Remember Hot Labor Summer, just two years ago, when sectors nationwide, from Hollywood and hospitals to Amazon, seemed to be on the brink of change?
This summer, a different kind of heat is making headlines and the labor movement has seen setbacks from the Trump administration—an executive order seeking to undermine federal-sector unionism and a new head of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), for example—but organizing continues apace. Just last week, Chapel Hill Starbucks workers voted to unionize, making the store the seventh in the state to do so.
Local cinephiles can celebrate the spirit of Hot Labor Summer at the Chelsea Theater’s special MAY DAYS: LABOR ON THE MOVE! screening series. The four-film series is presented in collaboration with the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union (UE150) and will feature an educational component. The series overlaps with the theater’s annual Chelsea Classics programming, says Matt Brown, film program and media manager at the Chelsea, but will continue after the summer.
This iteration of the series kicks off on July 7 with afternoon and evening screenings of Matewan and continues with an August 4 screening of Norma Rae and an August 16 screening of A Bug’s Life. It wraps up September 1, in honor of Labor Day, with screenings of Warren Beatty’s Reds.
“These films are our history,” Nyssa Tucker, an organizer with UE150, wrote to the INDY in an email. “Much of this history is lost, and the memory of labor victories have become simply facts taken for granted. The 8-hour work day and two days of rest weekends are eroded by the demands of capital and the uptick in a gig economy that forces people to trade their lives for survival.”
Norma Rae, the second film in the series, is based on the true North Carolina story of Crystal Lee Sutton, an early-thirties worker at a Roanoke Rapids textile mill in the early 1970s—pay grade $2.65 an hour—who really did climb atop a shop floor table, upon being fired for her organizing attempts, and hoist a cardboard sign spelling UNION, just like Sally Field’s character does in the movie. (Field won an Oscar for the role.) The movie is a pleasing visual timepiece of life in the South, but Norma Rae’s struggles against her bosses, in a town where mill work is the only kind of work, do not feel far removed from current local organizing struggles.
The next film after Norma Rae, a family-friendly screening of the 1998 animated comedy A Bug’s Life, is “a sharp allegory about exploitation and the power of collective uprising,” per the programming notes.
Each screening in the series will be introduced by members of UE150—the union is currently raising money to fund an independent audit of UNC-Chapel Hill’s finances—followed by a community discussion after the film.
“Each film depicts important labor history and gives historical context for our current labor struggle,” Brown says. “These historical struggles, though thought of as separate, are all part of one ongoing struggle, and the more we show solidarity locally and globally, the more we understand the material nature of so many oppressions, the more people we organize with, and the more people have each other’s backs.”
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