Harlan County USA

I've never taken part in any of the "Blind Spot" blogathons mostly because I don't know at the beginning of the year what movies I'm going to get around to watching over the course of the coming 12 months. But if I did, one of the movies that would have wound up in the series this year is Harlan County USA, as I only recently got around to watching it.

At the Brookside mine in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973, the miners are fed up with the terrible working conditions, from the black lung disease that kills the men young to the risk of mine explosions and the terrible housing they feel the company hasn't done enough to alleviate. They've tried to get the company to do something about it, and the company won't help, so the workers use the only bargaining chip they have left, which is going on strike.

Documentarian Barbara Kopple was always interested in workers' struggles to improve their lot in life, and had been doing work on a possible documentary on corruption in the United Mine Workers' leadership. But when the Brookside strike began, she knew she had to go down to Kentucky to document that. Using a lot of raw footage with the miners along with a soundtrack of the sorts of workers' rights songs the miners had created over the decades.

The strike gets increasingly testy with a risk of violence. The miners having used their trump card of walking off the job, the company tries to use its logical trump card of importing labor to do the jobs the miners would be doing if they weren't on strike. The strikers respond by trying to physically prevent the imported labor from getting to the mine, and the company escalates that bit of violence by brandishing weapons. Eventually one of the striking miners gets shot and killed, and that's what brings the two sides to the bargaining table.

If there's one flaw with Kopple's work, it's that she's not just on the miners' side, but actively unsympathetic to the issues facing the company. I couldn't help but think of the movie Norma Rae (based on a true story), where the workers finally do succeed in organizing a union, but the work turns out to be something that overseas workers can do more cheaply. Of course, I don't think anybody could have known in the mid-1970s of the changes that would destroy much of the coal mining industry. It's amazing the extent to which large swathes of Appalachia have gone neglected because today's politicans can't use their plight to gain political advantage.

There's a lot in the movie that's interesting looking back 45 or more years. The miners went to Wall Street to protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and in a conversation with a (unionized, obviously) police officer, the cop says that most of what he does is bullshit. Contrast that with the idea of latter-day police insisting that theirs is one of the most dangerous jobs out there.

Kopple also touches on union corruption (ironically, the agreement the Brookside miners got would be folded into a nationwide agreement just a few years later), which from the things I hear from some of the government-sector workers I know is absolutely a thing -- their union bosses care more about the union leaders' political position than the welfare of the workers, at least if my friends' stories are 100% accurate.

Regardless of your political perspective, Harlan County, USA is a noteworthy film that absolutely deserves to be seen.