Each end in violent, sometimes deadly interventions in order to force compliance. All catalog the suffering of the powerless, forced to work in order to survive and taken for granted for their desperation. Other great labor films include John Sayles’ extraordinary Matewan (1987) which dramatizes a 1929 coal miners’ strike in a small West Virginian mining town Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963) tackles textile workers in Turin at the turn of the last century Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires(1970) grimly, ambiguously essays a kind of grassroots terrorism at play in Pennsylvanian coal mines in 1876 John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley(1941) (now unfairly known primarily as the film that beat Citizen Kane for best picture) features a divisive mine strike in its first half, paid off in its second by a mine disaster in 19th century Wales and Youssef Chahine’s hard bitten The Land (1970) details the struggles between landowners and their tenants in an Egypt under British control circa 1930. The resolution of the film has the government herding striking workers into a field to execute them as images of a bull being slaughtered are intercut to underscore the horror of state-sponsored intervention and, literally, how workers are seen by their masters. Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature Strike (1925) utlizes the cross-cutting montage style originated by Lev Kuleshov that Eisenstein’s largely credited with popularizing, remains a shockingly modern take on how factory owners treat their workers. Movie depictions of labor strife often find inspiration in the conflagrations flaring up at home and abroad pre-Wagner Act. He hoped negotiation would supplant bloodshed.

Roosevelt was responding to a recent spate of bloody labor conflicts, factory and town takeovers, in the United States. FDR signed the Wagner Act, officially the National Labor Relations Act, into law in 1934, giving employees the right to form and join unions and obligating employers to engage in good faith collective bargaining.

It is the engine that runs Charles Dickens’ novels, the jungle of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Oil!, the central concern of British Romanticism and the target of Franklin Roosevelt’s legislative slate establishing an 8 hour work day and creating a Department of Commerce and Labor in the pursuit of his utopian vision of a classless society. The question of how industry exploits labor is as old as the concept of industry itself.

Kane Volume 1 by Paul Grist