Union Organisation is hardly the stuff of cinema blockbusters. But if you want to see a film covering labour movement issues, there is a surprising variety, finds labour reserach.
"I ain't afraid to get dirt on my hands. I ain't afraid to get blood on them. I ain't afraid of anything, And you know whys Because I'm part of a brotherhood - the International Brotherhood of Teamsters." So says union organiser Jimmy Hoffa, played by Jack Nicholson, as he helps a truck driver change a tyre in a scene from the recent Hollywood production Hoffa.
The film, shows Hoffa fighting hard to organise transport workers into the Teamsters' union in the 1930s and 1940s. But, as with most mainstream films, the routine of union Organisation is not the stuff of Hollywood, and before the tyre-changing scene we have already seen Hoffa firebomb an anti-union laundry and doing a deal with the mafia to help win a strike.
The film concentrates on Hoffa and his personal ambition rather than the struggle to build the union. When the trucker that Hoffa helps suggests he should run for president of the United States, Hoffa is unimpressed, replying that his aim is to become president of the Teamsters.
Hoffa is shown dealing with the mafia and threatening journalists to prevent them exposing corruption in the union. Nevertheless, the film has its sympathies with Hoffa. We are shown a glimpse of the brutal struggles that took place in the 1930s to get workers organised and Hoffa is seen fighting alongside his members and being beaten up by strikebreakers.
But while Hoffa at one point refuses to end a strike when ordered to by the union's national leadership, he shows his paranoia and personal ambition when he takes over as president. Even while he is acknowledging the applause at his election victory rally he is telling one of his assistants to summarily sack most of the union's staff so that he can employ only people loyal to him.
The story of Hoffa and the Teamsters forms the basis of another US film called F.I.S.T Directed in 1978 by Norman Jewison and starring Sylvester Stallone and Rod Steiger, the film again shows how a determined and committed union activist is corrupted as he moves up the hierarchy.
Union corruption is also a theme in Blue collar, also made in 1978. Directed by Paul Schrader and starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel, this is about three workers at a Detroit car plant. When they feel they are getting a raw deal from the union they burgle the union offices finding documents that link the union with organised crime.
The film works well, as many Hollywood films do, in the way it exposes how workers as individuals lose out in the face of the corporate interests of companies and crime syndicates, but it plays up union bureaucracies as being just as bad.
Earlier US films on labour issues were few and far between, particularly in the political climate of the fifties. McCarthyism, the paranoid seeking-out of communists and communist-sympathisers led by Senator Joe McCarthy, meant that many actors and directors were either blacklisted or chose to avoid making films on controversial issues.
On the waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan in 1954, is about gangster control of the longshoremen's union and the struggle against corruption by an ex-boxer played by Marlon Brando. Similar themes are taken up in a 1957 film called The garment jungle which shows a Korean war veteran returning home to conflict in the family clothing firm.
Director Robert Aldrich described it as a "pro-labour" film and his determination to stick to a tough screenplay led to his replacement as director a week before filming was concluded.
A much more positive portrayal of union issues is achieved in a 1953 film, Salt of the earth. This was actually produced despite the blacklisting of a number of those involved in making it and despite constant harassment by the FBI during filming. The film was paid for by the American Mineworkers' union and deals with an industrial dispute in a small town in New Mexico, where women are shown as playing a key role in maintaining the strike.
Other US films with a less jaundiced view of workers' struggles include Matewan (1987), Killing floor (1985) and the more mainstream Norma Rae (1979). Matewan, directed by John Sayles, is about a miners' strike in West Virginia in the 1920s. It shows how the miners build support for their strike, uniting black and white workers despite the mineowners' attempts to use recent European immigrants and then black workers as scab labour.
The strikers are led by an organiser from the International Workers of the World, the so-called "Wobblies", a general union which organised all kinds of workers in contrast to the then craft snobbery and racism of the American Federation of Labour.
Killing floor also tackles the struggle to unite black and white workers. It is set in a Chicago meatpacking factory at the time of the city's notorious anti-black noting. The film shows the difficulties and dangers faced by activists trying to get black and white to unite in the face of company bosses who are quick to resort to violence to smash strikes.
Norma Rae, directed by Martin Ritt, is the story of a millworker and union activist, played by Sally Field, who fights for improved working conditions at the same time as breaking out of her initial wife and mother character.
US industrial relations has often involved violent confrontation, as several of the films mentioned depict. The miners' strike featured in Harlan County, USA certainly shows this. This is a documentary-style account of a bitter strike in the 1970s.
But Hollywood is always there to help us forget what life is really like and if you watch the 1957 musical The pajama game, starring Doris Day, you'll see a cosier view of industrial relations. In fact, it is so cosy that shop steward Day ends up marrying the boss. But don't write the film off completely, the Time Out Film Guide found it "truly joyous", particularly the workers' picnic scene, and French director Jean-Luc Godard described it as "the first left-wing operetta".
Probably the most famous British film featuring trade unions is the 1959 production I'm all right Jack. It stars Ian Carmichael as an upper class twit who gets a job in a factory and innocently exposes the way unions and bosses combine to run an inefficient company. It includes all the familiar accusations about unions and restrictive practices and features Peter Sellers as the communist sympathising convenor, although company boss Richard Attenborough comes out little better in the end.
Another product of the 1950s was The man in the white suit starring Alec Guinness. Guinness invents a suit which never wears out and never gets dirty. This is another story of the little man losing out to the combined forces of big business, wanting to protect its profits, and unions wanting to safeguard jobs.
Even the Carry on team made a contribution to industrial relations analysis in Carry on at your convenience, which exposed the goings-on at a toilet making factory hit by an industrial dispute.
More recent British films on labour movement issues include Business as usual and Comrades, both produced in the mid-1980s. Business as usual stars Glenda Jackson, Cathy Tyson and John Thaw. The plot centres around the determination of Glenda Jackson to stand up against sexual harassment at a small clothes shop in Liverpool. John Thaw features as her husband, an unemployed former shop steward who finds it difficult to adjust to his wife's activism.
Comrades, directed by Bill Douglas, is about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Dorset farmworkers who were deported to Australia in the 1830s for forming a trade union. This three-hour epic also boasts some famous names in Freddie Jones, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Hordern and James Fox. Time Out describes it in glowing terms as an I often humorous, always intelligently moving spectacle, immaculately performed, structured and shot."
Apart from a few other films and a range of documentaries (see box) these are about all that the US and British film industries can offer us with a union content. Films from other countries are less likely to be shown on TV or be available on video but there are a few familiar ones amongst them. Probably the most famous are Strike, a silent film, by the Russian director Eisenstein, a dramatic portrayal of an intense and prolonged dispute in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the two films Man of marble and its sequel, Man of iron by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.
Man of marble is about the treatment of a model worker in 1950s Poland. First lauded and rewarded for his superhuman ef- forts, the worker is then discredited, then rehabilitated. Man of iron is a sequel of sorts where the worker's son appears as a character in the Solidarity strike in Gdansk shipyard.
Although the film industry hasn't provided us with a wealth of movies on labour movement issues, at least there is some variety, from the dulcet tones of Doris Day to the foul-mouthed aggression of Jack Nicholson.