‘A reminder of why we have unions’: Matewan writer and director on the film’s lessons for the labor movement

John Sayles’s 1987 film dramatizes a 1920 labor conflict, illustrating how class solidarity can overcome prejudice. The film’s context includes Sayles’s 1970 hitchhiking experience in West Virginia, where miners were dealing with the aftermath of a contentious union election that led to the murder of union reform candidate Joseph Yablonski and his wife in December 1969.