Union Maids (1976) User Reviews

Fascinating mix of interviews and archival footage recounting the efforts at organizing unions in the 1930s

[llltdesq · 8/10 · 23 June 2015]

This documentary was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature, losing to Who Are the DeBolts and Where Did They Get Nineteen Children? There will be spoilers ahead:

This documentary details the experiences of three women who were active in the labor union movement in the 1930s. The three women-Kate, Stella and Sylvia-were active in Chicago in separate industries and worked to organize unions in their various workplaces/industries. They talk about the problems they had with employers, reluctant or frightened workers and even with the unions themselves because they were often unskilled labor or because they were women when unions were dominated by men.

One of the women, Kate, is a die-hard socialist, even in the interviews conducted in the 1970s, she's firmly and proudly a socialist. Stella talks about her current connections to the women's movement. Sylvia talks about her father being in a union and telling her that, whatever work she ends up doing, if she has an opportunity to join a union, she should, because any union is better than no union.

The documentary intersperses interview segments with still photos and archival footage with music from the likes of Pete Seegar and Arlo Guthrie, as well as a recording of "Sweet Home Chicago". The archival footage lends context to the interviews. If there's a serious problem with this, at least for me, it's a bit short. I'd have liked it to be longer. But that's a minor nitpick.

This film deserves to be more widely known. Recommended.

Documentary about women in the workers' movement.

[ItalianGerry · 4 June 2004]

"Union Maids" is an appealing and often compelling documentary about three women involved in the workers' movements in the early 1930s. Much of the movie consists of interviews with three women in their 60s at the time of filming. They are Sylvia, Kate, and Stella and they are figures of dignity and beauty amid their experiences of social injustice.

They vividly tell us the way it was back then when they and other people risked jobs and lives attempting to organize trade unions amid the textile factories and meat producers of Chicago in order to remedy injustices to the factory workers. This was a time when if you dared demand safe working conditions to prevent meat-workers from losing their thumbs in sausage machines or called for an increase in the pitiful subsistence wages, you were immediately labeled a Bolshevik and fired.

It was a time when the police seemed to be arms of the capitalist industrialists by beating and even killing recalcitrant strikers or forcefully evicting the unemployed from their apartments.

It was an ugly era before unemployment compensation and other worker benefits, and it all comes painfully alive in this fascinating documentary, a collaborative effort by filmmakers James Klein, Julia Reichert, and Miles Mogulescu. Particularly effective is the intercut archival footage of riots, police beatings, the first union rallies, the scenes of evicted workers with their furniture strewn on the sidewalks.

"Union Maids" also relates the workers' movement to the continuing struggle for equality for women, and there are comments on the unions of the 1970s as being too conservative. Although at times the film seems to be grinding a socialist axe, it generally remains rather level-headed and is always humane. Some of the music is by Woody Guthrie as sung by crusader-singer Pete Seeger.