Editor’s Note: LUEL’s Harry Bridges School of Labor will present a viewing of Matewan for its May classes. The viewing will be split between the to nights, so join us on Wednesday May 7th at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT and Saturday May 10th at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT.
Matewan, directed by John Sayles, in 1987, documents—though with some added fictionalized characters for dramatic effect—the monumental events that occurred in Matewan, West Virginia in 1920. The film is seen through the lens of the coal miners of the Stone Mountain Coal Company who are confronted by the company’s hired thugs, the Pinkerton-esque strikebreaking Baldwin-Felts Detective Company.
This film is second to none in its presentation of the proto-fascist methods that companies have and will continue to use in their pursuit of super-profits. We start by seeing the semi-feudal conditions in the company towns: everything is owned by the company and employees must agree to submit to the monopoly on necessities held by the company stores and housing. Stone Mountain Coal Company was free to determine rent, costs of food, and use of non-company-sanctioned commodities would result in heavy consequences for the worker. Next, when the workers try to unionize with the United Mineworkers Association (UMWA), the bosses use the ignorance of the white workers to their advantage and bring in African-American scab workers to disrupt the unionization efforts. When UMWA organizer Joe Kenehan succeeds in redirecting the false frustration of the white workers towards the black workers back at the bosses, the bosses then bring in the next weapon in their arsenal: the strikebreaking Baldwin-Felts Detective Company. This company employs tactics such as using infiltrators to spread lies among the workers, sowing distrust among the workers against the union, using force and coercion to evict striking workers from the company’s housing, and even using gangster methods of torture and murder.
Though the union of workers succeeds in parrying the brutal tactics of the Baldwin-Felts paramilitary, ultimately the labor drive is forced into a bloody confrontation that leaves many dead due to the adventurism of certain workers who grow impatient with the mass organization methods of the union. The final confrontation shows the loyalty of Sheriff Sid Hatfield who arms the workers in a shoot-out against the desperate Baldwin-Felts agents.
Though the Battle of Matewan did not earn the workers the safety, job security, and better wages they initially demanded, it did succeed in ridding the town of the Baldwin-Felts Company which allowed safer union organization efforts among the workers. It also succeeded in educating the workers about the brutality that the bosses are willing to use as well as the only way to combat this violence: forming militant class-oriented unions that reject divisions on racial lines.
This film is a must-see that will teach the viewer that only through militant class-oriented labor struggles were the American and even international working class able to win better working conditions and wages. As we are experiencing the unprecedented attacks and reversals of labor and civil rights for the workers in today’s America, we must learn the lesson that our forebears learned through bloodshed: that only by relying on organization of the working class, can we defend and expand our rights.
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