Educating workers about labor rights and global wrongs through documentary film.

AuthorAnsley, Fran

I want to thank the Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law, specifically David Yamada and the other organizers of this panel, for choosing the theme that brings us here today. The idea that people who teach and write about the employment relationship might have something special to offer as public intellectuals is both a compliment and a challenge.

The particular project I will discuss is my work on a film called Morristown: In the Air and Sun, released in 2007 after the labor of almost a decade. During that time, I worked closely with Anne Lewis, the independent filmmaker who created the documentary. Now, she and I are up to our elbows in the distribution phase of the effort. I will share below several stories about how the project came to be and what lessons one might take from it as to possible productive roles for public intellectuals. Before beginning that discussion, however, I want to set out some things about the larger perspective I bring to this work, a move that I hope will better equip readers both to question and to understand what follows.

I take myself to be a partisan in what I view as a momentous battle going on in our country and in the world over how we are going to order our economic and political affairs, whose interests will be taken into account, where our resources ought to flow, what values and priorities ought to guide our steps, and who will participate in making important decisions about the rules of the game. I do not see this as a simple battle driven by a single set of issues, nor one in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on another.

But for all its ambiguity and iridescence, this struggle is a real and urgent one. A thread of purpose running through my life has been the attempt to join that battle in a manner that advances the fortunes of the precarious classes, of those who are significantly harmed and disempowered by current arrangements. I do not claim to have a blueprint of how to proceed in this engagement. In fact, the times seem particularly confusing just now: major historical shifts are taking place, new systems and practices are pervading the world's economy, and change is happening on a tectonic scale but also at a lightning pace. Moreover, while the future is bearing down upon us in ways that call for courage and resolve, the lessons of past battles for social justice counsel both wariness about grand strategies and humility about our own capacity even to see the best way forward, much less to stay reliably upon it.

Still, despite these well-advised disclaimers, I have some convictions about how redistributionist, egalitarian, democracy-enhancing change can actually occur and what ingredients are most crucial for its success. As these convictions are central to my aspiration to be a public intellectual, they merit some consideration here.

My basic belief is that greater justice for working class people will only be possible through the organization, mobilization, and leadership of those people themselves, exerting pressure from below on those who are in power. This is not to say, of course, that other factors do not matter; they do. Many organized, mobilized movements blessed with outstanding leadership have gone down in defeat. In any given context, various factors may facilitate or prevent change. Crucial elements may include, for instance: opportune splits among more dominant and powerful groups; effective tactical alliances across class and other differences; the existence of well-constructed policy ideas that can implement and institutionalize popular cries for change; great leaders with imagination and charisma; allies who support and accompany movements and organizations of the disenfranchised and oppressed; access to sufficient resources to do what needs to be done; and plain dumb (or smart) luck.

Nevertheless, I believe that the most indispensable component for the achievement of greater social justice is the power of organized movement from below, led by--and accountable to--the people most directly affected by the institutions targeted for change. Such movements, in turn, need a number of things that intellectuals can help to provide or to mobilize, including relevant knowledge, solid information, liberatory education, and apt rhetoric. Accordingly, I want to argue that the most important task for public intellectuals in the United States today is to find ways of sharing the fruits of their research and their varied professional and human skills with groups of poor and working people who are organizing to demand social change. (2)

I urge those interested in the theme of this panel to consider "looking to the bottom" in a concentrated and conscious way when envisioning how and why they might take up a project in the role of public intellectual. (3) I suspect some urging is in order, because the path suggested is less frequently an object of desire than pathways leading to the top. In academia, no less than in other locations, the way to finding that rarer path is quite likely to be obscured or obstructed. However, I am also moved to this urging by a different impulse, by the knowledge that working with bottom-up movements can be a source of great pleasure. I have spent much of my teaching career trying to put my academic knowledge at the disposal of local groups working for economic justice. In the course of these efforts, I have consistently felt that I was doing my best and most joyous work when the alleged distinctions between teaching, scholarship, service, and the rest of my life were most thoroughly blurred. (4) Certainly the experience of serving as an adviser on this film has been a prime example. The roots of the Morristown project go back to my early days in the legal academy. I began teaching law after a number of previous lives, and I knew from the beginning that I wanted to find a way to link my work as a scholar with groups that were in motion around issues of economic justice. At that time, the end of the eighties, a new organization was just emerging in Tennessee: a coalition of labor, community, and religious organizations focused on the problem of plant closings. I quickly decided to hitch my research agenda to this nascent movement and began delving into the generally unhelpful state of the law regarding plant closings. I also began listening to stories about the impact of deindustrialization on hard-hit Tennessee factory workers and local communities.

One result of that work was an article on deindustrialization that I tried to adapt to what I saw as the work of a bottom-up public intellectual. (5) I intentionally tried to craft the article in a way that might prove useful to people who were laboring under the threat of a plant closing and who needed a broad survey of legal strategies that they or their lawyers might want to consider as tools in their attempt to respond. Once the article was published, I sent out reprints beyond the legal academy and learned over the years that some people did indeed make use of it. I suppose it goes without saying that the riptide of deindustrialization was most definitely not stopped.

In any event, as my community partners and I began more closely to study what was happening in our local economy, we found something unexpected. Most of the plants that were closing their doors in Tennessee were not actually winding up business; they were moving away to other places. At that time, the destination of choice was most often the maquiladora export processing zones of northern Mexico. This discovery propelled us into researching the maquiladoras, and we soon realized that what we had originally thought to be a local or national problem was in fact a global one.

The next phase of the work was tremendously exciting, both because we were learning so fast and because the horizon opening up before us was so wide and international in scope. Together with partners in labor unions, community organizations, and religious groups, and also working in concert with national activist networks to which these local partners were able to give me credible introductions, I had the heady experience of moving into a whole new arena of work and thought. For instance, we learned from local grassroots people in Mexico and the Caribbean about structural adjustment policies imposed on developing countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). We were introduced to the neo-liberal gospel that had come to dominate United States trade policy and to allies in other countries around the world who were mobilizing to oppose that gospel. We also listened as many Tennessee factory workers laid the blame on "those Mexicans" when they saw their jobs exported south to the maquiladoras, and we became concerned that workers in the United States were in urgent need of more internationalist perspectives on the changes that were sweeping through their lives.

In response to these developments, our coalition began trying to find a way to apply the educational philosophy of the Highlander Research and Education Center (Highlander or Center)--one of our coalition's founding members--to the challenging situation now confronting factory workers in the state. Since the 1930s, Highlander has worked with emerging leaders of popular movements in the United States South, carrying on adult education for social change in a range of fascinating contexts. (6) Concentrating its efforts in Appalachia and the Deep South, Highlander has in different periods worked with labor unions, the civil rights movement, and grassroots environmental justice efforts. Today, the Center continues working in all strands of this tradition, while it also works to welcome the region's new Latino immigrants and help them build bridges to other people and movements in the region. (7)

Highlander's philosophy is akin to and intertwined with traditions of educacion popular (or "popular education") from the global South. (8) The...

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