Main Street

DC Labor FilmFest: Just Another Cog in the Machine

Unfortunately we didn’t get this done in time for the final showing of the excellent “Working Lunch” collection of short films, though the DC Labor FilmFest does have a few more films coming that you can still make it to. But we were able to ask John Wood, the maker of “Just Another Cog in the Machine,” a few questions about his film (via email – hence the British spellings).

It’s a particularly interesting case of how someone with basic equipment can make something, put it online, and see it spread around the world.

“Just another cog in the machine” is visually simple (and contains no speaking) but conceptually unexpected. Where did the idea come from?

To be honest, I stole the idea really. I’d seen a poem on YouTube called the Lost Generation, which runs backwards and forwards. I hadn’t realised the author actually pinched the idea themselves from an Argentinian election broadcast, and only found out about it when someone left me a YouTube comment about it (which was a nice bonus!). I didn’t want to speak on the camera (don’t like sound of my voice recorded!), so wanted a way to get words over quickly, and thought updating Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues video method for the Office Space age with a photocopier might be a neat way to get around having to say anything myself.

I have a day job working in comms for unions in the UK, so I see the centralised and corporate side of union campaigning. In this new online world though, I think we need to do a lot more to help support activists in using the powerful comms tools that they might not realise they have access to, to get their thoughts and creativity out there and sparking debate.

In my spare time I try to do personal projects here and there to help build other activists’ efforts in online communications (for example, I run a UK union blog aggregator at www.tigmoo.co.uk to help give new union bloggers more of an audience), and I wanted to do something simple and rough and ready to prove to myself that it was possible and not too difficult to put my own message out in online video, something I’d not really tried before.

The employers and governments we’re lobbying have huge budgets to produce materials about our disputes with them, which dwarf anything unions can pay for. But in the union movement we have millions of motivated and talented people, using their own creativity and good-enough technology, which could be more than a match for any big bucks ad agency. Activists can say things that their unions are too respectable to say, or get away with production that people might think too amateurish to reflect well on a national union. People used to working in old media might think we’d have 1,000 loose cannons, but I reckon if those loose cannons are pointing half way the right direction, those opposing us had better look out.

I was also looking for an excuse to try out a pocket tripod that I’d just inherited from my late uncle, a lifelong union activist in the print industry, and this seemed like a good idea.

Was it difficult to execute?

Not really. I had to print the script and flip it then print blank on the other side, so it would come out the right (wrong) way up, but it only needed 2 takes to get near enough to be good enough. By nature I’m too impatient to get anything perfect, and in any case my colleagues would probably have got annoyed with me telling them to keep quiet for any longer during my lunchbreak! I had to do a separate set on card to hold up, as the card wouldn’t go through the copier, which was a pain, but I made sure to recycle it all properly after!

Next, what kind of response has it gotten? Has it reached the audiences you intended, gone beyond them, reached unexpected places?

Weird - I’d never expected it to go so far, and it seems to have hit a chord (Limey spellings excepted). It got thousands of views in only a couple of days, but once LabourStart.org (an influential group of online union activists) decided to mention it in one of their mails, it leapt in a single day by maybe five thousand views and really started to be sent onwards. The labour movement is all about connections between people, and as people found something they could use it for, they started linking it on to other groups and then on again to other groups. So far it’s been shown offline at union meetings and organising drives in the UK, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. I’ve been having to upload high res versions to YouSendIt over and over to get them out to different people who’ve gotten in touch. It’s been on community cable TV in Australia, and as well as showing at the DC Labor Film Fest (which is an amazing honour that I was really thrilled about!), it’s going to the Canadian Labour International Film Festival next month.

Has it been useful as an organizing tool? Do you find it makes people open to a pro-union message?

To be honest, I don’t know so well - the internet makes a good echo chamber and it’s hard to know exactly what’s happened. YouTube has had some nice comments from non-members, saying they had thought about unions a little differently as a result, but most of the feedback I’ve had has been internal to the union movement around the world. The music (courtesy of Moby, who kindly makes a load of his tracks available for free to independent film makers) swells nicely from being very downbeat and strengthens the emotion of the change of direction and the punchline, and I think that’s been probably the biggest reason so many people inside the movement have responded to it. I saw some lovely comments on Facebook from unionists in Sweden talking about how they cried watching it (I’ll assume it’s a compliment and they weren’t crying over the production values, or more embarrassingly to me, the typo that I didn’t notice). I think that as the story connects the worst cases unionists have to deal with and the best outcomes they can achieve, it can have an emotional pull to it for people who are commited to getting everyone a fairer deal at work.

Of course, just getting a union in the workplace is not the magic switch. It just means that the staff there are now empowered to make the changes they need by themselves, and that they’ll have a long and possibly difficult road ahead of them, but I wanted to make something that appealed to people looking for that light at the end of the tunnel. Unionism is only the first step in the process, but if you don’t take that first step right, you’ll never be going in the right direction. The negative lobbying in the US around the Employee Free Choice Act seems to have focused on the process side of unions, the means, what you have to sign and how it gets done, and not on actually why we want and need unions in the first place - because people want the ends those means can bring - respect, fulfillment, dignity, development. So I don’t think it’s too big a sin to skip over the process for once in telling a story.