Is there life after coal, what future for the collier?
The scab and the hardliner both, wear the blue scars of the miner
Rising up now from the earth, we’re branded and we’re blinded
The sunlight and the dole queue boast, the blue scars of the miner
Is there anything but drink, drugs and last reminders
A single tear drop rolling down, the blue scars of the miner
–Lyrics from the “Blue Scars of the Miner,” The Freakons, 2022.
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Rails, Jails, & Trolleys is a feature-length documentary, directed by Henna Mann and produced by the South Asian Studies Institute (SASI) at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. The documentary highlights the timeline of the historic Farmers’ Movement in India and the Canadian diaspora’s response to it.
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Editor’s Note: We select a featured essay from each issue of Labor: Studies in Working Class History. We’ve never featured a film review, and so it’s great to make available Richard Wells’ essay, Class Politics and the Filmmakers’s Craft in Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from issue 19:3 on the film Peterloo, released in 2018.
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Betrayal: When the Government Took Over the Teamsters Union, a recent (2019) documentary by George Bogdanich, asks critical questions about the decades long oversight of the Teamsters by the federal government. The documentary argues that the 1989 consent decree which put in place the Independent Review Board (IRB) until 2020 was a dramatic case of federal overreach, gutted strong locals, violated free speech and was a self-interested and self-perpetuating power and money machine for the law firms hired to run the board.
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