Sudbury

May Day Movie - Memory and Muscle

3:00pm
- 4:30pm
Friday May 1 2015

On May Day, a day set aside to celebrate working class power, join us for a viewing of Memory and Muscle, a documentary about the 1965 wildcat postal strike. These postal workers were not organized in a business union and had no collective bargaining "rights". What they did have was autonomy, militancy and solidarity. This strike is also a good example of women workers struggling within an overall context of class struggle, before middle class feminism began to dominate women's struggles. Another interesting aspect of this strike is that it united English and French workers. So, this strike is an important one in the history of workers, and it's also timely: as postal workers are coming under renewed attack, we need to start thinking about how we can best practice solidarity with these workers at this moment in history. To that end, we'll also have a report from a postal worker in Sudbury.

What defines the importance of this strike is that it was led by workers themselves. To emphasize this point, we'll be making a short presentation on the importance of autonomy in workers' struggles -- even in unionized workplaces -- and a critque of how the film is resolved. The film is 49 minutes long and we'll have a discussion afterwards.

We apologize for the terrible timing of this event, but the library is not open late on Fridays. Tell your boss you're S.I.C.K. (Sudden Interest in anti-Capitalist Knowledge) and come down to the lbrary for an afternoon of inspired militancy!