Union Maids
Directed by Julia Reichert, Jim Klein, and Miles Mogulescu
Reichert interviews three “Union Maids” on their experiences as organizing women of the Labor movement. Fighting for humanitarian rights, these radical workers reflect on their lives filled with purpose and struggle. Frustrated by the privileged class’ participation in the women’s movement and caught up in race and gender discrimination within class warfare, their voices echo and contextualize many social justice issues today. 1976, DCP, 48 min.
The Last Truck: The Closing of a GM Plant
Directed by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
Workers describe the death of a GM plant as the last truck comes down the line two days before Christmas in 2008. Interviews with talented, experienced tradespeople abandoned in the wake of change reveal the multifaceted impact of the loss of livelihood, purpose, and friends. Reichert chronicles the reopening of the plant a decade later in her new, Oscar-nominated film American Factory, screening on February 22. 2009, DCP, 40 min.
A conversation about the film with community engagement specialist Johnny Howard and labor organizer KaeJae Johnson, facilitated by Peter Rachleff of the East Side Freedom Library, follows the screening.
Johnny Howard moved to St. Paul in the early 1980s to work at the Ford truck plant. After plants had closed in Ohio, Michigan, California, numerous auto workers were displaced, Howard among them. Like many of them, he became an activist in UAW Local 879. Howard left the Ford plant before it closed in 2011 to become a community organizer in Frogtown.
KaeJae Johnson is an internal organizer with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota. She grew up in Chicago and relocated from Milwaukee to Minnesota. Johnson has worked in the labor movement in Illinois and Wisconsin. She is a student at the New Brookwood Labor College, which meets weekly at East Side Freedom Library to advance the immediate and long-term goals of the labor movement. New Brookwood Labor College strives to address racial, economic, and social imbalances of power by educating workers into their class.
Peter Rachleff is the co-executive director of East Side Freedom Library. Rachleff earned his PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981, writing his dissertation about the interactions of white and African American workers in Richmond, Virginia, during and after Reconstruction. He taught at Macalester College from 1982 to 2012 and co-founded the East Side Freedom Library with Beth Cleary in 2013.
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