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Vivid Projects

Put People First
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Put People First

19 May 2022 – 21 May 2022

SCREENINGS

Stories of contemporary workers struggles.

Esther Johnsons’s 2019 film, ‘a ROLE to PLAY’ was co-commissioned by Animate Projects and Junction Arts as part of the WORK project. The film tells stories of the impact of economic changes in post-industrial Bolsover, a Derbyshire constituency where coal was once king. featuring the Bolsover Freedom Community Project food bank users, volunteers, adult reading group members, and former Bolsover MP (1970-2019) Dennis Skinner.

‘1970. I got elected, and six o’clock the day after I went to work. I didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together.

I hadn’t got a bank account.

I hadn’t got a car. I went to work because I didn’t know when I was going to get paid in Parliament. Nobody sent me a letter saying turn up on such and such a day. I just had to keep looking in the papers to see when swearing in started. So I kept going to the pit’.

Dennis Skinner, trade unionist, ex-miner, MP for Bolsover from 1970 – 2019.

A ROLE to PLAY is accompanied by two 80’s campaign videos made by Birmingham’s TURC Video. Birmingham Trades Union Council set up TURC in the early 1980’s with funding from the economic development committee of the West Midlands County Council (WMCC). he county council took the view that if it was providing support and funding for employers in the region it should do the same for the employees and also funded a Health and Safety Advice Centre.  TURC Video was established as a separate trading arm in 1984, making campaign videos and providing video facilities and an extensive library of tapes on employment and local and campaign issues.  

PUT PEOPLE FIRST was produced with funding from the trade union NALGO,  to campaign against the privatisation of council services and nationalised industries. TURC worked in partnership with the recently established local Channel 4 workshop BFVW (in 1983, still called the Birmingham Film Workshop) to produce the film. It is part of one of the first major campaigns that TURC became involved in against the privatisation of the public sector.  NALGO (National Association of Local Government Officers) was running a campaign under the banner ‘Put People First’  and contracted TURC to make a campaign video for them.  

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT shares the uncomfortably relevant experiences of the seafarers striking over P & O ferries’ decision –  in the wake of the ‘Herald of Free Enterprise’ disaster  – to cut staffing and increase the hours of the staff on the channel ferries.

Image credit: Courtesy Esther Johnson.

Dennis Skinner

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