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11 Lab. Stud. J. 162 (1986-1987)
Shout Youngstown

handle is hein.journals/labstuj11 and id is 162 raw text is: LABOR STUDIES JOURNAL/FALL 1986 Film Previews Shout Youngstown!, 45 min., color, various video formats. Directed by Carold Greenwald and Dorie Krauss. Distributed by The Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, New York, N.Y 10019. Rental fee, $75; pur- chase, $395. Many cities throughout the nation have faced corporate disinvest- ment and deindustrialization. Most have resigned themselves that plant closings and the deterioration of their communities are somehow part of a natural economic order. However, this was not the case in Youngstown. The story of Youngstown's struggle to save its steel mills-both its achievements and disappointments-has been dramatically told by Dorie Krauss and Carold Greenwald in their documentary Shout Youngstown!. Using interviews combined with still photos and archival footage, set to the original music of Si Kahn, the documentary outlines how com- munity activists and local steelworkers overcame both individual inertia and institutional resistance in order to gain acceptance of the principle of community ownership. In each successive plant closing, Krauss and Greenwald depict the collective outrage and changing consciousness of a community scorned by absentee corporate managers. Claims in the documentary by David Roderick, president of U.S. Steel, that the mill closings were necessary because of unavailability of capital, inadequate depreciation, or environ- mental requirements seem vacuous when juxtaposed against a historical accounting by steelworkers of corporate neglect and malfeasance in oper- ating the steel mills. Failing to accept the corporate justifications and inevitability of the plant shutdown, the documentary describes how the steelworkers organized various coalitions, lawsuits, and even direct actions that had as their focus community ownership. Yet each tactic met resistance in the form of governmental or judicial decisions and succumbed to the politics of postponement and evasion. While unsuccessful in actually achieving community ownership, Youngstown's struggle was not vain. As workers in the documentary tes- tify, messing around with free enterprise is at best a complicated propo- sition, in which you cannot expect corporate America and its political functionaries to roll over and accept community ownership on the scale suggested in Youngstown. Nevertheless, Youngstown's fight against shut- downs has advanced the thinking of other communities facing plant clos- 162

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