Review of Bread and Roses (2000) by Laurie E — 14 Apr 2007

It's the sort of thing we pretend not to know. There are jobs in America that pay a pittance. We need them done, but we're not going to pay for them. Not if we can avoid it.

I've done some pretty awful jobs in my day, too, back when I was still able to work at all. I worked fast food, ye Gods, and we talked about organizing, but none of us knew how to go about starting it. We didn't know what union would've taken us on, and Port Angeles is hardly a hotbed of union activity anyway.

I did hotel housekeeping, too. I made $5.25 an hour, about the same as the characters in this film did for office housekeeping. There's no way to raise a family on it, but that's okay according to some people, because you're not supposed to. I guess a substantial portion of the population just isn't going to be able to have kids, by that reasoning.

A lot of people go on about immigration, but how many of them are willing to try to raise a family on the wages paid for the kind of jobs illegal immigrants end up taking? Not to mention sending money home to a family in another country. Characters in this film take the gritty, unpleasant jobs, and at that, we don't see the worst of the jobs filled by illegal immigrants in the US. I mean, none of these people are migrant farmworkers, and the one person who spent time as a prostitute managed to (mostly) not be anymore.

People live and die on $5.25 an hour--well, not as often anymore, because minimum wage is going up. Then again, companies (I'm looking at you, Wal-Mart) can get away with paying illegal immigrants below minimum wage, because if they complain, they get deported. The system needs fixing; unionizing just might be an important way to do it.