Forty
million persons have no medical insurance in the richest country
in the world, the United States. Among the uninsured are recent
immigrants, who often work at wages below the minimum allowed
by law while immigration quotas are not relaxed to allow badly
needed unskilled laborers into the country legally. In Bread
and Roses, British director Ken Loach focuses on nonunion
Los Angeles janitors who in 1999 earn $5.75 per hour without
benefits. When the film begins, Maya (played by Pilar Padilla)
is illegally transported across the border from México. Since
her sister could not come up with all the money for the passage,
she is forced to go to a seedy apartment to have sex with
one of the two Mexican drivers. After escaping while he takes
a shower, Maya locates her sister Rosa (played by Elpidia
Carrillo), who in turn finds her a cleaning job with Angel,
a janitor company in a downtown high-rise office building.
While on the job, she observes her supervisor, Perez (played
by George Lopez), arbitrarily fire an elderly Salvadoreña
for arriving late without her glasses. Soon, a nice man asks
to be smuggled in her trash bin to evade pursuing security
guards. The man, Sam Shapiro (played by Adrien Brody), is
a union organizer. Making the rounds of janitors in their
homes, he explains at Rosa’s home that in 1982 union janitors
in Los Angeles earned $8.50 per hour with benefits, whereas
in 1999 the Angel company underbids union janitor companies
by paying below-minimum wages. Rosa is hostile and orders
him to leave the home. Although Rosa is legally in the country,
many workers are undocumented and fearful. Maya, nevertheless,
decides to participate in the union drive, which grows as
more workers are discharged. Eventually, Maya is fired when
Rosa rats on her and others who want union wages. Among those
fired is Maya’s good friend Rubén (played by Alonso Chavez),
who desperately needs money to match a grant to attend law
school. Eventually, Angel capitulates after the union organizers
pull several stunts, culminating in a march with pickets into
the building serviced by Angel, whereupon arrests of the protesters
appear on television. The fingerprints of Rosa, who earlier
robbed a cash register to help Rubén, match those on file
for the robbery, so she is deported.
Several
important points are made in the film. Rosa, who sent remittances
to feed Maya and her family in México, admits that she came
up with the money and secured Maya her job by turning tricks.
Rosa, it turns out, identified the workers seeking unionization
to get a higher-paying job with Angel, a company that clearly
violates the Fair Labor Standards Act by paying below-minimum
wages and even flouts a court order to allow workers time
off for lunch. Angel, of course, was calculating that there
would be no sympathy for janitors; indeed, one janitor says
to another early in the film, "When we put on uniforms, we
become invisible." But one meaning of the word "strike" is
to become visible. In order to inspire and to train workers
for demonstrations, Shapiro shows a video of the success of
the 1990 Justice for Janitors strike at Century City, Los
Angeles, the very event on which Bread and Roses
is based. At the rally inside the office building, Shapiro
reminds the workers of the "bread and roses" demand for decent
wages and management respect by the 30,000 textile mill workers
of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the first multiethnic strike
of men and women in American history in 1912 protested wage
cuts and won after two months of support from the townspeople.
In Bread and Roses, Angel capitulates even while
the arrested demonstrators are being processed in jail. The
film’s tagline hints at the ending: "The balance of power
is about to change." With subtitles in English and Spanish,
as the characters slip in and out of the two languages, speaking
"Spanglish," Bread and Roses offers a powerful
glimpse at how immigrants and janitors are unlawfully exploited
and what unions can do to help. Accordingly, Bread and
Roses has been nominated by the Political Film Society
for best film exposé, best film promoting democracy (specifically,
industrial democracy), and best film on human rights for the
year 2001. MH
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