When William Mello watches On the Waterfront, he sees a lot more than the Academy-Award winning Marlon Brando classic. For one thing, the film’s setting among union workers on New York’s docks takes Mello back to his time as a mechanic and union organizer among Brooklyn ironworkers.

The movie also connects directly to Mello’s current pursuits as assistant professor and coordinator of the Indiana University Kokomo Division of Labor Studies. Mello has studied the post–World War II longshoremen’s movement in New York City that is the subject of On the Waterfront and is working on a book tentatively titled Reforming the Waterfront.

Praised for its gritty realism— using real-life longshoremen as extras—the 1954 film is undeniably powerful, but it’s weak on historical accuracy, Mello says.

“It fails to show what drove workers to rebel. In the movie, change on the waterfront occurred when one longshoreman [played by Brando] decides to testify against corrupt, gangster-like union bosses,” says Mello. “In fact, the longshoremen’s union was dominated by gangsters. The workers’ victories were not the result of a Hollywood ‘knight in shining armor,’ but of a mobilization of thousands of workers over years of fighting.”

In response to that struggle, Mello says, political and economic elites pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the political power of organized labor. Mello rejects the theory that unions traded power for wages. “Power was systematically constrained. In the end, the only thing left was higher wages and benefits,” he says.

The choice of money over personal integrity underscores one of the most quoted lines from On the Waterfront. Regretting how he threw a prizefight for cash, Brando’s character says, “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.”

Lacking “class”—that is, acceptance within socially and economically rising circles—still holds certain workers back, Mello says. Race and gender define the “new limited classes” of workers: “If class doesn’t matter for success, why are women still paid less than men are?”

Mello and IU Northwest Professor of Labor Studies Ruth Needleman recently led the first study-abroad trip for students in IUK’s Division of Labor Studies. The IU contingent visited auto and steel plants near Porto Alegre, Brazil, and met members of that country’s Metalworkers Federation. Like Indiana, Porto Alegre’s economy relies heavily on agriculture and manufacturing, with recent additions of high-tech and computer businesses.

“We wanted to look at a place that resembles the context in which our students live, so they can draw on familiar experiences,” says Mello, who believes university labor studies cannot be removed from community life. “The university has to become even more involved in the community where it’s located,” he says. “We need to respond to situations of work where people spend so much of their time.”

In the next academic year, Mello and Needleman hope to establish exchanges of labor studies faculty and students between IU and Brazil’s federal University of Ceara.

Labor, Politics, and On the Waterfront