Conv. B2: Nice post and clip for talking about working women

If I had received this earlier, I would have used this tomorrow and put the environment clip and news articles back one class, as this is very relevant to yesterday's holiday, The Day of  the Working Woman, which has received a lot of coverage in Spain in the media. We will use it when enough of you see it.This short blurb is about a historically significant American working woman. Do you know any similar historical female figures in Spain?

Crystal Lee Sutton

(1940-2009)  

  

Crystal Lee Sutton is the woman on whom the movie Norma Rae was based.

In 1973 Crystal Lee was 33 and a mother of three working at the J.P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C .  She was making $2.65 an hour folding towels. The poor working conditions she and her fellow employees suffered compelled her to join forces with labor organizer Eli Zivkovich, and attempt to unionize the J.P. Stevens employees.

  "Management and others treated me as if I had leprosy," said Crystal. She received threats and was finally fired from her job. But before she left, she took one final stand, filmed verbatim in the 1979 film Norma Rae. "I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word UNION on it in big letters, got up on my work table, and slowly turned it around. The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet..."

 Sutton was physically removed from the plant by police, but the result of her actions was staggering.  The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) won the right to represent the workers at the plant and, in 1977, Sutton was reinstated to her job and awarded back wages.  She went back to work for two days "just to prove a point" before she quit. ACTWU hired her as a spokeswoman and an organizer, a job she held for a decade.

 In 1988 Crystal earned her certification as a nursing assistant from Alamance Community College in Graham, N.C. 

 After being diagnosed with brain cancer, Crystal had to struggle with her insurance company because they delayed potentially life-saving medication. In 2009 Crystal Lee Sutton died in Burlington, N.C. at age 68. 

 "It is not necessary I be remembered as anything, but I would like to be remembered as a woman who deeply cared for working women, the working poor and the poor people of the U.S. and the world."

And the movie trailer:

First a few vocabulary items for video clip:
- on her own = alone, without help
- mill = factory, especially for steel, flour or textiles (besides meaning "molino")
- ain't = slang word used by working classes for all forms of auxiliaries"be" or "have"
-a fish out of water = an idiom in English similar to Spanish
-  to stand up for what's right = dar la cara
- Off the premises! Off the property (particularly referring to a work place or public institution.)

 Norma Rae

the trailer

Click here.  

AND DON'T FORGET TO ALSO SEE THE VIDEO CLIP AND EXERCISES ON THE ENVIRONMENT.