There are 200 miserably impoverished people working in the Dongseong Metalworks Factory. Ju Wan-ik is introduced to the forging team as a new member of the team and they all go drinking together to welcome him.
Sulan, who works in a factory in the summer of 1978, begins learning photos with other female workers from Seok-yoon, the owner of the photo studio across from the factory. Seok-yoon, who had been closed, began to open his heart to female workers, but began to feel uneasy about the female workers' labor movement.
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.
Megan Carter is a reporter duped into running an untrue story on Michael Gallagher, a suspected racketeer. He has an alibi for the time his crime was allegedly committed—but it involves an innocent party. When he tells Carter the truth and the newspaper runs it, tragedy follows, forcing Carter to face up to the responsibilities of her job when she is confronted by Gallagher.
Like most of the people in her town, Karen Silkwood works at the local nuclear plant producing highly radioactive plutonium. Exposed one day to a lethal dose of radiation, Karen faces the blank walls of corporate indifference and denial. As her illness increases, her protest grows louder and she becomes an obvious danger to the powers that be.
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.
In response to a sudden dismissal of staff, workers at a big retail store begin a protest against their employer's oppressive labor policies.
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.
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.
Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.
A biography of Woody Guthrie, one of America's greatest folk singers. He left his dust-devastated Texas home in the 1930s to find work, discovering the suffering and strength of America's working class.
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.
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 difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.
After promising 1100 employees that they would protect their jobs, the managers of a factory decide to suddenly close up shop. Laurent takes the lead in a fight against this decision.
Davey Fenwick leaves his mining village on a university scholarship intent on returning to better support the miners against the owners. But he falls in love with Jenny who gets him to marry her and return home as local schoolteacher before finishing his degree.
Mary Rafferty comes from a poor family of steel mill workers in 19th Century Pittsburgh. Her family objects when she goes to work as a maid for the wealthy Scott family which controls the mill. Mary catches the attention of handsome scion Paul Scott, but their romance is complicated by Paul's engagement to someone else and a bitter strike among the mill workers.
A recently laid off steel mill worker in a little seaside town starts losing his wife to a local TV anchor.
A gripping story of love, deceit, betrayal and survival set against the backdrop of the Miners' Strike of 1984-85. Michelle is married to Gary, a young miner who goes on strike as soon as the dispute between the Thatcher government and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) begins. Meanwhile, her sister Linda's husband Paul is a local policeman. Paul becomes more and more voluble in his opposition to the strike, while Linda looks around her and witnesses the women of her community suddenly find a voice and independence. The scene is set for political and personal conflicts which would change their lives forever.
In 1910, women working in the silk industry in Bursa, protest against the working conditions. They go on strike.
In 1920, workers from Patagonia, in Southern Argentina, gather around an anarcho-syndicalist society and go on strike, demanding better working conditions. When the situation turns unsustainable, President Yrigoyen sends Lieutenant Colonel Zavala to impose order.