Headed to Chicago for Labor Notes 2024? Know a journalist or other media worker who is?

National Writers Union / Freelance Solidarity Project host a happy hour together with Chicago Headline Club on Saturday 4/20, 7pm CT. Come hang! Sleeping Village on Belmont Ave. We’re bringing the pizza.

RSVP: https://bit.ly/mwhh

#LaborNotes2024 #LaborNotes #mediaWorker #happyhour

April FSP film club! — this Sun., Apr. 14, 8pm ET

April’s online screening is Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, in 1979 a record-setter for cost in African film.

Staged on a replica ship in an abandoned factory, the film renders Middle Passage and French colonialism as song-and-dance agitprop, jumping through time & place without set change. This is militant cinema on a budget, “a musical comedy and a musical tragedy,” in Hondo’s own words.

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdX7hzndQdfSnYAV7qxdj7c8QTf9zsZtah48Z0t3jMualTIVg/viewform

JOURNALISM FUTURES The Fight Ahead
Tuesday 9 April, 7pm ET/4pm PT

Brandi Collins-Dexter, Natl Cntr on Race & Digital Justice
Matt Pearce, Media Guild of the West
Victor Pickard, UPenn Media, Inequality & Change Cntr
moderator Kate Harloe, Natl Writers Union / Freelance Solidarity Project

https://bit.ly/journalism-futures

December FSP film club! — this Sun., Dec. 17, 8pm ET

This online screening brings together several films touching themes of food, family, and wealth redistribution. The main one will be Jumana Manna’s Foragers, which follows West Bank Palestinians harvesting herbs in defiance of occupation edict.

For opening short we have the Per Ahlin cartoon Christopher’s Christmas Mission, about a postal worker stealing presents from rich people and giving them to the poor.

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5dnmBv1xm6EsicphiVjrsGwJtlgnvjKqi4MsrO-nI8tmkqQ/viewform

October FSP film club! — this Sun., Oct. 8, 8pm ET

Our Halloween screening will be Videodrome, David Cronenberg’s cautionary tale about working for media companies.

A sleazy TV producer (James Woods, essentially playing himself) discovers a clandestine broadcast with enough horror to thrill the most desensitized viewer … and then finds the violent forces behind it altering his own body. Funnier than you might expect, as Cronenberg often is.

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeMLgz0-lhkHwA7tjXwMNJpPgkmFcvqPiMKScHoncYSQhxKKA/viewform

September FSP film club! — this Sun., Sep. 10, 8pm ET

This month’s political-cinema screening will be Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film, where an oil-company executive gets dispatched to buy up a remote Scottish village on behalf of his weird boss (Burt Lancaster!) but then discovers a life beyond capitalist acquisition.

Describing this one as “sweatercore.”

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdUOvf_a3RnYhv6AibPWUIlW-GaDbt03fuhTdYMVSg-iyABbg/viewform

We urge Gov. Hochul to sign New York’s now twice-passed Freelance Isn’t Free Act — and to provide the leadership ensuring that it and all protections secured in law for the state’s workers will be enforced.
https://nysfocus.com/2023/08/16/roberta-reardon-labor-wage-theft

#FreelanceIsntFree #labor #solidarity #NewYork

August FSP film club! — this Sun., Aug. 13, 8pm ET

We watch Working Class, Tsui Hark’s 1985 film about a rebellion at a Hong Kong ramen factory, in the online screening this month.

Via Tsui’s characteristic genre-collapsing style, the movie is somehow both a screwball romantic comedy and a revolutionary tract on egging your boss. The old organizing tactic of collective sick days gets its own musical number. Chaplin would approve, we bet.

RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdWCCae_xuzk7nYd6OlGYIYwIS8QY0kgubCDsqAdEFZ-8ML0g/viewform

Join Zoe Hu, Jennifer Wilson, Nora Caplan-Bricker, E. Tammy Kim, and Adam Dalva this Thursday for “Labor and Literary Criticism.” Sponsored by us together with CUNY’s Newmark School and the National Book Critics Circle.
https://bookcritics.org/event/labor-and-literary-criticism-a-panel-discussion/

Thurs. Aug. 10, 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT
Free registration: https://tinyurl.com/laborpanel23

#mediaWorker #freelance #union #labor #solidarity

7 PM ET / 4 PM PT on Aug. 10, Thursday next week: “Labor and Literary Criticism,” a conversation between E. Tammy Kim, Jennifer Wilson, Nora Caplan-Bricker, and Zoe Hu, Adam Dalva moderating — co-sponsored by CUNY’s Newmark School, the National Book Critics Circle, and us.

More about the panel: https://bookcritics.org/event/labor-and-literary-criticism-a-panel-discussion/

You’re invited! Sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/laborpanel23