With the annual Workers Memorial Day commemoration coming up next month, the AFL-CIO Cool Toolsselection is highlighting “Workingman’s Death,” a movie documenting six of the most dangerous, deadly and exploitive jobs on the planet. Filmmaker Michael Glawogger says he
“wanted to make a movie where you sit in the cinema and actually feel the weight on your back.”
That’s exactly what he did with “Workingman’s Death,” a harsh documentary about manual labor around the world. He shows us Ukrainian miners digging for coal in mine shafts only 16 inches wide, Nigerian slaughterhouse workers surrounded by animal blood and stench, and Pakistanis who dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal with little more than their bare hands.
While the situations depicted are graphic and may be disturbing to some, Glawogger’s documentary shows how these impoverished workers represent a forgotten kind of courage in a world where manual labor is often invisible. It is available from Seventh Art Releasing.
Cool Tools also is spotlighting two new books (both available from The Union Shop Online™) that take a look at the progressive movement now and in the past. In Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, Robert Leighninger tells the incredible story of public investment during the New Deal, when the federal government built schools, housing, bridges, power plants, zoos, farmers markets and stadiums—infrastructure investment our nation could badly use today.
The other book, Michael Jacoby Brown’s Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups that Can Solve Problems and Change the World, is a nuts-and-bolts community organizing guide that examines real world successes, many from the union movement, in which people organized to improve their communities and their lives. Brown, a veteran community organizer, says the book
is for people who want to change the world and know that they cannot do it alone.
Also available from The Union Shop Online™ and highlighted in the most recent Cool Tools is the CD, “The Unbroken Circle: Songs of the West Virginia Coalfields.” Singer/songwriter Tom Breiding, a West Virginia native, has lent his talent and songs to many union benefits and causes. This new CD includes “The Obituary of Joe Fry,” written after Breiding discovered the death notice of a miner killed in a 1937 mine explosion, and “The Longest Darkest Day,” which tells of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood after the collapse of a mine’s dam.
Don’t forget to check out the Cool Tools archives by clicking here. That’s where you’ll find such gems as “Karaoke Union Songs” and a link to www.folkstreams.net, which uses documentaries to capture the diversity of our culture and our workplaces.
The archives include books such as Beware of Cat and Other Encounters of a Letter Carrier and Speechless: The Erosion of Free Expression in the American Workplace along with resources such as the Flex Pack from the Labor Project for Working Families, which offers practical advice on the best flextime options to seek at the bargaining table and when flextime can be a powerful organizing tool.