Shop talk

Duration: 83

Year Published: 1980

Creator: Institute for Research in History

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: A documentary film about a New York City lithographic plant that was unionized in the fall of 1979 in response to new management practices. The plant, family-owned for two generations, was sold to a conglomerate which promptly introduced new equipment and insisted on the use of time clocks. Faced with the anonymity of corporate ownership, the impoverishment of the quality of work through automation and general economic insecurity, the workers also had to come to terms with the limitations of American trade-unionism.