Union Maids

There are several types of movies which deal with the period of history that Union Maids deals with--the period of the great battles to organize labor unions. Julia Reicherr, who made the 1971 documentary Growing Up Female, has given us a needed “oral history” by women key to the events of the thirties.

Big budget movies are not vehicles for teaching radical social history. Witness two such movies, both of which deal with great songwriters: Joe Hill (the International Workers of the World organizer and songwriter), and Bound for Glory , about Woody Guthrie. Each movie glamorizes its main character, and relies on stereotype and excessive romance to portray the mood and historical experiences of his time. The history is secondary to the attempts at biography. Unfortunately, many will view such movies and form misconceptions about those historical times, and the movements that were prominent in them. You can’t organize by walking into a field and getting the workers to join you in a song.

There are many “heroes” in the labor movement: people who through their articulateness, visibility, courage, or martyrdom were able to capture the public imagination and become spokespeople for an idea. Names like Mother Jones, Sacco and Vanzetti, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, and Eugene Debs might no be household words, but their exploits are the folklore of labor organizers.

History, though, is not written by heroes alone, those who stand out in our consciousness. Those folk heroes came out of a movement peopled by ordinary men and women who possessed dignity, courage and a capacity to organize workers to change an unjust situation. Those ordinary, unnamed, and unknown people are the ones who made history, and who continue to make it. They are called, in biblical language, the salt of the earth.