Isa and Marie bond while working in a French sweatshop and soon begin sharing an apartment that Marie is watching for a hospitalized mother and daughter. Marie, hoping to avoid a life of struggle and poverty, takes up with Chriss, a nightclub owner whose most attractive asset is his money. Isa recognizes the ultimate futility of the relationship and tries to keep Marie away from him, but her interference puts their friendship at risk.
A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
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.
When the last factory in a small Rust Belt town closes its doors, an unlikely hero emerges in dutiful, quiet Allery Parkes. A career employee of the factory, the aging Allery can't reconcile how to live a life simply sitting at home doing nothing. Against the advice and pleas of his loving wife Iola, he forms an unlikely friendship with his charismatic neighbor Walter Brewer in order to revive the defunct factory.
After the coal mine he works at closes and his father commits suicide, a Finnish man leaves for the city to make a living but there, he is framed and imprisoned for various crimes.
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.
When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At the other, a number of disgruntled long-time union members struggle with the new exigencies of Japanese quality control.
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.
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.
Sean Odkin loves to dance—much to his fathers distain. When the woman he loves cannot return his love, he goes in search of the only thing that can make him whole again—dancing.
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.
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.
Taxi driver Sang-gu is an ordinary father who has made a happy family. Due to their unfortunate financial circumstances, he is sorry that he cannot afford to send his daughter Yoon-mi to university like other parents. Yet, with a bright smile on her face, Yoon-mi tells her father that she will one day buy him a new car and pay college tuition fees for her younger sibling. However, less than two years after Yoon-mi begins her job at a large corporate company, she gets seriously ill and returns home. Sang-gu is heartbroken to see his young daughter in such a condition.
Risto, a zombie loses his burial plot and to reclaim it he must get a job in a factory. His former lover Sanna also works at the same place.
A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.
A modern day urban tale centered around a young man named Tru, who recently came home from jail and is fighting to stay on the right path for the sake of his son. Not too long after his release, Tru finds himself struggling to be an average man while he battles with his son's mother, the law, and the streets.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
The film depicts the story of four people working in a sewing factory in Guro Industrial Complex in Seoul and the problems they face.
An enterprising youngster in a slum wants his people to lead a life of dignity, but has to take on an ambitious capitalist, who only wants to dominate his field.
A wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite is racked by guilt over the death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick. Her newfound, single-minded activism leads to conflicts with her husband and questions about her sanity.