The Research Director
1954 · 18m · Documentary
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 wages and working conditions are shown.
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Solidarność: How Solidarity Changed Europe
2019 · ★ 7
Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.
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Let's Rise Up
2022
On 9 July 2021, the 422 workers at the GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio near Florence received their dismissal, by email. They immediately met in front of the factory, scared away the management's bodyguards and have been holding an open-ended meeting at the factory ever since. In June of 2022, they talk about how they are rooted in the territory, why 30,000 people demonstrated with them. They explain why they put their struggle under the slogan "Insorgiamo!" ("Let's rise up!"), the slogan of the italian partisans who liberated Florence in 1944. But they also talk about their collaboration with climate activists and what they would like to produce. But as things stand today, it is not the workers who are responsible for the ecological damage caused by production: "Nobody asked me what I would like to produce when they hired me. They hired me and that was it."
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Crude Oil
2008 · ★ 7.6
Filmed in the Inner Mongolian portion of the Gobi Desert, this film follows a group of oil field workers as they go about their daily routine.
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The Flickering Flame
1996 · ★ 6.3
Documentary following dockers of Liverpool sacked in a labour dispute and their supporters’ group, Women of the Waterfront, as they receive support from around the world and seek solidarity at the TUC conference.
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Labor Wars of the Northwest
2019
Discontent, radicalism, and violence permeated the U.S. Northwest in the early decades of the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of workers migrated for jobs in logging, mining, and fishing - where they found poverty-level wages, crushing hours, and dreadful conditions. The conflict becomes part of a decades-long struggle involving tragedies such as the Everett Massacre (1916), the Seattle General Strike (1919), and the Centralia Massacre (1919).
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Shipbuilding
1978
A documentary about Dutch shipbuilders and their work. Hundreds of jobs at shipyards are on the line and their craftsmanship is under threat. The labourers have to watch and stand by as their future becomes more and more uncertain.
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Harvest of Loneliness
2010
Shedding light on the current debate over immigration reform and the use of "guest workers" in American agriculture, this historical documentary, "Harvest Of Loneliness: The Bracero Program," examines what was known as the Bracero Program-a system put in place from 1942 to 1964 to recruit Mexican farm laborers for temporary work in the United States.
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Brothers on the Line
2012 · ★ 7.5
Brothers on the Line explores the extraordinary journey of the Reuther brothers – Walter, Roy, and Victor – union organizers whose unshakeable devotion led an army of workers into an epic human rights struggle.
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American Dream
1990 · ★ 7.3
When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.
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Cocalero
2007 · ★ 5
A documentary centered on the union formed by Bolivian farmers in response to their government's (which was urged by the U.S.) effort to eradicate coca crops, and the man who would come to represent them, Evo Morales.
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Children of Labor: A Finnish-American History
1977
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 cooperatives.
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Partners
2025
The story of how a group of baristas in Buffalo, New York announce their intention to form a labor union, and how Starbucks responds with an elaborate and illegal anti-union campaign. Featuring on-the-ground footage from workers and organizers, Partners takes us to the front lines of the historic union campaign that catalyzed America’s Gen Z labor revival.
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