Books and films

Harlan County, USA

The film covering the "Brookside Strike" when 180 miners, along with their wives, stood up against the management of the coal mine and the mining and processing plant owned by Duke Power.

The Great Sit-Down - Yesterday's Witness in America

The Last Tycoon

The boss of the fictional film studio Monroe Star is making a movie despite the Great Depression and the death of his wife. He has to deal with the inflated demands of an aging movie star and the tough conditions imposed by the unions...

Sunday Too Far Away

The mid-1950s, deep in the South Australian bush. The sheep shearers, drinking like sailors and working like oxen, live a tough life.

Apuntes para la historia del movimiento obrero cubano / Notes for a History of the Cuban Labor Movement

A history of the struggles of the Cuban proletariat from the 19th century to the triumph of the Revolution. It highlights the decisive role played by the union leader Lázaro Peña.

Streik

Norwegian docudrama from 1975, directed by Oddvar Bull Tuhus. The film is loosely based on Tor Obrestad's novel Sauda!

Pay Off / Diyet

Lütfi Akad describes a factory and the surrounding workers' relations of the family who migrated in this last film of the trilogy.

Rebellion in Patagonia

This film was immediately banned by the authorities, and most of the cast was forced into exile abroad. Only ten years later, after a democratic government was established in Argentina, the film became available to the general public.

They Kill Me If I Don’t Work, and If I Work, They Kill Me: The Workers’ Strike at the INSUD Factory / Me matan si no trabajo y si trabajo me matan: La huelga obrera en la fábrica INSUD

A documentary about the situation of metalworkers who, due to lead exposure and poor working conditions, became ill and died from saturnism (lead poisoning). The film includes one of the last public appearances of Congressman Rodolfo Ortega Peña, who was assassinated by paramilitary forces (the AAA) days after the documentary was completed.

Wages and Love / Lohn und Liebe

This film is about the struggles women face, and how they are often even more difficult than those of men. The events take place at a telephone factory in Berlin, where the workforce is made up of women and the managers are men (how recognizable!).

Sagina

The film (the Hindi version of Sagina Mahato, 1970) is based on a real episode of the labor struggle on tea plantations in the Himalayas in Northeast India during 1942-1943 but features fictional characters. The protagonist, Sagina, is an honest and spirited yet politically inexperienced union leader who organizes the workers' fight at a factory in Siliguri.

TEEVRA MADHYAM

Shama and Ravi are members of the Marxist party. Shama is a fan of classical Indian music, while Ravi quotes Marx and Marxist philosophy and "the needs of the masses" at every turn.

Apuntes

The film is set around a harsh taxi-drivers’ strike in Mexico City, inspired by the real events of 1950. The main figures are Quintanilla, a corrupt union leader, and Eduardo, an opposition activist who tries to organize the taxi drivers legally and fight for justice.

Los albañiles / The Bricklayers

This short documentary portrays the exploitative working conditions faced by a group of construction workers in Tula, Hidalgo, in the aftermath of a strike called by their unio

A strike is not a Sunday school /

The film was shot with trade union support during a strike in the Burger & Jacobi piano factory in Biel in June 1974. The reason for the strike in the carpenter was that the company no longer wanted to pay the agreed thirteenth monthly salary.

The Miners’ Film

The film documents, from inside and for the labour movement, the miners’ strike of 1974. It examines the industrial action against the Conservative government’s Phase 3 incomes policy, the miners’ historical experience, memories of the 1926 General Strike, the failures of nationalisation and the struggle over energy and employment policy.

Conversaciones con trabajadores / Conversations with Chilean Workers

As a counterpoint to the first film, “Chile 1973 – The workers do not participate, they are the government,” which shows the revolutionary process of the Popular Unity from the perspective of its leaders, this second production, “Conversations with Chilean Workers,” offers an image of how the social base of Chilean society—the very people to whom the…

A Shot in the Factory / Laukaus tehtaalla

An elderly man rides his bicycle to his factory in a small town. He enters the office of the manager, pulls out a sawed-off shotgun from under his coat, and kills him.

Namak Haraam / Traitor

The film focuses on two friends: Vicky from a wealthy family and Soma from a poor. Vicky takes charge of the family factory, but when he clashes with the leader of the local labor union, he calls on Soma for help.

La derrota

The workers of a company go on strike and are massacred. A journalist tries to defend them and is also killed.

The People vs. Willie Farah

Latina workers on strike at El Paso’s Farah Manufacturing Company discuss their working conditions & their fight for a union.

Los traidores

It tells the story of the beginnings, rise, and fall of a union bureaucrat’s life. From his early days of struggle in the Peronist resistance in the late 1950s, to his transformation into a corrupt leader bought off by the bosses, a traitor to the workers’ interests, who persecutes class-struggle and leftist militants during the turbulent days of the 1970s.

Los puños frente al cañón / Fists Against the Cannon

Feature-length documentary about the history of the Chilean labor movement, narrated through interviews with its protagonists, photographic material, archival footage, and reenactments of events such as the San Gregorio massacre and the executions that were commonly carried out in response to social movements in the 1920s.

Blow for Blow / Coup pour coup

In France, in Elbeuf , a wildcat strike begins in a small textile company employing almost exclusively women. Labor conflict breaks out due to hard labor, sexual harassment, and mistreatment by the management.

All's Well

The workers of a sausage factory in the town of Tuvabya, under Maoist slogans, occupied the factory, declared an indefinite strike, and captured the commercial director and his American wife. The poor couple now even go to the toilet according to the mocking time standards set by the administration for workers.

Handsome Face / Beau Masque

Piaret works at a spinning factory in the eastern department of France. She is a single mother, dedicating all her energy to the union and the fight for workers' rights.

Dear Mother, I'm Fine / Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut

In 1967, the Ruhr area's mining industry in West Germany faced an economic crisis. The labor exchange sends the unemployed mechanic Alfred Schefchuk as a day laborer to West Berlin, where he has to work hard to earn his daily bread.

Die Wollands

This film was a standout in German "proletarian cinema." The Volland family lives in West Berlin and has managed to build a stable life: Horst, the husband, works as a welder in a factory, his wife has a job too, and their daughter lives with her grandparents. However, the modernization of the factory line stirs discontent among the workers.

Trade unionist / Il sindacalista

The passionate and ambitious Sicilian Saverio Ravizzi survives a deadly incident during a demonstration and moves to Bergamo. There, he gets a job at a home appliance factory and immediately begins rallying his colleagues for better working conditions, unaware that his activism is being skillfully manipulated by the factory owner for his own selfish…

Boxcar Bertha

The head of the railroad shamelessly exploits the workers in the 1930s. But union organizer Bill Shelley, along with the Brotherhood of Workers, fights back.