"Pop art" by Ruth Hartnup, CC BY 2.0
Big pop culture – television, movies, and songs that reach widespread audiences – is a battleground of class conflict. One set of fights is about the worksite – hiring, pay, hours, benefits, and safety – where unions are already engaged through organizing members, negotiating contracts, and striking when necessary. Another set of fights is about who gets to make the dominant meanings for American workers, unions, and fair labor. Shaping the creative decisions about the stories, characters, images, and sounds that represent workers and that influence how audiences imagine unions and working is an area where unions are largely absent.
From Popular Front to Conservative Capture of Pop Culture
To strategize effectively, we need to distinguish labor movement culture from pop culture. Labor movement culture refers to the practices used by unions to build solidarity among members: the slogans, songs, posters, and now social media posts that foster a sense of belonging and strengthen bonds within the labor movement. Pop culture, by contrast, is outward-facing. It consists of the movies, television shows, songs, novels, and other media that circulate across society and shape how the public imagines workers, unions, and class struggle.
In the past, unions and their efforts building labor movement culture played a more visible role in shaping how pop culture stories about work, unions, and collective struggle were portrayed. In the 1930s, unions and the captivating labor movement culture they created reached beyond organizing into pop culture. They shaped how Americans understood class, unions, and power. As a response to fascism, especially the German and Italian regimes, the great variety of unions, leftist groups, and socialist organizations agreed to stop clashing with each other and form a Popular Front to work together. While the Popular Front engaged in lobbying and political campaigning, their members and creative allies also wrote plays and radio shows, and published novels and short stories. Their ideas reached widespread audiences and shaped the way people understood work and power for a couple decades. The amazing movie, Salt of the Earth (1954), is an example of that influence.
Movie image from the 1954 movie, Salt of the Earth, which tells a story of collective action by men workers and women caretakers in a southwest company mining town. Screenshot of the Zinn Education Project image courtesy of author.
This pop cultural power shifted in the 1970s, when conservative organizations began efforts to make right-wing ideas and politics more appealing to a larger segment of the working class. Right-wing radio personalities and political groups have narrowed the cultural meaning of “legitimate American workers” to white, masculine, industrial and construction workers. Corporate lobbyists and conservative politicians then use this cultural formation to distract working-class voters from economic policies (e.g. taxes, investment regulations, banking changes) that actually hurt workers financially while opening more opportunities for wealthy people to accumulate even more income and wealth.
Norma Rae and the Fight Over Who Tells Workers’ Stories
The tension over who has the power to define “the American working class” is not abstract – it played out in concrete ways, including one mill worker’s battle over how her union and co-workers would be represented on screen. My book, Beyond Norma Rae, tells the story of how one woman fought for control over the representation of union workers and organizers in the 1979 movie Norma Rae.
The film tells the story of a Southern mill worker persuaded to lead a campaign to unionize her workplace. While the film’s focus on a single woman makes for compelling cinema, the framing erases a sixteen-year drive and thousands of workers whose organizing, risk-taking, and solidarity actually allowed the campaign to succeed. Crystal Lee Jordan Sutton, the real-life inspiration for the main character, understood this and fought to make sure the film reflected the shared effort of women and men, Black and white, who built the union together.
While unions often celebrate Norma Rae, the woman whose life it was based on did not want the movie made this way. I understand people want to cheer Norma Rae. Pop culture gives us almost no representations of union organizing campaigns. The few that exist often focus on the negative, including corruption or ineffectiveness. So, who wouldn’t want to applaud Norma Rae and its story of a northern organizer persuading a southern woman to change her ways, lead the union, and get a majority vote? Sutton – the woman whose life story was taken for the script.
Sutton understood that getting a movie about a union worker was not enough. She was a poor millhand in North Carolina who had been working since she was a teenager when she joined the Textile Workers Union of America’s (TWUA) southern organizing drive in the 1970s. But Sutton was no “country bumpkin.” When a director and two women producers contacted her with their “Crystal Lee” script, Sutton gave them feedback: you’re making the movie too much about me, but I did not start the drive and I was not the only one organizing and taking risks. Hollywood’s creative business people did not like that response.
TWUA postcard from 1980. Courtesy of the Crystal Lee Sutton Collection at Alamance Community College.
This all started with a 1973 interview about the TWUA drive, which had launched in 1963. The resulting piece, published in the New York Times Magazine, focused primarily on Sutton. The women’s liberation movement was growing at that time, which facilitated media by and about women. Two of the first women producers in Hollywood read the article and decided to make a “Crystal Lee” movie. It went forward in 1976 with a $5 million commitment from Twentieth Century-Fox.
Sutton became an obstacle to the movie these elite creative business people wanted to make. The project involved big money, so they were not interested in deviating from the successful formula: an underdog hero who becomes the lead in a positive change. But Sutton did not want that hyper-individualist focus. She knew that successful worker organizing and union building took thousands of people in constant collaboration and shared sacrifices. The story that the movie told, the meanings it made about the union and labor movement, were more important than just getting a movie about her. Sutton recognized there was power in pop culture.
When Sutton refused to sign the release to use her life story, the director and producers turned to legal workarounds that let them use it without her consent. They dug up every release Sutton had signed for other articles and television episodes, changed the name of the main character to Norma Rae, changed the name of the mill, and inserted language in the movie credits that said it was fictional.
Sally Field as Norma standing alone as the individual underdog hero. Screenshot of Norma Rae (1979) courtesy of author.
Upon the film’s release in 1979, Sutton did interviews explaining that she was “the real Norma Rae” and did not appreciate the film. In People magazine, Sutton described the stakes: “I wanted it to be a movie that was right – about the union, about what we went through. In the movie they make like it’s only me that’s important, and there were so many others.”
Pop Culture Should Be Labor’s Next Battleground
Creating a strong local union culture is challenging. Building national movement culture that encourages people to have a sense of belonging to get involved in organizing and campaigning is even harder, especially in a country as large as the United States. It probably seems like big pop culture is an extravagance that unions cannot waste time and money on.
But it is through big pop culture that dominant meanings are made, worldviews are developed, and widespread legitimacy is established. If evidence of hard work and long hours was enough to gain recognition and respect, nurse’s aides and farmworkers already would be well-paid.
The stakes in the arena of pop culture are not simply accuracy or style. Big movies, television shows, segments, songs, and commercials circulate repeatedly – even more through YouTube and social media. In this recirculation, pop culture, not straight material or economic realities, form people’s understanding of their society. These understandings influence how they vote, whether they join a union, who they see as legitimate labor.
Union leaders need more thoughtful strategies for the arena of pop culture. Tactics have to be big with a reach across millions, yet simple and direct with emotional resonance. There will be criticisms – pop culture is not nuanced analysis. But pop culture sways people in the potent realm of emotions. Emotions, not numbers, are the way into changing people’s perspective.
Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers (UAW) became a strong presence in labor movement culture with his “Eat the Rich” t-shirt and sharp critiques of “corporate greed.” He was even able to break into mainstream news coverage during the 2023 strike wave – even though coverage was often unfavorable to him and UAW, Fain had limited recognizability. Fain still has not, however, gotten any traction in big pop culture. When Christian Smalls was president of Amazon Labor Union and courted media coverage in 2022-23, the concept of “union drip” earned mainstream notice in magazines like Elle but did not build any serious pop circulation.
Shawn Fain, UAW President, speaking for a livestream on YouTube to announce collective bargaining negotiations about tiers, wages, profit sharing, and right to strike over plant closures. “How do working-class people build the power we need to win what we deserve? We need power… They look at me and they see some redneck from Indiana. They look at you and see someone they would never have over for dinner. They think they know us.” October 6, 2023. Screenshot of UAW YouTube video courtesy of the author.
We may be organizing our workplaces but we also got union drip #unionsforall. Screenshot of raiseupthesouth post on Instagram courtesy of author.
Meanwhile, Trump is a master of pop culture, which he has honed since his television career began in the 1980s. He expertly deploys the narrow, but emotionally potent, cultural appeal of “the American working class” as white, masculine, rough, industrial, and always under siege. He talks as if he is under siege just like they are, even as he makes billions of dollars from the presidency. This Trumpist dominance in pop culture has helped camouflage the administration’s plan to gut the very agencies and practices that serve working people. This is the reason the wealthy elite support him. Trump has cut taxes for their income brackets, their inheritance, and their financial investments. But he does nothing to improve the political leverage, economic standing, or labor conditions of wage workers.
Trump with hardhats and the emotional, psychological, and social appeal of the notion that men’s industrial steel jobs = real jobs. Screenshot of WTAE ABC 4 May 2025 segment courtesy of author.
Big pop culture has to be part of any union effort, especially to oppose Trump’s agenda. There must be a deliberate strategy to claim space in mainstream media – through repeated outreach to screenwriters, playwrights, bestselling authors, and television showrunners with compelling stories that can reach mass audiences. It means understanding how pop media works and how to use its emotional power, beyond the fragmented world of social media. Imagine a major concert or televised performance that highlights the diversity of today’s union workforce and uses music and choreography to represent collective action. Beyoncé did it with 1970s collective Black Power activism during the 2016 Superbowl Halftime Show.
Beyoncé and her dancers with Black Panther berets and Black Power afros and raised fists. Screenshot from Black Brazil Today courtesy of author.
The Popular Front cannot be replicated. Culture production was more simple and less expensive in the 1930s and 1940s. But it can be a model for activists who can encourage not just membership and a sense of belonging, but also build larger mainstream influence. Pop power makes all their organizing and lobbying more fruitful. We need a Tony-award-winning musical with big stars co-written by an established playwright. We need segments on television comedy shows (even as they are losing breadth of audience) that then become viral on TikTok (the secondary, often larger audience). We need a union and climate change organization to write a teleplay with real possibilities for production with Hulu. The labor movement needs power through pop culture.
Aimee Loiselle is an award-winning historian and assistant professor at Central Connecticut State University. Her book is Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
