Love & Solidarity: Rev. James Lawson & Nonviolence in the Search for Workers' Rights

Director:  Michael Honey
Run time:  38 min.
Call number: HM1281 .L68 2016

"What can people do to change a world full of violence and hate? Is nonviolent revolution possible? 'Love and Solidarity' addresses these questions through the life and thought of Rev. James Lawson, an African American Methodist minister who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., to initiate civil rights struggles in the South in the 1960s, and in recent years taught nonviolence organizing to poor Black and Latino workers in coalitions that have remade the labor movement in Los Angeles. Through interviews with Rev. Lawson and historic film footage, acclaimed labor and civil rights historian Michael Honey and award-winning filmmaker Errol Webber place a needed discourse on nonviolent social change at the forefront of today's struggles against violence and for human rights, peace, and economic justice."

—Publisher's description

H-2 Worker

Director: Stephanie Black
Run time: 67 min.

"Winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, H-2 Worker reveals the systematic exploitation of Caribbean laborers by the Florida sugar cane industry from World War II through the 1990s . . . Originally released in 1990, today H-2 Worker provides an invaluable resource to understanding the current debate over guest worker provisions of immigration legislation.  While Florida's sugar cane cutters have been replaced by mechanical harvesters, guest worker programs have expanded in agriculture, hotel, restaurant, forestry, and other industries."
—Distributor's description

Food Chain$

Director: Sanjay Rawal
Run time: 83 min.
Call number: HD1525 .F66 2014

"...Required to pick a minimum of 480 pounds of fruit per hour (hands moving so quickly that you would swear the film has been sped up), the workers average around $42 for a nine-hour shift. . . . “We live like animals in cramped housing,” one man says, as Mr. Rawal shows us jam-packed trailers and ragtag encampments. The ability to improve these conditions lies not with the farmers, we are told, but with the fast-food industry, restaurants and supermarkets whose contracts with buyers set the economics of the supply chain. But when a coalition of tomato pickers in Immokalee, Fla., began agitating for companies to pay a penny more per pound for their tomatoes, the state’s largest supermarket chain, Publix, refused to blink."

—Jeannette Catsoulis, N.Y. Times