Disney's Newsies: The Broadway Musical (2017), The Organizer (1963), Live Nude Girls, Unite! (2000), Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005), Where to Invade Next (2015), The Price of Sugar (2007), Roger & Me (1989), Comrades (1986) ... Let's take a look at the ranked list of the best Workers' Rights movies.
Storyline: Newsboys go on strike in 1899 New York in this stage performance of the musical "Newsies," filmed at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood.
Plot Keywords: musical, disney, broadway, song and dance, historical, adaptation, youth ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Professor Sinigaglia (Marcello Mastroianni) is the title character in this darkly comedic Italian drama about mistreated factory workers in the city of Turin. Toiling away in appalling conditions in a textile mill, these employees have no one to stand up for them until Sinigaglia puts his academic career on the line by helping them to start a strike. Although the teacher comes under scrutiny by unsympathetic authorities, he maintains his dedication to the workers' cause.
Plot Keywords: working class, exploitation, poverty, protest, oppression, social injustice, class struggle ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: "Live Nude Girls Unite!" is a fierce and funny first person documentary about a group of strippers who win the only union of exotic dancers in the United States. Stripper/Comedian Julia Query takes the audience on a turbulent journey beginning with her decision to leave graduate school and start stripping through the victory with the union, stopping along the way to tell her Jewish mother.
Plot Keywords: documentary, women's rights, social justice, gender equality, workers' rights, social change, labor rights ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: This examination of cultural and economic globalization follows the life-cycle of Mardi Gras beads from a small factory in Fuzhou, China, to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and to art galleries in New York City.
Plot Keywords: globalization, labor rights, consumerism, cultural differences, documentary, american culture, social justice ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: To show what the USA can learn from rest of the world, director Michael Moore playfully visits various nations in Europe and Africa as a one-man "invader" to take their ideas and practices for America. Whether it is Italy with its generous vacation time allotments, France with its gourmet school lunches, Germany with its industrial policy, Norway and its prison system, Tunisia and its strongly progressive women's policy, or Iceland and its strong female presence in government and business among others, Michael Moore discovers there is much that American should emulate.—Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)
Plot Keywords: documentary, political, social issues, usa, satire, government, policy ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of which ends up in US kitchens. Cutting cane by machete, they work 14 hour days, 7 days a week, frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare or adequate nutrition. The Price of Sugar follows a charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley, as he organizes some of this hemisphere's poorest people, challenging the powerful interests profiting from their work. This film raises key questions about where the products we consume originate, at what human cost they are produced and ultimately, where our responsibility lies.—Louise Rosen Ltd.
Plot Keywords: documentary, social justice, human rights, exploitation, poverty, inequality, globalization ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant at Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30,000 jobs. Details the attempts of filmmaker Michael Moore to get an interview with GM CEO Roger Smith.—Murray Chapman <muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au>
Plot Keywords: documentary, social issues, usa, unemployment, workers' rights, globalization, working class ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: The story of "The Tolpuddle Martyrs". A group of nineteenth century English farm laborers who formed one of the first trade unions and started a campaign to receive fair wages.—Steve Crook <steve@brainstorm.co.uk>
Plot Keywords: history, british film, 19th century, true story, collectivism, class struggle, politics ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: A worker becomes a "man of iron" forged by experience, a son comes to terms with his father, a couple fall in love, a reporter searches for courage, and a nation undergoes historic change. In Warsaw in 1980, the Party sends Winkel, a weak, alcoholic TV hack, to Gdansk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers, particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an articulate worker whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews people who know Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka. Their narrations become flashbacks using actual news footage of 1968 and 1970 protests and of the later birth of free unions and Solidarity.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>
Plot Keywords: history, politics, working class, solidarity, poland, biography, social movement ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: There is so much interest in food these days yet there is almost no interest in the hands that pick that food. In the US, farm labor has always been one of the most difficult and poorly paid jobs and has relied on some of the nation's most vulnerable people. While the legal restrictions which kept people bound to farms, like slavery, have been abolished, exploitation still exists, ranging from wage theft to modern-day slavery. These days, this exploitation is perpetuated by the corporations at the top of the food chain: supermarkets. Their buying power has kept wages pitifully low and has created a scenario where desperately poor people are willing to put up with anything to keep their jobs.—Anonymous
Plot Keywords: documentary, agriculture, labor rights, exploitation, social justice, human rights, poverty ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In South Yorkshire, a small group of railway maintenance men discover that because of privatization, their lives will never be the same. When the trusty British Rail sign is replaced by one reading East Midland Infrastructure, it is clear that there will be the inevitable winners and losers as downsizing and efficiency become the new buzzwords. A cheery camaraderie is soon replaced by uncertainty and turmoil when their depot manager fills them in on the details of the new arrangement. Privatization means that the customer now comes first, something that is instilled into the men in new training sessions. But there are inconsistencies and shortsightedness to the new ways. Men used to working together now find themselves belonging to different, competing companies. Some even have to tender for their old jobs. Others decide to take the redundancy packages offered by the firm. As always, corners are cut in the interest of lowering costs, leading to a series of misadventures.—Sujit R. Varma
Plot Keywords: working class, unemployment, social realism, british cinema, ken loach, workers' rights, critique of capitalism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: In South Yorkshire, a small group of railway maintenance men discover that because of privatization, their lives will never be the same. When the trusty British Rail sign is replaced by one reading East Midland Infrastructure, it is clear that there will be the inevitable winners and losers as downsizing and efficiency become the new buzzwords. A cheery camaraderie is soon replaced by uncertainty and turmoil when their depot manager fills them in on the details of the new arrangement. Privatization means that the customer now comes first, something that is instilled into the men in new training sessions. But there are inconsistencies and shortsightedness to the new ways. Men used to working together now find themselves belonging to different, competing companies. Some even have to tender for their old jobs. Others decide to take the redundancy packages offered by the firm. As always, corners are cut in the interest of lowering costs, leading to a series of misadventures.—Sujit R. Varma
Plot Keywords: working class, unemployment, social realism, british cinema, ken loach, workers' rights, critique of capitalism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Davey Fenwick (Sir Michael Redgrave) 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 (Margaret Lockwood) who gets him to marry her and return home as local schoolteacher before finishing his degree. Davey finds he is ill-at-ease in his role, the more so when he realizes Jenny still loves her former boyfriend. When he finds that his father and the other miners are going to have to continue working on a possibly deadly coal seam he decides to act.—Jeremy Perkins {J-26}
Plot Keywords: working class, social injustice, poverty, class conflict, idealism, realism, social realism ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: Employees of the Sleeptite Pajama Factory are looking for a whopping seven-and-a-half cent an hour increase and they won't take no for an answer. Babe Williams is their feisty employee representative but she may have found her match in shop superintendent Sid Sorokin. When the two get together they wind up discussing a whole lot more than job actions!—A.L.Beneteau <albl@inforamp.net>
Plot Keywords: musical, romance, comedy, love, song and dance, broadway, adaptation ...
Movie Details Click Here !Storyline: During the 1950s, the New York garment industry is going through a turmoil. On one side, the industry workers want to organize themselves into labor unions that will fight for them in obtaining better wages, better working conditions and other benefits. On the other side, the factory owners and their managers staunchly oppose unionization. At one of the largest garment companies, Roxton Fashions, the owner, Walter Mitchell, is fighting against his workers' wishes to unionize. For the past 15 years, Walter Mitchell has been using the mob muscle in order to protect his company against unions. His gangster friend Artie Ravidge, and his henchmen, provide Walter Mitchell and Roxton Fashions with such protection against union men who agitate the workers into forming their own union locals. This protection includes murder, whenever necessary, to eliminate stubborn union men. Unfortunately, when Walter Mitchell's business partner, Fred Kenner, argues in favor of allowing a union into their factory, he meets with a suspicious fatal accident. The freight elevator in which he was traveling plummets to the ground, after being serviced by a suspicious repair-man. After the funeral, Walter Mitchell's son, Alan Mitchell, who recently returns from the Korean War, starts asking questions about the rumors concerning Fred Kenner's assassination and about the role of the mob in his father's company. His father denies the rumors but his son becomes more suspicious. When a garment industry union organizer, Tulio Renata, comes into the factory and creates a scene, arguing with the factory owner and promising the forming of a union local for the workers, the owner's son starts making inquiries on his own, against his father's wishes. He befriends union man Tulio Renata in order to learn more about the just and fair aims of the union directed at the garment industry. First viewed with mistrust, the factory owner's son, gradually gains the respect and the trust of Renata, of the union men and the workers themselves. But this union-friendly attitude of Alan Mitchell draws the ire of his father who, once more, uses his gangster friend Artie Ravidge's services to eliminate his foes. Only, this time, his own son is on the side of the unions.—nufs68
Plot Keywords: crime, drama, thriller, film noir, corruption, murder, new york ...
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