Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer
Featuring Utah Phillips and Roger Baldwin
Running time 1 hour and 28 minutes
Unrated
Opening at Merograph in NYC on April 29th, select theaters May 1st for International Workers Day, and on VOD May 31st

by Benjamin Leonard, Best Boy

“Gather ‘round fellow workers. We got a goddamn revolution to talk about!"

I grew up in a rural Michigan community in the ‘80s. The majority of jobs were with small,  independent farms or in some way supporting the auto industry. My father commuted an hour each way, every day, to be a union auto worker at one of the big three in Lansing. While my family was far from “well-off,” it was easy to see the advantages that my father’s union job provided us. With medical insurance and fair pay practices such as time-and-a-half for Saturdays and double-time on Sundays, our financial hardships generally only occurred during layoffs and strikes. Those times were infrequent and unpredictable, but that’s when I really understood what his union membership did for us.

All of this is to say, I was not unaware of any of the ideologies nor much of the history that is presented in Stewart Bird’s and Deborah Shaffer’s 1979 documentary The Wobblies. However, I understand that I’m a rare case these days and that all of this could be very new to the general public. 

The name itself, Wobblies, is the nickname for the Industrial Workers of the World, an international, socialist, and anarcho-syndicalist labor organization founded in Chicago in 1905 with the goal of organizing all workers under one union to protect themselves against the capitalist regime. The film is mostly made up of contemporary (1979) interviews with various people that were involved in the American movement in the 1910s. They are primarily men of European ancestry, but there are a few interviews with women and one Black man who gives a fairly in-depth telling of the 1914 Longshoremen’s Strike in Philadelphia. Other stories include lumber workers in the pacific northwest, California agricultural workers, and railway workers. Train-hopping was not an uncommon means of travel back in those days and, per one story, railway workers would kick people off the train if they didn’t have a red-card (IWW union membership card). 

Other storytelling methods employed in the documentary include: newspaper clippings, songs, old news reels, songs, dramatic readings of court proceedings, songs, photographs, songs, and cartoons. There are also interviews with more known personalities, Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU) and Utah Phillips (activist and folk singer), but they are not provided any sort of celebrity status in the film as the focus was on the average, everyday struggles. (Phillips might have a song in there though.)

Overall, the 4K restoration is amazing. When I first started the film the sound and picture was so crisp and clear that I forgot that it was from 1979. I was starting to think the style was a bit dated until I quickly looked back and was reminded of its age. For those interested in the scanning specs, Kino’s press release states that it “ was digitally scanned by the DuArt Digitization Center in full 4k resolution using the DFT Scanity. For the ultimate equality, the original cut ABC&D rolls of negative were the source for scanning and conforming into 4K 16-bit DPX files. The DPX media represents the new “digital negative” and was subsequently color graded and restored to create the archival and distribution masters. The new archival master is stored in MOMA’s Film Preservation Center.”

The Wobblies isn’t just some tale out of the past, though. Interest has increased worldwide, especially due to the inequities laid bare by the pandemic. In the last decade, membership numbers in both the US and UK have quadrupled. I highly recommend checking out this film. It’s informative and enjoyable being both a look at our past and perhaps towards our future. Then, maybe, you’d be interested in looking at the International Workers of the World website as well.

“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth.”