Activity 1.A.1: Actors in the Labor Drama
Movies About Labor
And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, 1994: www.imdb.com/title/tt0108999/plotsummary
The Garment Jungle, 1957
The Grapes of Wrath, 1940
Hoffa, 1992
The Killing Floor, 1985
Matewan, 1987. A labor leader seeking to organize the workers of a company town sets off a powderkeg of racial hostility, corruption and betrayal in this dramatic retelling of the bitter clash between unionist miners and the tyrannical coal company owners in West Virginia in the 1920s.
Metropolis, Germany, 1926, 21st century dystopia in which workers are enslaved underground
Modern Times, 1936, with Charlie Chaplin
The Molly Maguires, 1970
Norma Rae, 1975
On the Waterfront, 1954
Create Lesson Plans Based on Movies and Films: www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/on-the-waterfront.html
The Devil Wears Prada, 2006
The Cradle Will Rock, 2000
Outsourced, 2006 Man loses jobs, travels to India to train his replacement
10,000 Black Men Named George, 2002, Pullman Porter strike
Salt of the Earth, 1954, Strike against Empire Zinc Mine in New Mexico. Only film to be blacklisted.
Spirited Away, 2001, as a labor film: www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/Spirited.php
The Triangle Shirt Factory Fire Scandal, 1979
Up in the Air, 2009
Television Shows About the Workplace
Boston Legal
Mad Men
The Office
The Simpsons
Activity 1.B.1: Labor History Overview
Documentary Photographs and Movies
American Social History Project
Daughters of Free Men. Lucy Hall leaves her New England farm to work in the Lowell textile mills of the 1830s and confronts a new world of opportunity and exploitation.
1877: The Grand Army of Starvation. In the summer of 1877, eighty thousand railroad workers went on strike and hundreds of thousands soon followed. The Great Uprising began a new era of conflict about equality in the industrial age.
Up South: African American Migration in the Era of the Great War. Narrated by a Mississippi barber and a sharecropper woman, Up South tells the dramatic story of African-American migration to industrial cities during World War I.
Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. Framed by the 1909 shirtwaist strike, this program presents a panoramic portrait of immigrant working women in the turn-of-the-century city.
Other Films
Union Maids. Three women in the Communist Party who organized in Chicago’s meatpacking district in the 1930s.
Photographs
The History Place: Child Labor in America 1908-1912: Photographs of Lewis W. Hines. www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/
Activity1.B.2: The Great Depression and the New Deal
Graphs showing unemployment during the Great Depression
US and U6 Unemployment During the Great Depression: www.economicpopulist.org/content/u3-and-u6-unemployment-during-great-depression
The New Deal
Roosevelt, Franklin D. Outlining the New Deal Program. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, May 7, 1933: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14636
Teaching with Documents: FDR’s Fireside Chat on the Purposes and Foundations of the Recovery Program: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-fireside/
Fireside Chat, Outlining the New Deal programs, May 7, 1933: http://newdeal.feri.org/chat/chat02.htm
Fireside Chat on the Purposes and Foundations of the Recovery Program, July 24, 1933: www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-fireside/
National Labor Relations Act: https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/national-labor-relations-act
Social Security Act: https://www.ssa.gov/history/35act.html
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf
New Deal: www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1851.html