Introduction
Watch The Great Depression 5 – Mean Things Happening – a powerful documentary of the Great Depression in the 1930s tracing how tenant farmers and steelworkers fought to unionise during the Great Depression, revealing the deep inequalities, violent resistance and unequal labor laws that shaped the stark divide between Southern and Northern worker power in the 1930s.
In the American democracy of the 1930s, two visions of liberty collided. Working men and women battled landowners and factory managers for the right to join a union. On the tenant farms and in the steel factories, working people asserted their citizenship during great economic turmoil and a tide of government reform. – Source
Video Description
“This documentary examines the efforts that tenant farmers and steelworkers undertook to organize and unionize amidst The Great Depression of the 1930s. Using interviews, film footage, and historians’ reflections, it recounts the privation and violent conditions facing H.L. Mitchell and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), and industrial workers who formed the Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) of the burgeoning Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Racism, paternalistic company towns, heavy-handed anti-unionism and violent opposition posed grave obstacles to organizers in the Southern agricultural fields and Northern industrial cities alike. A key element to the success of the SWOC and CIO on the one hand, and the failure of the STFU on the other, was the legal framework protecting organizing, rights, and concerted activity for private-sector workers with the passage of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which expressly excluded agricultural and domestic workers who comprised much of the South’s workforce.
The result was the rise of powerful unionism in much of the more industrialized North, Midwest, and West, and the concomitant absence of effective unionism from the more agricultural South and Southwest, in the Depression-riddled 1930s.” – Source: Labor Films
Watch Video
The Great Depression 5 – Mean things happening
This video is part of a series about the Great Depression.
Explore Further
- Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU)
- Labor Films Database
- Jane McAlevey: Organizer Extraordinaire
- Australia’s History of Workers’ Rights, Strikes and Campaigns
- How Workers Defeated Anti-Strike Laws in the 1970s
- Defending Unionism: The Weipa Dispute, 1995
- Beer Strikes: A History of Hotel Boycotts in Australia, 1900-1920
- Australian Aboriginal workers strike for fair wages and equality, 1946-1949
- Online Picket Line Guide
Credit
The original photo is from the Library of Congress and has been altered – Source: Feature image.