American Dream (1990)
Were labor conditions better in the 1970s or 1980s? Judging by two documentaries covering strikes from Barbara Kopple, it could depend on how you want to interpret the lack of violence in American Dream. The coal company in Harlan County, U.S.A. hired people to intimidate the strikers while in American Dream, Hormel is comfortable simply ignoring them. While the lack of violence sounds like a win for the union, if it is a product of how completely defanged unions had become by that point, it is a pretty shallow one. In the three decades since, the balance of power has shifted even further away, and economic inequality has blossomed even further, that the film remains vital.
As noted, Hormel is in a certain respect an absent figure here. It includes footage of public statements but the center of the conflict isn't between Hormel and the union but rather within the union. In backgrounding Hormel, it arguably leaves out the kind of economic context that would allow the viewer to assess the validity of Hormel's push to lower wages.
That said, in the internal conflict of the union, I couldn't help sense a precognitive echo of the current ideological schism within the Democratic Party. The establishment structure of the union at international/national levels mirrors that of the more establishment party members, angling for more pragmatic and cautious approaches in consideration of a broader context and game theory. The activist side of the union, especially present in the local union here, operates much more emotionally on the concept of what is just. But too often it has an underpants gnome level of nativity. They have action X they opt to use and establish end point Z of winning the dispute without reductions in pay/benefit. Unfortunately the Y, the logic in how that action can actually produce that outcome, is just a bunch of question marks.
As I have often played the disliked scold warning of the cost of third-party voting or taking absolutist stances, I definitely recognized the frustration of the union establishment having to sit back and watch chaos reign as the idealists take control. I guess the question is, does someone watch this film and appreciate the wisdom of the union experts, or do they not want to hear that and choose to work from the logic that the reason things turned out poorly was lack of true faith from enough people. In a year where teacher strikes in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma have had positive effects, Kopple certainly could make another film about the state of labor, but notably, the target of those actions were state governments and not corporate employers, and I feel that labor progress of the 21st Century will have to primarily route through politics and not collective bargaining.
B+