Mother Jones, America's Most Dangerous Woman

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).

Textile workers recall with pride the long- suppressed story of the General Textile Strike of 1934 when 500,000 Southern mill laborers walked off their jobs.

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.

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.

Starbucks baristas in Buffalo unite against corporate exploitation, sparking a generational uprising among working-class Millennials and Gen Z as they challenge a powerful billionaire CEO and fight for their rights.

In August 2012, mineworkers in one of South Africa’s biggest platinum mines began a wildcat strike for better wages. Six days later the police used live ammunition to brutally suppress the strike, killing 34 and injuring many more. Using the point of view of the Marikana miners, Miners Shot Down follows the strike from day one, showing the courageous but isolated fight waged by a group of low-paid workers against the combined forces of the mining company Lonmin, the ANC government and their allies in the National Union of Mineworkers.

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.

Delegates and workers discuss the issues that effect the Timberworkers’ Union, the reasons for the formation of the Combined Council of Timber Workers Delegates (CCD) and their industrial action.

Documentary about the nurses' strike in Finland on autumn 2007.

This documentary film traces the struggle of Indian auto workers of the Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar, near Delhi, in forming a union. Investigating the underbelly of class conflict and exposing a widespread system of injustice, the film focuses on the repression faced by the workers and their criminal prosecution.

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?

This film documents the coal miners' strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastover's refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk. Director Barbara Kopple puts the strike into perspective by giving us some background on the historical plight of the miners and some history of the UMWA. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with New York Women in Film & Television in 2004.

Out of Office is the story of a scrappy group of office workers in Wisconsin who managed to pull off a major victory for workers’ rights. Upon their contract’s expiration, the workers activated their dormant union and fought back against their employer - a massive financial services provider making record profits. Their fight dragged out for over 600 days and included the first strike in the company’s almost 100-year history, which was the largest labor action in Wisconsin for over ten years. A rank-and-file member of the union documented the entire struggle, and the documentary includes emotional interviews with key members of the fight.

When a group of baristas in Buffalo, New York announce their intention to start a labor union, Starbucks responds with an elaborate, illegal anti-union attack. Featuring on-the-ground footage from workers and organisers, Partners takes us to the front lines of the historic union campaign that catalysed America’s Gen Z labour revival.

Up against one of the most powerful companies on the planet, a group of Amazon workers embark on an unprecedented campaign to unionize their warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

A Century of Struggle chronicles the hundred-year history of the NZ Seamen’s Union from its formation in 1879. Using original film and archive footage, it examines the working lives of seamen and the battles fought by their union from the sailing ships of colonial days to the modern turbine-powered container vessels. Because the Seamen’s Union was frequently at the forefront of working-class struggle in New Zealand, its story involves most of the crucial issues and events in the history of the union movement generally, including the great maritime strikes of 1890 and 1913 and the waterfront dispute of 1951.

A documentary telling the story of the 1983 Solidarity strike in “British Columbia,” a key point in the introduction of neoliberal economic policy in the province.

Running Out of Patience documents the Victorian nurses' strike of 1986, revealing various myths and stereotypes which have managed to pigeonhole women as saints first and unionists second.

In response to the Detroit riots of 1967, where racial tensions in the city reached a breaking point, the city decided that the way to resolve these tensions would be to put more resources into employing Black people. Namely, chronically unemployed Black men who they refer to as "the hardcore." And predominantly, employing them on the line in auto assembly plants. But in the words of Lloyd Love, a young Detroiter interviewed in the film, this PBS documentary poses the question, "Do you think a job is the answer?" The film explores this question in 1968, by speaking with workers, unemployed people, union activists, students, people who implement city-run employment programs, members of DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement), and the Detroit Industrial Mission.

“…It is a film that tells in hurried film sequences and a resonant musical score juxtaposing the sublime, funereal despair of Bartok agains tthe gut-bare tones of folk music. Gates has through his filming technique and meticulously selected mining sites, captured all the outrage and sorrow and indignity to the land and its people that strip mining represents. The film is one that all Americans should see, for it shows extremely well the price we have to pay for strip mined coal.” - Dale A. Burk, The Montana “Missoulian”