Analysis Of Norma Rae 's ' Character Is Played By Sally Field

Only six months after Jackie was born his father deserted the family. This led to several hardships. The family lived on a sharecropper’s farm until the plantation owner used the father’s leave as an excuse to keep the whole crop the family had raised and to evict the widow and her children (54). Jackie’s mother gathered her young ones about her with bitter feelings and found work as a domestic servant.

Throughout the Twentieth Century, the evolution of workers’ rights in the workplace has drastically evolved. Through the utilization of constitutional freedoms, workers across the nation came together to support the goal of receiving fair treatment from employers when it came to wages, work conditions, and benefits. However, this wasn’t achieved without great sacrifice from the average man as standing up for their rights was a brave act that usually resulted in consequences.

In the film, Matewan, director John Sayles paints a 1920’s picture of a small, West Virginia coal-mining town. Over the course of the film, this seemingly American Township reveals itself as the site of feudal hardship for its citizens. The Stone Mountain Coal Company was the sole employer in Matewan. The company’s laborers struggled for autonomy and for freedom from the company’s grasp. The ideal method for this achieving such autonomy was organization of a union. This idea of union struck a cord with the company, and the conflict between employer and employee soon escalated into a battle. The laborers began to realize, in certain terms, that the Stone Mountain Coal Company is not simply a corporation but a

Life in the early 1900’s wasn’t easy. Competition for jobs was at an all time high, especially in New York City. Immigrants were flooding in and needed to find work fast, even if that meant in the hot, overcrowded conditions of garment factories. Conditions were horrid and disaster was inevitable, and disaster did strike in March, 1911. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York set on fire, killing 146 workers. This is an important event in US history because it helped accomplish the tasks unions and strikes had tried to accomplish years earlier, It improved working conditions in factories nationwide and set new safety laws and regulations so that nothing as catastrophic would happen again. The workplace struggles became public after

Sally Thomas family is given an opportunity to make a name for herself by being given social and business opportunities. While the southernmost states have a different outtake on slavery, Sally and her family are treated with much more respect. Sally is able to own her own business as a laundress and comes to be popular in the town for her kindness and fairness.

In the film Norma Rae, the textile workers were unsatisfied with many aspects of their Capitalistic work environment. They fought to form a union so that they could change the undesirable characteristics to better meet their needs. Political, environmental and cultural processes all played a part in the workers struggle to form an effective union.

In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, labor was anything but easy. Factory workers faced long hours, low pay, high unemployment fears, and poor working conditions during this time. Life today is much easier in comparison to the late 1800s. Americans have shorter days, bigger pay and easier working conditions. Not comparable to how life is today, many riots sparked, and citizens began to fight for equal treatment. Along with other important events, the Haymarket Riot, the Pullman Strike, and the Homestead strike all play a vital role in illustrating labor’s struggle to gain fair and equitable treatment during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The ensuing conflict, between labor vs. capital, during the late 1800s initiated a struggle of power in the workforce between the rich-industrialists (or corporate leaders) and the middle-class/lower-class workers. The Capitalists had intervened with the protests orchestrated by the workers, ensuring that the power remains with them. The strategies of the industrialists and the unique ways of protesting from the workers, contributes to spur a vigorous argument between the employers and their employees. The workers tried their best to ameliorate their working conditions by forming numerous unions, trying to fix currency (gold to paper) to economically help themselves, refusing to go to work, resorting to violence and non-violence, etc. However, the Corporate leaders kept an upper hand and dissolved the workers’ ambitions by hiring scabs, creating a strong relationship with the military (Pullman strike), controlling and fixing policies at work, hiring immigrants for cheap labor, etc. Throughout the late 1800s, the corporate leaders have been able to successfully prevent workers who had resorted to: forming unions, protests (ex. Pullman strike and Homestead strike), violence (ex. Haymarket Sq. Riot), etc., from achieving a radical solution to the workers issues with the management by using several different strategies including but not limited to: hiring scabs/immigrants in the Homestead strike, using government support in the Pullman strike and keeping the power on their side

The resident workers’ fear and hatred of blacks and Italians and vice versa distracts them from their hatred of the company, and prevents them from bonding together as workers against the Company. The Company uses racism to their advantage by promoting it, and further prevents unionization of the workers by showing the union as something new, foreign, and untrustworthy. Unions are forbidden in the workers’ contracts, so the workers must meet secretly to discuss the possibility of one. Because they lack security in their jobs, the workers fear for their lives and creature “comforts.” The company promotes this fear by monopolizing housing, forcing workers to live in substandard housing and making sure that the workers know that if they should lose this housing, they have nowhere else to go, no place else to live. The company completely controls their physical lives, an indication of slavery. Keeping the workers in ignorance of their futures forces them to live in constant fear, allowing the company to easily gain and maintain control.

On a Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire started on the top floors of a factory in New York, The Asch Building owned by the Triangle Waist Company. According to the owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were practicing a common procedure in many factories to prevent workers from taking extra breaks and preventing theft. They locked the exit doors. These owners, weren’t held accountable for the deaths of the 146 employees. Numerous workers could not escape from the eighth, ninth and tenth floors. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris would go to trial for their actions of ignoring poor work conditions against “the people.” But this was a time when there was more greed with many factory owners. Owners were not being proactive in making their

But by September 1909, the workers had become fed up with the mistreatment and terrible conditions, leading the men and women of garment industries all across New York to look for a change. Over a hundred garment workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company met in secret to listen to speakers from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) (Argersinger 63). These speeches prompted the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employees to unionize

The labor relations movement has been one of the most successful driving forces behind such efforts as: providing aid to workers who were injured or retired, better health benefits and to stop the practice of child labor in the workforce. Ostensibly, unions in the United States arose out of the need to better protect the “common interests” of laborers. Today, many of the social movements and alliances forged are created under the guise to better protect the employer from a plethora of interests made against the organization, rather than, increasing wages, improving reasonable employment hours and/or enhancing work conditions.

Kazan highlights how the mob exploits their position at the expense of the longshoreman. The union has instilled fear into all of the union

The labor union movement over the years has shaped the way individuals work and live for both the nicest and unpleasant. Some would think the unions influence has created a power struggle between management and union leaders. In today’s time, some citizens insist the existence of unions are a must to aid in employee freedom, while others view the labor unions as just another problem in the line of progress. The purpose of labor unions was for employed workers to come together and collectively agree on fundamental workplace objectives. The rise of the union came about after the Civil War- responding to the industrial economy. Surprisingly at the least unions became popular within the 1930-50’s and began to slowly decrease,

In 2005, social, economic, and political conditions in Alberta were ideal for the labour dispute that mushroomed at Lakeside Packers in Brooks, Alberta between workers (and their union) and management. The primarily Caucasian, conservative, change-averse community of Brooks had a long history of farming, family, and church life that hadn’t changed much in generations (Inkster, 2007). The multimillion-dollar beef processing and packing plant (a division of American megacorporation Tyson Foods) was one of the largest slaughterhouses in North America, with a reputation of treating workers badly and being confrontationally anti-union, and had been hiring a large number of immigrant workers who flooded the community. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union had been striving for years to become the bargaining unit for Lakeside workers, and with the influx of immigrant workers, recruitment and advocacy efforts were ballooning. As well, the long-entrenched Progressive Conservative government in Alberta was a supporter of big business and labour laws did little to protect workers.