Union Organizer - Organizing in Popular Culture

Organizing in Popular Culture

The most famous movie about organizing is the 1979 factually-based film Norma Rae, the story of a Jewish organizer from New York who came to the American South to organize a textile mill. He recruits Norma Rae, played by Sally Field. Norma becomes a key union activist who defies management at great personal risk.

The 1987 production of Matewan is another factually-based story of an organizer who visits a small mining town in West Virginia and who is able to unite rival ethnic groups against a common enemy: the company.

Both of these stories feature outsiders entering rural company towns and stirring workers up against exploitative management. This is a common theme in organizing. The workers are cast as simple commoners being oppressed by powerful managers cast in the role of villains. The organizer is portrayed as a liberator. There is some truth in these stories since companies did, in fact, historically hire armed thugs to break up organizing drives through unethical and oppressive means. Modern unions work within the existing system, rather than against it, through sophisticated political action programs. Most unions have reinvented themselves as streamlined, professional machines.

10,000 Black Men Named George, released in 2002, is a movie based on the true story of A. Philip Randolph, the famous black organizer who organized the railroad company's largely black Pullman Porters.

The film Bread and Roses (2001) depicts the Service Employees International Union's "Justice for Janitors" campaign to organize cleaners. The story is also a love story between an idealistic young organizer and a female Hispanic immigrant among those he is organizing.

Both of these stories incorporate pro-union messages with ethnic determination. In the case of the Pullman Porters, Randolph is remembered as a civil rights hero. The Justice for Janitors campaign is about immigrants' rights, as many of the organized janitors are from Spanish speaking or Slavic countries. The status of the characters as minorities paints a picture of them as being outside of, or on the margins of, the American Dream, thus further casting workers and activists as underdogs. The underdog theme is an inspirational archetype in myth.

In the 2005 action movie Four Brothers, one of the characters is a former union activist who turns the bad guy's henchmen against him by informally organizing them against their boss based on the common organizing themes of a greater share in the profits and respect on the job.

In the 1997 action movie Grosse Pointe Blank, Dan Aykroyd's villainous character pursues fellow assassin John Cusack in order to include him in a ridiculous assassins' union.

These latter two movies use organizing as a plot device, though they involve black market businesses and are far-fetched for this reason. Nonetheless, they demonstrate how, absent a union's presence, the same issues arise in any vocation. Also, both of the movies take place in the Detroit, Michigan area, a city which has produced some great organizers.

The 1992 production Hoffa, starring Jack Nicholson as famed labor leader Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters, begins the story where Hoffa's career began: organizing truck drivers and warehouse workers in and around Detroit. Jimmy Hoffa went on to become one of the most powerful labor leaders in U.S. history.

The 1978 movie F.I.S.T, tells the same story of Hoffa's beginnings as an organizer and of his rise to power, albeit with more liberties taken. Sylvester Stallone plays Hoffa as a man with good intentions, dogged on both sides, by both sides of the law.

Both Hoffa stories feature Hoffa as a tough "man of the people" and chronicle how his organizing swelled the ranks of the Teamsters. Hoffa was notorious for taking an "ends justifies the means" approach to organizing. Hoffa's legacy remains: his son, James P. Hoffa, is the current General President of the Teamsters.

In an episode of the popular American sit-com The Office, the characters hold an organizing meeting which ends with a manager threatening to fire everyone involved. The character played by comedian Patrice O'Neal tells the boss, "This isn't over."

The Fred Savage sitcom Working had an episode where the main character organizes his fellow workers into a union and tells management it’s because he really cares about the well-being of his coworkers, exhibiting solidarity.

The song "Solidarity Forever" by Ralph Chaplin has become the anthem of large parts of the labor movement such as those in North America.