UE Pioneered Use of Film to Deliver Union Message

Delegates to UE’s 11th Convention, held in September 1946, not only debated resolutions and elected officers, they also got to see the world premier of a 37-minute film, one of the first films ever produced by a labor union.

Deadline for Action tells the story of a General Electric worker in Lynn, Massachusetts. A member of UE Local 201, Bill Turner, faces financial hardship at the end of World War II. Despite the wartime promises made by GE President C.E. Wilson that “after the war is won, take home pay on a 40-hour a week basis must eventually represent the higher levels of pay that now prevail,” Bill’s take-home pay has been cut by the loss of overtime — but the prices of rent, shoes for his child, and food for his family remain high.

Bill goes to a union meeting, where the recent cut in take-home pay “was on everybody’s mind.” When GE refuses to meet the union’s demands for compensatory wage increases at the bargaining table, he votes to strike — along with 83 percent of his co-workers. UE members at GE, Westinghouse Electric, and the General Motors electrical division hit the picket lines, along with workers in other industries: auto, steel, meatpacking, farm equipment, communications, and others.

Despite efforts by the companies to break the strike through violence — including police attacks against UE strikers in Philadelphia and elsewhere — the workers maintain solid picket lines and community support, and are victorious. This of course was, in 1946, very recent history which many of the delegates to the UE convention would have just lived through.

Innovative Film Techniques

Although the fictional Bill, his family, and his co-workers are the central characters of the film, it also uses a variety of techniques from documentary filmmaking, which had blossomed during the 1930s and 40s. The film incorporates footage of World War II, the violent suppression of strikes after World War I, and the 1946 strikes, much of the latter filmed by strikers themselves. Recorded audio of the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt is used throughout the film, to remind the viewer that workers’ aspirations for a postwar world of peace and shared prosperity were, until recently, shared by the President of the country.

Each of UE’s three national officers delivers a short message directly to the camera. President Albert Fitzgerald reports on the poor progress of negotiations prior to the strikes, and reminds viewers how “employers mobilized the full power of the government against the unions” following World War I. Director of Organization Jim Matles denounces the use of injunctions to break strikes as “an illegitimate offspring of an undemocratic government and a reactionary employer in the name of law and order.” And Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak explains, “With the CIO in the forefront, labor and the people won the first round. But big business is not giving up. It is starting a new offensive. ... What we won in the strikes is being stolen back from us through a big-business Congress.”

Animation is used to explain the broader economic and social forces shaping Bill’s life. When UE enters into negotiations with GE, demanding a pay raise of $2 per day to make up for wartime sacrifices, the company responds that it cannot grant a pay raise without increasing prices. (At the beginning of 1946, prices were still controlled by the Office of Price Administration, established during the war to prevent price-gouging.) Animated graphs break down the actual costs of a GE refrigerator, revealing that labor costs make up barely 10 percent, and emphasizing the massive profits that GE made during the war.

Most striking is a lengthy sequence about halfway through the film which illustrates, through both animation and live action, the sheer power of the capitalists that Bill and his UE co-workers are up against. GE, Westinghouse and the GM electrical division together controlled 50 percent of the electrical manufacturing industry in the U.S. at the time. But they also had collusive agreements with similar corporations in other countries, giving them a global reach — the film highlights an agreement GE made with the German corporation Krupp during the war to set tungsten carbide prices, an agreement which severely hindered the U.S. war effort.

And they, along with most other major corporations, were majority-owned by eight major groups of finance capital which together controlled $82 billion in assets ($1.4 trillion in today’s money), over 30 percent of the economy at the time. “This is what is meant by big business,” says the film’s narrator, who goes on to explain how big business’s efforts to dominate not only national economies but the entire world — “imperialism” — leads to war.

“Bill could see rising prices ahead. And he could see more strikes.”

Emspak was not wrong: after being forced to give workers raises across basic industry, employers moved to “fix” the Office of Price Administration so they could raise prices. At the time, 75 percent of Americans supported the OPA, but the National Association of Manufacturers spent $3 million — $51 billion in today’s dollars — to convince the public, and more importantly Congress, that preventing companies from price-gouging consumers was “un-American.”

They got their way — the OPA was abolished by the “big-business Congress” that Emspak warned about. The final scene of Deadline for Action shows Bill Turner putting on a suit and going to Washington D.C. to lobby for the OPA, but to no avail. Dejected and weary, he sits down on the lawn of the National Mall and takes off his shoes.

But, like UE members before and after him, Bill does not give up easily. He puts his shoes back on and visits the Lincoln memorial. Inspired by Lincoln’s words — “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” — Bill resolves to redouble his efforts to replace the reactionaries in Congress during the 1946 elections. He rededicates himself to the faith that, in Emspak’s words, “Community political action will hold the gains of the picket lines.”

An Inspiring Story and Cautionary Tale

As the UE NEWS reported, Deadline for Action was intended as a tool for political action, “to renew the resolve of all decent people to get men in government who will fight inflation, depression, want and war.” A month after the convention, UE organized a showing on Broadway, winning praise from movie critics (including one from the New York Times) and others. The author and labor educator Leo Huberman said, “I think it’s the best educational weapon that labor has ever gotten out. It’s the first time labor has made the Big League in films.” GE and other companies were worried enough about the film that they engaged in a public crusade to denounce it as “Communistic propaganda,” even organizing a secretive showing for CEOs and company public-relations men to figure out what to do about the film’s “dangerous indoctrination.”

However, despite the film — and the best efforts of UE and other CIO unions — the 1946 elections resulted in a Congress even more subservient to big business than the previous one. Fresh off of their victory over price controls, NAM pushed for a bill to weaken labor unions, and the new Congress delivered the infamous Taft-Hartley law. Instead of uniting to fight for repeal of this “slave labor” bill, right-wing elements in the CIO conspired with the government and companies to try to destroy UE and other unions that fought not only for their members, but for the interests of the entire working class.

In the decades since 1946, UE has periodically used Deadline for Action as an educational tool, most recently in June of 2007, when delegates to a Northeast Region council meeting watched the film on the 60th anniversary of the Taft-Hartley Act. The UE NEWS reported that, “delegates discussed how this and other developments shown in the film affect us today.”

Watching it today, the film undoubtedly seems dated in a number of ways, and its cinematography is, to modern eyes, primitive. (The film version which has been digitized, and is available above and on YouTube, contains a number of glitches, including a ten-second break around the 12-minute mark.) And Westinghouse’s collusive relationship with Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric is illustrated with the kind of racist images regularly used during WWII — although the character representing Westinghouse is hardly flattering either.

Nonetheless, the film remains an inspiring story of labor’s greatest triumph over big business in U.S. history, and a cautionary tale about the power of concentrated capital — power and concentration that has only increased in the ensuing eight decades. Bill Turner may have been fictional, but his triumphs were real, and the defeats that he suffered continue to hinder the working class to this day.

• Deadline for Action can be viewed at the top of this article, or on YouTube. The National Union also has a high-quality digitized version of the film suitable for screening at union meetings or in theaters; any UE local interested in organizing a showing of the film should contact the UE Communications Department at communications@ueunion.org.