The film Bread and Roses by Ken Loach highlighted the plight of janitorial workers seeking to organize, demand better wages, gain respect from their malicious and exploitative employer. A union organizer named Sam encourages the janitors to demand these things and guides them along the way. There are tensions throughout between the workers, within the family, and attempts from the employer to sabotage the campaign. Though the storyline was less complacent and trite than many others, and somewhat felt more realistic, what I found to be particularly striking was the way in which it was portrayed as a savior narrative. Not only does the union organizer “fall in love” with one of the workers, it is a poor union strategy to have a white male organizer for a group of predominantly women of color. It is also poor strategy to have a romantic relationship with someone who you are working on a difficult campaign with. In fact, I think that these actions are grounds for an immediate termination of a union employee. Of course, the narrative was constructed this way because women (and especially women of color) are rarely centered within a story sans attachment to a male, the development of a romantic relationship, being subject to the ever-present male gaze, and so forth.

In emphasizing the romantic relationship between the organizer and one of the workers, the director loses an opportunity to depict struggles faced by these laborers more accurately and the ways in which a union campaign unfolds. He does this in order to inject a typical and cliche narrative of two people from different worlds becoming involved (the different worlds being their racial/ethnic/class backgrounds). Overall, the director forced a romance where it did not need to be and recreated the white male savior narrative within the realm of a union campaign. This cheapens what could have been a powerful message about collective action and the struggles these workers endure to fight for basic rights. Though this is the case, I would argue that there is still a somewhat nuanced and realistic depiction of the realities janitorial workers face during this process.