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.
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.
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.
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.
The early struggles of the working class are placed under a microscope in Plutocracy III: Class War, the latest chapter in an exceptionally well produced series which explores the origins of America's growing economic divide.
In the late 19th century, a former high school teacher turned unionist tries to organize workers laboring with inhuman conditions at a textile factory in Turin, Italy.
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 losing a finger in a work accident, an Italian worker becomes increasingly involved in political and revolutionary groups.
Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.
When a convicted felon fails to return from his prison leave and a young woman is found murdered, forensic psychiatrist Roman Mettler finds himself fighting for his existence. It was him who had composed the report permitting the leave.
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.
Victim of a terrible plot, Captain Dreyfus was sentenced in December 1894 to deportation for high treason. His wife Lucie made a pact with him: to live, whatever the cost, while awaiting rehabilitation. During five years, the Dreyfus spouses exchanged hundreds of letters. They became a weapon of survival for Alfred. This film is the story of the correspondence of a man and a woman who unwittingly became the unsung heroes of the case that bears their name.
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.
Natalia, the owner of a restaurant on the island of Aruba, struggles to keep her business afloat while dealing with the daily struggles of the hospitality industry on a tropical paradise.
In response to a sudden dismissal of staff, workers at a big retail store begin a protest against their employer's oppressive labor policies.
When she learns she's in danger of losing her visa status and being deported, overbearing book editor Margaret Tate forces her put-upon assistant, Andrew Paxton, to marry her.
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.
Hannah Maynard, a prosecutor of Hague's Tribunal for war crimes in former Yugoslavia, charges a Serbian commander for killing Bosniaks. However, her main witness might be lying, so the court sends a team to Bosnia to investigate.
On the 5th of March 1985, a crowd gathered in a South Yorkshire pit village to watch a sight none of them had seen in a year. The villagers, many of them in tears, cheered and clapped as the men of Grimethorpe Colliery marched back to work accompanied by the village’s world-famous brass band. The miners and their families had endured months of hardship. It had all been for nothing. The miners had lost the strike called on March 6th 1984. They would lose a lot more in the years to come. But was it a good thing for the country that the miners lost their last battle?