Tag: labour

Movie review: Made in Dagenham

A bit behind, as we saw this a while ago…

**½ Made in Dagenham (November 2010) – Theatre
Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins. Set in Britain in 1968, shows how women workers at a Ford plant achieved pay equity with men though labour action.

She says: Really positive view of history that you realize must have been streamlined somewhat for dramatic purposes, but still makes for a pretty engaging movie.
He says: It was mostly good, but it was slow in parts.

The movie ends with the point that having achieved this milestone, the concept of “equal pay for equal work” for women spread throughout Britain, then through other industrialized countries. Of course, that’s for unionized jobs with clear pay scales. The picture is a bit murkier in other cases, as per this recent chart comparing men’s and women’s wages in US.

Gender gap in wages (US Bureau of Labor Statistics) shows men with higher wages in all sectors - management, services, sales, construction, and transportation

“Surviving” the TV writer’s strike

It’s been somewhat amusing reading some TV columnists on the strike, using adjectives like “dire” and “desperate”, that seem just a wee bit strong to describe a temporary weakness in entertainment options. Truthfully, it’s taken me a while to really notice. After all, shows didn’t run out of scripts immediately. But an awful lot of them have reached that point now. So what am I doing?

Well, probably watching a little less TV, for one! I’m doing more workouts to fitness videos instead of to prerecorded DVR programming (on the treadmill). Maybe I’m reading a little more. But of course, I haven’t given up TV entirely. I’m still watching:

  • CBC stuff. They have four new dramas. I’ve checked them all out, and have stuck with two (the low-rated ones): Jpod, which is weird, but I read the book; and MVP, which has its moments of awkwardness, but is mostly soapy fun. Then there’s the stalwart Marketplace, which I really think more people would benefit from watching.
  • Jon Stewart. It’s not quite the same—he’s calling it A Daily Show instead of The Daily Show—but it remains worth watching in this time of particularly interesting US races for the White House.
  • Documentaries. On PBS, CBC, CTV, and even the Documentary Channel. Often somewhat depressing programming, is the thing, but this week’s DocZone documentary is about Happiness, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
  • Reruns that are new to me. Only this year have I regularly been watching Bones. Lately they’ve been rerunning episodes from past seasons. They’re all new to me, and it’s fun to catch up. (They should start doing that with How I Met Your Mother.)
  • DVDs. Done rewatching My So-Called Life, working on WKRP, with more on standby. And just rented Battlestar Galactica; let’s see how I’ll like that.

I hope the strike doesn’t end until the writers get what they want. Their demands seem perfectly reasonable, the networks very greedy. Be great to have some new episodes back, but in the meantime, I’m “coping” just fine.