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Clip description
This clip contrasts the wealth of the shipping industry business executives and their partners with the workers who struggle to get a larger share of the profits. In a dramatised sequence, a group of affluent people are on their way to an extravagant banquet. The voice-over narration describes them as 'human crabs that eat their kind’. Unemployed workers demonstrate in the streets during the Depression of the 1930s. Men on the wharves and union organisers band together against shipowners and the government as a parliamentarian is superimposed on the banquet scene.
Curator’s notes
The build-up to this scene (clip two) shows the hard times of the Depression and the waterside workers who had to battle for an income. The decadence depicted in the staged banquet scene (with shipowners played by wharfies) is deliberately caricatured to emphasise the gap between the working classes and industry. It is a good example of how propaganda constructs a political argument. The film unit never meant their films to be apolitical or neutral, and were always biased in favour of the workers – they were, after all, a workers’ film unit.
