Plot
Norma Rae Webster is a minimum-wage worker in a cotton mill that has taken too much of a toll on the health of her family for her to ignore her Dickensian working conditions. After hearing a speech by New York union organizer Reuben Warshowsky, Norma Rae decides to join the effort to unionize her shop. This causes conflict at home when Norma Rae's husband Sonny says she's not spending enough time in the home. Despite the pressure brought to bear by management, when confronted, Norma Rae takes a piece of cardboard, writes the word "UNION", stands on her worktable, and slowly turns to show the sign around the room. One by one, other workers stop their mill machines, and eventually, the entire room becomes silent, after all machines have been switched off. Norma Rae then successfully orchestrates an election to unionize the factory, resulting in victory for the union.
The story is based on Crystal Lee Sutton's life as a textile worker in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, where the battle for the workers union took place against a J.P Stevens Textile mill. Her actual protest, in the mill, is the scene in the film where she writes the sign "UNION" and stands on her worktable until all machines are silent. Although Sutton was fired from her job, the mill became unionized, and she later went to work as an organizer for the textile union.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)