ABSTRACT
Filmmakers throughout the world have now documented and dramatized the precariat, a vast global workforce of unorganized, underemployed, and often undocumented workers. This chapter consists of five case studies of emerging classes of precariat workers, most of whom have never been documented in film studies. The first group, American migrant labor, was featured in Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame in 1960, the program that led to forty years of subsequent exposés. The third section focuses on waste and recycling workers who operate in garbage dumps, home recycling factories, and shanty towns around the world. Wal-Mart workers make up one of the largest group of underpaid workers in America: they suffer from low pay, poor working conditions, and arbitrary work assignments. As activist and other cinematically conscious game-makers developed their products, the virtual worlds of video games have dramatized not only the workers of the precariat but a distinctive use of cinematic space and conventions. This fifth group of video games is documented in detail in this chapter for the first time. The history of the precariat has been told in its cinema, but its future is uncertain. We know with some certainty that before there was the term ‘precariat,’ there was a precariat. The precariat as potential strikebreakers has remained constant for generations, an irony of their lowly position: not holding a regular job makes any job attractive.
