406 Days, Reviewed

In April 2020, Debenhams UK Retail Ltd shuttered stores across Ireland, making more than a thousand employees, most of them women, redundant via a generic email.

Former employees across the country picketed outside the shuttered Debenhams stores, asking that the company uphold a previously agreed upon redundancy package of four weeks pay per year of service.

The picket went on to last 406 days, making it Ireland’s longest-running industrial dispute.

In 406 Days, a documentary introduced as “A Joe Lee Film with Fergus Dowd & The Debenhams Ireland Picket Line Group”, we get a blow-by-blow account of the picketing from those who lived it.

If Lee’s documentary has a style, it’s to be as hands-off as possible. His approach here, as it was in his riveting lion-takes-Fairview doc Fortune’s Wheel, is to build a narrative bit by bit through to-camera interviews and archive footage.

The result is a filmed oral history. There’s no gimmickry to Lee’s filmmaking, the film’s movement is straightforward and direct in its focus, serving the women and men who stood united when faced with virtually insurmountable odds.

406 Days has the utmost confidence in its subject and its subjects. Letting those involved do the talking, demonstrating the injustice at the heart of their struggle. This approach brings us closer to the workers on the picket line because they’re letting us into their world.

At the beginning of the film, shop stewards and other employees tell of their many years of service at Debenhams. Many of those affected worked there for 10 to 15 years, some longer.

Jane Crowe, a former shop steward and one of the main faces of the Henry Street picket line, speaks to a familial atmosphere among the staff who knew each other for “babies, Christenings, weddings”.

But this sense of togetherness, of a workplace family came from the workers themselves. That same support and care wasn’t evident on a corporate level.

We hear of how even the modest redundancy package that the picketers hoped for was even less than it had been a couple of years previous. The chipping away of holidays, flexible time and other benefits was an ongoing concern for the staff.

Around Easter time 2020, before the staff were axed, they assisted with packing valuable stock away. All part of Covid procedure, or so Debenhams’ head office had them believe. In fact, the packing was to facilitate stock sales as part of a hasty liquidation process.

After the unceremonious firing via form letter, staff members were told that a previously agreed redundancy package would not be honoured. Mandate, the union, supported the picketing by former staff to protect the stock from liquidators. Stock that could fund the €13 million needed to honour the agreed upon “2+2″ week package.

The early days of the picketing campaign prove to be a sink-or-swim situation, but the workers adapt quickly. Making rotas, swapping shifts and drumming up support. Lee shows this through archival footage, self-shot footage by the picketers and videos from social media.

The inclusion of videos from social media in their original portrait format is effective because it brings the audience closer to the action. The perspective is that of someone on the ground, capturing a moment of significance, sometimes by accident.

The vertical aspect ratio feels like the current visual language of protest. Even as demonstrators march in protest they capture it as video or livestream it to social media. The benefit of this for Lee is an abundance of footage that supports and emphasises the challenges and successes for those on the picket line.

We see support from passers-by who bring hot drinks and supplies for the workers. Scenes featuring the Resistance Choir are rousing. Support from Karen Gearon, a former Dunnes Stores striker, at the picket line in Tralee places the picketers’ efforts within a context of significant workers’ struggle.

But even with a great outpouring of goodwill, standing up to the liquidators is a difficult and dangerous task.

At the Cork warehouse behind the Merchant’s Quay shopping centre a van tries to intimidate the picket line by speeding towards them. Maeve Murphy O’Leary and Ciara Hartnett say that if it wasn’t for adrenaline and instinct kicking in they’d have been flattened.

These and other strong-arm tactics put pressure on the picketers. But nothing seems to shake their resolve.

Scenes in which workers and volunteers from People Before Profit and other organisations lock arms in a show of resistance are as moving as any drama film. More so because of the toll and human cost involved in a long-term action like this. Crowe is hospitalised at one point as a result of exposure and stress.

Many of the interviewees tell of not seeing their family and friends and a feeling that they couldn’t move on from the picket line without closure. As a result, they spent these 406 days without an income, and with the sense that to look for work would mean abandoning the cause and their work family.

The passage of time and significant dates are highlighted by intertitles showing a rolling counter. It’s one of the very few visual flourishes that Lee employs in his presenting the narrative. As time marches on tactics change.

The first negotiation process feels like an insult. None of the shop stewards were asked to attend, and no women were present at the table. Given that the workers who were let go were 98-percent women, and that all of the picket lines were led by women, the offer of €1 million in redundancy pay split between the roughly 1,000 workers without consultation comes off as a calculated insult.

Soon, sit-ins are planned and staged, garnering media attention again and revitalising the cause. There’s a tense caper element to these scenes as even in retrospect the process of entering the stores is no easy feat. Rusty ladders and leaps of faith, again, show a level of dedication to the cause that speaks to a true sense of camaraderie and desire for justice among the picketers.

When we see footage of the picket being raised in the Dáil the feeling is that concerns are falling on deaf ears. Low attendance presumably on account of the pandemic makes the workers’ struggles seem unimportant. Even if this wasn’t the case, the footage of empty seats and ministers shuffling papers paints a jaundiced view of proceedings.

One particularly gruelling sequence cuts between smartphone footage and shots of protesters being forcibly removed by the guards. The picketers lie down in a last-ditch effort to stop liquidators from entering warehouses.

Gardai carry the women out like they’re carrying a stretcher. “That’s my mother! That’s my mother!” a voice offscreen screams as one of the women is just about dragged across the concrete. One of the interviewees wonders who the gardaí are serving, companies or people?

As the counter rolls closer to the 406-day mark, more and more warehouses fall to the liquidators. We see an extraordinary show of community support in Limerick where vans are forced to retreat, but the victory is short-lived and bittersweet as momentum shifts away from the picket lines.

The workers’ courageous efforts were fingers plugging a dam. Eventually, the water gets through and washes everything away.

A series of titles about a compromised redundancy package close the film: a pool of €3 million for education purposes, of which about €500,000 was used. (The version of the film I saw states €255,000 but that number has since changed and it’s my understanding that the titles will be updated to reflect this.)

A disappointing end to what is an infuriating but inspiring and very human document of a found family brought together by a desire to help each other. The bonds that sustained these souls for over a year weren’t built through corporate team-building exercises or “we’re more of a family than a company” pizza Thursdays.

They come instead from a sense of duty to remain united through the kind of trial that a corporate parent company won’t help you through because it’s not in their interest, and never was.

406 Days is in cinemas nationwide from Friday 26 May.