‘A reminder of why we have unions’: Matewan writer and director on the film’s lessons for the labor movement

John Sayles's 1987 film, which dramatizes a 1920 labor conflict, shows how class solidarity can overcome prejudice

When John Sayles, a student at Williams College taking time off from his summer factory job, was hitchhiking during the summer of 1970 in West Virginia, it was often coal miners who picked him off the main interstate highways.

At the time, miners were amid the wake of a contentious union election within the United Mine Workers of America. Fierce tensions had led to the murder of union reform candidate Joseph Yablonski and his wife in December 1969.