Pasi returns to his childhood town, asked to reconfigure the local plywood factory. With a child on the way with his upper-class wife, Pasi sees an opportunity – this is his ticket to climb the professional ladder in the company. On arrival, he bumps into his childhood friend Janne, who works in the factory he is about to downsize. Pasi begins to struggle with the fact that he is supposed to care for the profits – not for the people.
A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, escaping life's troubles – even if just for a moment – by dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.
A working class teenager comes of age in 1910s rural Sweden, moving through a series of jobs and romances that gradually shape his future.
Angie is a working class woman. After being fired, she decides to set up a recruitment agency of her own, running it from her kitchen with her friend, Rose. Taking advantage of the desperation of immigrants, Angie builds a successful business extremely quickly.
Wallace is an efficiency expert, managing the high-profile downsizing of a major auto parts factory. But when he is hired to evaluate a small moccasin factory which seems from another era, Wallace has to reconsider the rapid modernization he advocates, as he is confronted by the human faces such plans hurt.
Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.
The workers in a small plough factory take over the firm, but when a large order falls through, the old management come back to help out.
Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer Lola and everything changes.
A portrait of union leader James R. Hoffa, as seen through the eyes of his friend, Bobby Ciaro. The film follows Hoffa through his countless battles with the RTA and President Roosevelt.
Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.
Dramatization of the true story of the so-called Willmar Eight, a group of Minnesota bank workers who braved freezing conditions whilst picketing their branch in a struggle for union rights.
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.
At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.
Filmed in the coal country of West Virginia, "Matewan" celebrates labor organizing in the context of a 1920s work stoppage. Union organizer, Joe Kenehan, a scab named "Few Clothes" Johnson and a sympathetic mayor and police chief heroically fight the power represented by a coal company and Matewan's vested interests so that justice and workers' rights need not take a back seat to squalid working conditions, exploitation and the bottom line.
A week in the life of the exploited, child newspaper sellers in turn-of-the-century New York. When their publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, tries to squeeze a little more profit out of their labours, they organize a strike, only to be confronted with the Pulitzer's hard-ball tactics.
In the 1950s, a poor Georgia cotton farmer and his sons search for the gold presumably buried on the farm by their grandfather but problems related to poverty, marital infidelity, unemployment and booze threaten to destroy their family.
Andula, an innocent Czech girl from a factory town, is desperately in search of love. She believes she's found it when she beds Milda, a charming young musician visiting from Prague. Milda, however, is only looking for a casual encounter, and leaves town assuming he'll never see Andula again. But when Andula doesn't hear from him, she packs up and heads to Prague, to the surprise of Milda and his parents.
A 22-year-old factory worker lets loose on the weekends: drinking, brawling, and dating two women, one of whom is older and married.