low-wage jobs, social services, and child care. On today’s show, Chris and Elise talk with Lane Windham and Kathy Newman about Maid and the issues it raises about women and work. Kathy's a professor of English, literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Me...