Top 10 Union Movies
Norma Rae, 1979
Babe Williams from The Pajama Game, meet Professor Sinigaglia from The Organizer. Norma Rae Webster (Sally Field), an unskilled worker at a North Carolina textile mill, gets sparked to activism when she hears a speech by New Yawk unionist Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Liebman). Soon Norma Rae finds her own eloquence, in word — "I'm stayin' right where I am. It's gonna take you and the police department and the fire department and the National Guard to get me outta here!" — and gesture, when she stands up on her work table and silently holds a cardboard sign reading "Union."
Director Martin Ritt's film, for which Field won the Best Actress Oscar, kindles a not-exactly-sexual warmth between Norma Rae and Reuben, as when she gives a Southern-drawl spin to Reuben's Yiddish ("Kvayetch, kvayetch, kvayetch"). But the movie also reminds viewers that, in late–20th century America, when the working class was supposed to have achieved middle-class comfort, injustices still blotted the labor landscape. "I saw a pregnant woman on a picket line get hit in the stomach with a club," Reuben tells Norma Rae. "I saw a boy of 16 shot in the back. I saw a guy blown to hell and back when he tried to start his car in the morning."
Those anecdotes ring true, like case histories of management goonery. Certainly the film was based on fact: Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. based their script on the crusade by Crystal Lee Sutton and the Textile Workers of America to unionize the J.P. Stevens Mill in Roanoke Rapids, N.C. They won the battle in 1974, but, as with the mining jobs in How Green Was My Valley, the mill jobs in Roanoke Rapids gradually disappeared. Today it's the workers in China, Malaysia and Mexico who need Reuben and Norma Rae to secure higher pay and better working conditions. And then the jobs will go somewhere else.