LABOR HISTORY REVIEW, VOLUME 43, NO. 4, 2002
A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay makes a fierce claim for the dignity
and rights of the welfare-poor-as-workers. This film chronicles the efforts
of participants in New York City’s Work Experience Program (WEP)—public
assistance recipients forced to work for their benefits at dead-end, below minimum
wage placements—to organize for decent pay, benefits, worker protections,
and, as one organizer put it, the right to stand up and say “I am somebody.”
A Day’s Work follows three organizers, each of whom achieves a vivid
presence on the screen. One of them, Juan Nicolau, 41, explains that he wants
to be like his father, a building superintendent, “a working man, a caring
man.” To Nicolau this means, “I want to put my signature on the
way I work, like an artist puts his signature on his work.” But this film
does not foreground the intimate lives of its subjects. A Day’s Work is
a layered film that moves from the personal outward, as the protagonists, Nicolau,
Jackie Marte, and Juan Galan, build activist identities and coalitions among
their constituents. These three affiliate with organizations devoted to workers’
rights (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and
Community Voices Heard (CVH)), lobby for legislation in the interests of WEP
workers, work the halls of city council, and lead worker demonstrations in the
city. Their projects and the thrust of their efforts are like those of labor
organizers everywhere. The fact that the worker-activists are public assistance
recipients, people typically defined in this culture as lazy freeloaders, gives
the film the status of a paradigm-shifting work. It thoroughly challenges prevailing
definitions of both “welfare recipients” and “workers.”
At the same time, the film sharpens suspicions that a lot of politicians are
every bit as craven as prevailing images of them suggest. We see city council
members sleeping during workers’ testimony, then waking up to grandstand
against legislation providing basic grievance rights for these workers. When
Giuliani explains why he is vetoing the WEP-worker-sponsored Grievance Procedure
and Transitional Jobs Bill in the winter of 2000, he piously lectures the activists
who sit before him, people who worked for two years to bring this legislation
before the city council: “One of the worst things government does for
people is to give them false expectations. We have lots of people in New York
City that are the victims of government giving people the sense that they live
in an unreal world and then the realities of life crash down on them and they
find themselves unhappy, depressed, and unsuccessful.” A WEP worker shouts
out, “You don’t know anything about us.”
More than anything, A Day’s Work demonstrates how activism becomes a
source of clarity, work experience and empowerment for the three organizers.
Juan Galan points out that without activism and coalition, passersby see the
workers as “chumps,” sweeping the street for their pitiful benefits.
As unprotected individuals, WEP workers are also in serious danger: reports
circulate about rapes and even death on the job. Most galling, WEP workers are
counseled at job-search trainings not to tell prospective employers that they
are in WEP, even though the program is supposed to function as the best route
to real employment. Nicolau speaks for all worker-recipients when he asks, “
So what good is WEP if you can’t mention it?”
A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay displays the special character of worker-recipient
militancy through the words of an organizer: “They like to keep us in
check with their big stick of sanctions. I think we’ve got to keep them
in check with the grievance procedure.” When CVH refers Jackie Marte to
a transitional, non-profit program that actually provides decent resources,
dignity, collegiality, leadership training and a job she believes in, activism
truly seems its own reward.
A Day’s Work concludes with properly mixed emotions and mixed personal and political outcomes. In the end, public policies have not become more humane; the poor have not prevailed. But the film is nevertheless a bracing testament to what activism can accomplish. Nicolau speaks from experience when he suggests that if only all the WEP workers showed up at city Hall, together, objecting to the wretched work conditions they all faced, then the chances for change would be great.
— Rickie Solinger, Independent Scholar
Labor History, vol. 43, no. 4, 2002