American Dream

That one union worker obsessed with 1984's mega hit Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA album making it his entire identity rules. Everyone in this looks like a beer burp. It's really wild watching these people making under 11 dollars an hour cutting apart pigs horrifically every day bitching about having to pay for their 33k dollar farmhouse on a 200 acre lot while I'm scraping the very last molecules of peanut butter out of a jar. *puffs bubble pipe and sits back methodically* Fuck Ronald Reag

Watching Austin, Minnesota eat itself alive is as painful as watching the slaughtering of the pigs; it's Reaganism laid bare. Viewers don't give Kopple enough credit; it's not just that she is in the right place at the right time, she also has the skill, discipline, and dedication to carve out a clear and powerful narrative from the chaos and carnage. She has what Fred Wiseman would call a finely tuned 'bullshit metre', and while Lewis Anderson passes the test, Ray Rogers certainly does not.

Watch a country die before your eyes at the hands of trade union bureaucracy defeatism and the good ol' stick. One of the defining labor battles of the neoliberal era.

Instead of offering the viewers the expected good vs. evil labor/mgmt conflict, it delves into the internecine strife within the labor union as the local battles with the International, and ultimately itself in a test of strategy, will and morality. More than this one strike, it's about a sea change in the state of the labor movement. Without unity or broad public support, the unions are defenseless against corporations that are emboldened to maximize short-term profits for shareholder gains.

In the same league as Harlan County, but still, not quite as powerful.

Soul crushing. Kopple is clearly pro-union but she tries (and succeeds) in keeping things mostly balanced. The most important reason to see this movie is that it shows that solidarity can't beat economic considerations. (Multiple plants, offshoring, temporary workers, management replacing front line workers...)

The story of the Hormel company breaking the union in one of its plants just because it can. This movie should have been a lot stronger considering the story it tells