This screenplay was written about a miner strike at the New Mexico zinc mine and the struggles that the workers and women faced as they fought for dignity and equality.
React: If you wanted to get yourself in trouble with the government in the 1950’s. All you needed to do was compose a screenplay to recount the genuine story of the 1951 miner’s strike in Bayard, New Mexico. I bet that you could wager your bottom union dollar that the United States government did whatever it could in its never ending abuse of power to make sure the cinematic message would never see the general populations’ light of day. The film fell victim to excessive censorship and banned from the public in the United States, because of its labor message. This
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Just how far the government did and can go in squashing freedom and human rights in the name of corporate interests, while keeping the country’s working class under their boot. The film not only depicts the evils of racism the verbal abuse, but also the cruel discrimination in the working and living conditions and exposes the economic usefulness of racism. It does so by suggesting that racism serves by dividing the workers and making them fight amongst themselves.
Connect: After watching the movie, Salt of the Earth it reminded me of a movie I just watched a few weeks ago named, Dreams of Dust. It is a 2006 drama that takes a harsh look at life in a hellish African gold mine. For countless weeks on end the employees of the mining camp dig long tunnels into the ground in search of increasingly hard to gold. When one is found the economic situation improves for all and when the tunnels collapse, workers lose their lives. New teams are then brought in and the process begins starts over.
Question:
People are down on Unions these days, but have they forgotten the major contributions that unions have made for workers. When the unions were strong, people had high paying jobs and a strong middle class. America was overall stronger, more prosperous and if unions did not exist, who would represent the