A Carmel filmmaker focuses on labor, class and gender in documentary shorts.

Vivian Price is a filmmaker, a union electrician and an expert on labor studies, who just “settled down” in Carmel in May 2020. A Cincinnati-born professor of interdisciplinary studies at CSU Dominguez Hills, she comes from a Jewish family that barely escaped Hitler in Vienna.

After getting her master’s degree in history, Price started working in factories – electronics, pharmaceuticals, a steel mill. Eventually, she became an electrician. She picked up filmmaking in her late 20s, after moving to California. Her first works were shorts about women in construction.

The first feature was initially set as part of her PhD dissertation – “Politics and Society at the University of California, Irvine” – but became an independent project. She applied for a grant, hired someone to teach her about script writing and then film editing. In 2000, she released Hammering It Out. a documentary about women hired to build I-105, the Century Freeway. The movie took her to festivals across the U.S. and abroad, and that led to another feature on women in nontraditional jobs, Transnational Tradeswomen (2006), followed by Harvest of Loneliness (2010) with Gilbert Gonzalez, this time about male migrant workers in the Bracero Program.

Weekly: How does a history grad end up working as an electrician?

Price: I graduated in a recession, my parents were refugees. I had a degree but I wasn’t really middle class. Manufacturing jobs were already leaving the U.S., but they were better paid than non-unionized female-dominated jobs.

The misogyny was pretty big. It was just shocking, the things that came out of men’s mouths, that they were perfectly capable of saying. But I was interested in what’s happening on the assembly line, the way the factory culture affects workers’ personality and their ability to stand up for themselves. I was a spot welder and, let’s say, at first you do 20 welds per hour. And they watch you. And if you can handle it, they will start adding a weld here, a weld there. And workers learn to resist that – it’s a very subtle dance.

Are labor relations better now than in the ’70s?

We’ve lost a lot of unionized work. Over the last 50 years the employer got the upper hand, with restrictions on union organization and union contracts. There was a concerted effort in the late ’60s by business to stop the unions. That’s why it’s very hard to build a collective action. We see the union around Starbucks becoming successful, Amazon had some victories in Europe. These days, blue-collar workers are very wide-ranging. In defense factories, we have young people who maybe don’t like making weapons, but these jobs pay the bills.

Let’s talk about solutions.

It will take an imagination and an emergence of a coalition between the environmental justice community, communities impacted by inequality and labor together to exert power and reverse the ways the business class made it so difficult. We have to acknowledge our differences, and that we can benefit from them.

We just lost a battle for California health care because big pharma pays for our politicians. And health care and child care and decent wages are things that can bring people together. Part of it is getting money from politics, overturning Citizens United and making it easier for a politician to run for an office without raising millions and millions of dollars.

And what role do the culture wars play in all that?

When we blame immigrants or China, we are failing to understand how it came about. I feel very compassionate to people who have to leave their countries for whatever reason, whether it’s economic or political. Immigrant communities have been growing strong in Southern California, New York and other cities. They should have a say in the changing economy and be part of a grassroots coalition to make sure the new economy is more equal.

We have to remember that the business class is interested in making a profit. Now we have hedge funds that invest in everything, including schools, and they don’t care how they make their money. They are happy for us to fight about what books we should have at school or whether abortion should be legal or not, happy when we are questioning vaccines and masks while they continue to lower our wages and make it harder for us to get health care.