In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In On Strike and on Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality. Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth. She shows how this worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity, Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation, Salt of the Earth was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American cinema.

Everything You Need to Know to Become a Film-Industry Insider Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a gaffer and a grip? Or what makes the best boy so great? In Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde,* Dave Knox, a top camera operator and longtime veteran of the film industry, gives you the inside story on the lingo and slang heard on the set. This is an A-to-Z guide to making a movie: the equipment, the crew, and the sometimes hilarious terminology—everything you need to know to sound like a seasoned pro. * Remove the small spotlight from the set and switch off the two-kilowatt quartz light.

This book tells the story of 15,000 wool workers who went on strike for more than a year, defying police violence and hunger. The strikers were mainly immigrants and half were women. The Passaic textile strike, the first time that the Communist Party led a mass workers’ struggle in the United States, captured the nation’s imagination and came to symbolize the struggle of workers throughout the country when the labor movement as a whole was in decline during the conservative, pro-business 1920s. Although the strike was defeated, many of the methods and tactics of the Passaic strike presaged the struggles for industrial unions a decade later in the Great Depression.

Examines the conception, production, distribution, and suppression of the pioneering labor-feminist film made during the virulently anti-communist era of the Cold War.

It was a Hollywood meltdown ...The Writers Guild went on strike in 2007. The big issue: fees for programs released on new media such as the Internet. The strike was settled one hundred turbulent days later – but then the Screen Actors Guild spiraled out of control, unwilling to accept the same terms but unable to muster a second strike. As the national economy collapsed, idled writers and actors sacrificed millions of dollars in film and TV wages in order to pursue pennies in new media. All told, the turmoil lasted about two years.But why? Analyzing events as they unfolded, Los Angeles entertainment attorney and journalist Jonathan Handel lays bare the contracts, economics and politics swirling behind the paradox of Hollywood labor relations. Handel is a uniquely qualified guide: a former associate counsel at the Writers Guild, his law practice at TroyGould focuses on new media and entertainment. He was described as “one of the most-quoted sources on the strike,” and recently taught a course on entertainment unions and guilds as an adjunct professor at UCLA School of Law. Handel covers entertainment labor as a Contributing Editor for The Hollywood Reporter and his writing also appears on Forbes.com and the Huffington Post. As a commentator, Handel has appeared in the media hundreds of times. The 2007-2009 contracts, so hard fought, brought scant months of labor peace: renegotiations began in 2010, and recur every three years. That makes this book essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Hollywood in the digital age.

Describes the conditions and treatment that drove workers, including many children, to various strikes, from the mill workers strikes in 1828 and 1836 and the coal strikes at the turn of the century to the work of Mother Jones on behalf of child workers.

Hard-Pressed in the Heartland tells the heartbreaking but empowering story of a spirited local union trying to resist management's drive for concessions--while fending off a conservative national union leadership unwilling to support its own members. Going beyond academic history, it offers useful perspectives for rebuilding a democratic, militant, community-based unionism that can succeed where today's bureaucratic unionism cannot.