Hacker CinemaMaster Hands
Master Hands
1936 · Film · documentary · 33 min
Documentary short film showing the production of cars at a Chevrolet factory in the mid 1930s.
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3 comments on Hacker News
If you've never seen it, watch "Master Hands".[1] This is a very good movie of auto manufacturing in the 1930s.
Those workers went on strike a few years after that, in 1939, and won. That ended the "Chrysler Speed Up Initiative".
[1] https://archive.org/details/masterhandscomplete4kh264
Where humans and heavy machinery interact, there have always been financial incentives to capital to look the other way over safety concerns. There's some really great footage from GM plants in the 30's from a film they made "Master Hands"[0] that shows workers handling red-hot cranks with hand tools in massive forges and other working conditions that would get them immediately shut down by OSHA today. Those regulations came out of the labor movements of the New Deal and the war/post-war.
I think the most damning thing is that cases of black lung are actually on the rise in Appalachia in the 21st century because companies have managed to slacken worker protections for coal miners.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc
This is spam. Someone copied an out of copyright industrial film from the Internet Archive and "monetized" it on YouTube.[1]
The Internet Archive has a good selection of other Jam Handy films. Recommended: "American Maker" and "Master Hands". There's also a long series of Chevrolet-sponsored films on brakes, suspensions, differentials, engines, and such.
[1] https://archive.org/details/HowaWatc1949