Cool Tools Highlights ‘Workingman’s Death’

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/03/29/cool-tools-highlights-workingmans-death/

by Mike Hall, Mar 29, 2008

With the annual Workers Memorial Day commemoration coming up next month, the AFL-CIO Cool Tools selection is highlighting “Workingman’s Death,” a movie documenting six of the most dangerous, deadly and exploitive jobs on the planet. Filmmaker Michael Glawogger says he

“wanted to make a movie where you sit in the cinema and actually feel the weight on your back.”

That’s exactly what he did with “Workingman’s Death,” a harsh documentary about manual labor around the world. He shows us Ukrainian miners digging for coal in mine shafts only 16 inches wide, Nigerian slaughterhouse workers surrounded by animal blood and stench, and Pakistanis who dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal with little more than their bare hands.



While the situations depicted are graphic and may be disturbing to some, Glawogger’s documentary shows how these impoverished workers represent a forgotten kind of courage in a world where manual labor is often invisible. It is available from Seventh Art Releasing.

Cool Tools also is spotlighting two new books (both available from The Union Shop Online™) that take a look at the progressive movement now and in the past. In Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, Robert Leighninger tells the incredible story of public investment during the New Deal, when the federal government built schools, housing, bridges, power plants, zoos, farmers markets and stadiums—infrastructure investment our nation could badly use today.

The other book, Michael Jacoby Brown’s Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups that Can Solve Problems and Change the World, is a nuts-and-bolts community organizing guide that examines real world successes, many from the union movement, in which people organized to improve their communities and their lives. Brown, a veteran community organizer, says the book

is for people who want to change the world and know that they cannot do it alone.

FULL story at link.