Movies: Labor

A Kentucky woman whose mine-worker husband is nearly killed in a cave-in, and whose father is slowly dying of black lung disease, joins the picket lines for a long, violent strike....

Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the diffic...

When his partner Sek dies, Thongkam loses his property to his late love's eager family and must fight to reclaim the home they built together....

Through first person narration, Tari reveals personal stories related to her decision to work in Taiwan, her strained family relationships, the risks involved in working abroad and the traps she has fallen into....

This 1996 documentary takes a nostalgic ride through history to present the experiences of Black sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada's railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s. There was a strong sense of pride among these men and they w...

How Finnish immigrants came into contact — and conflict — with industrial America. Three generations of Finnish-Americans recount how they coped with harsh realities by creating their own institutions: churches, temperance halls, socialist halls, and...

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led ...

In 1902, 13-year-old Horace toils on a run-down plantation in rural Texas to buy a tombstone for the father he lost a year earlier. Soll, the crusty old Confederate who owns the plantation and depends on convict labor to keep his farm running, takes ...

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for...

This day-in-the-life cult comedy focuses on a group of friends working at Sully Boyar's Car Wash in the Los Angeles ghetto. The team meets dozens of eccentric customers -- including a smooth-talking preacher, a wacky cab driver and an ex-convict -- w...

A description of the work of a research director of a United Steel Workers Union in Canada. The painstaking research and analyses of economic information, and the arrangement of arguments that lie beneath the negotiations of labour unions for better ...

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fasc...

Sorn, an ethnic Shan sex worker, tries to build a future in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a refugee far from home, but he is drawn into a complex relationship with one client, an investigator probing a political activist....

World War II created a huge demand for American farm products. But the war also caused vast numbers of farm workers to abandon the fields, either to join the military or to seek work in the cities. The solution would be a unique contract-worker agree...

An undercover cop infiltrates an illegal labor racket on a remote Texan/Mexican border farm. After falling for the farm owner's mistress, the two discover the tables have been turned and they are the hunted....

The lowest paid teachers in the nation are in the middle of a statewide walkout in Oklahoma. From start to finish, Walkout follows the teachers as they get organized and demand raises from their state legislature. From crowded classrooms to a packed ...

A bare-knuckled critique of corporate America told through the powerful true story of a toxic CEO who evolves from a profits-over-people, philandering executive to an unorthodox leader, populist messenger, and mentor to American influencers. It’s a s...

After a model is brutally murdered on a Caribbean island, her sister's investigation uncovers a horrifying rat-like creature....

Having defeated the best fighters of the Imperial Japanese army in occupied Shanghai, Ip Man and his family settle in post-war Hong Kong. Struggling to make a living, Master Ip opens a kung fu school to bring his celebrated art of Wing Chun to the tr...

Inside the life of former baseball star Curt Flood whose fight against MLB's 'Reserve Clause' led to reform, but destroyed his career....