‘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, which dramatizes a 1920 labor conflict, shows how class solidarity can overcome prejudice When John Sayles, a student at Williams College taking time off from his summer factory job, was hitchhiking during the summer of 1970 in West Virginia, it was often coal miners who…