- The Guardian
- Issue #2197
Harlan County, USA (1976)
The history of labour movements in the United States is complex, achieving victories after tough struggles in the workplace and on the picket lines. Over the past fifty years private-sector union membership in the United States has fallen to under 7 per cent. Unions have a hard time even existing in the US, as the recent struggles to establish a union for Amazon workers have shown.
Hollywood films deliberately avoid or underplay the important role of unions. They are marginalised, portraying union members as stereotypical tough working-class men, underplaying the important role organised labour has made in improving the lives of millions of Americans. Hollywood films rarely consider issues such as wages, workplace safety, or collective bargaining, instead putting forward the image of the ‘self-made’ millionaire.
Hollywood films offer a jaundiced view of unionists as thugs, as in On the Waterfront (1954) and Kill the Irishman (2011). There have been rare exceptions such as Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field, which follows textile workers forming their union. Matewan (1987) dramatises the 1920 coal miners’ struggle in West Virginia. These are two of the most significant American films dealing with the working class and organised labour.
Harlan County, USA (1976) is one of the greatest documentaries ever made on the US union movement. The Academy Award-winning cinema verité documentary by Barbara Kopple follows the harrowing 1973 Brookside Strike against the Eastover Coal Company in Kentucky. The coal miners and their families fought for safer conditions and union recognition. In the following fifty years what have union documentaries achieved?
Union Maids (1976) is an important study on women’s labour history. It follows three women who organised industrial unions during the Great Depression. The Wobblies (1979) is an oral history of the Industrial Workers of the World, featuring veterans of the radical union movement. The Last Pullman Car (1983) chronicles steelworkers’ attempts to save the historic Pullman rail-car factory in Chicago.
American Dream (1990), also by Barbara Kopple, examines the heartbreaking 1985-1986 Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, exploring the internal battles between workers and union leadership. Dolores (2017) examines the life of Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the first US farm workers’ union with Cesar Chavez. They expanded the labour fight into a platform for civil rights and feminism. Union-related films include Final Offer (1987), Michael Moore’s Downsize This! (2002), Bisbee ’17 (2018), and An Injury to One (2003).
The best recent documentary is Union (2024), an important account of Chris Smalls establishing the first union at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island. It tracks the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) from its earliest organising attempts to the historic 2022 vote at the JFK8 warehouse. Workers campaigned in parking lots, bus stops, break rooms, showing the human cost of fast shipping. Amazon’s immense wealth (including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceflight) is juxtaposed with the precarious life of exhausted warehouse workers boarding buses at dawn. It documents Amazon’s union‑busting tactics, using surveillance, intimidation, and mandatory ‘captive‑audience’ meetings. High on Films called it a ‘keenly observational digital portraiture’ of one of the most significant labour movements of the 21st century.
While unions have played an important part in US public life, the impact of union documentaries has been uneven. Since 1976 US documentaries have helped expose social problems, record historical experiences, amplify marginalised voices, thereby hoping to influence political and cultural change. They created a visual record of workers’ struggles, preserving workers’ voices that might otherwise have been forgotten. Labour documentaries serve as archives and as arguments for the continuing relevance of unions in the class struggle.
The achievement of these documentaries is that they ensure that the experiences, victories and defeats of workers remained visible to today’s viewers. They inspire new union movements and class struggle in a country in which the major corporations are worth US$82 trillion, while nearly 11 per cent (36 million) of the population live in poverty.
