Alex Demyanenko Capital and Main
While the Trump administration attacks workers’ rights, here are some of the most influential films about labor from the last 50 years.
In the climactic scene of Martin Ritt’s 1979 drama Norma Rae, Sally Field’s character climbs onto a cutting table in a textile mill, writes “UNION” in marker on a scrap of cardboard, and holds up the makeshift sign in silence. For 38 seconds — an eternity in film time — her co-workers just stare at her, not knowing what to do. Finally, one worker turns off her noisy machine. Then, slowly, one by one, the rest follow suit.
Crystal Lee Sutton, the mill worker Field was playing, really was fired, won her job back by court order, and spent years touring the country to further the boycott that resulted in J.P. Stevens signing a union contract in 1980, a year after the film dramatized it.
Most workers never get that ending. Americans support unions at a rate of 68%, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. But actual union membership sits near historic lows, at 10% according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — meaning most of the time, the machines stay on.
Movies have been picking a side in the fight for workers’ rights for almost as long as films have existed. Fritz Lang put workers literally underground running the machinery of a dystopian city in 1927’s Metropolis. Nine years later, Charlie Chaplin put a man inside the machine itself, chewed up by the gears of an assembly line in Modern Times. Films would spend the next century reusing that visual language — but it was still allegory. American filmmakers didn’t start paying for it until they pointed the camera at something real.
The decades that followed show what the consequences could be. Kern County banned and burned John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath before John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation even reached theaters. Elia Kazan named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, the congressional panel investigating alleged Communist influence in Hollywood, and made On the Waterfront (1954) as his own defense — compliance allowed him to win two Oscars, a host of nominations and an honorary Oscar in a long career. Herbert Biberman, Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico refused to name names and made Salt of the Earth the same year. That defiance cost them everything: Most laboratories refused to process the film, which delayed post-production for months, and it opened in only one theater.
The challenges workers are facing offscreen have intensified as the Trump administration has moved to strip collective bargaining rights from federal workers, among other attacks on organized labor.
Filmmakers, though, continue to tell the stories of workers fighting for their rights on screen. Documentarian Barbara Kopple’s Union Town, which premieres a couple of days after Labor Day on Sept. 9, follows delivery workers at UPS, Amazon and app-based bike courier services across New York as they try to organize. And Mark Mori’s recent Baristas vs. Billionaires chronicles the ongoing fight by Starbucks Workers United for a first contract.
Here are ten more impactful films about labor from the last 50 years and where you can watch them.
Features
Silkwood (1983)
Mike Nichols’ film stars Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood, who died in a car crash on her way to hand a reporter evidence of falsified safety records at the plutonium plant where she worked. Her family’s lawsuit against energy company Kerr-McGee reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that federal nuclear regulation doesn’t preempt state punitive-damages claims — a precedent still cited today. Kerr-McGee shut the plant a year later and eventually settled for $1.38 million without admitting fault. Rent or buy on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Matewan (1987)
John Sayles’ gritty yet elegiac film depicts 1920s West Virginia coal miners fighting guards for the company that owns the town, the store and the sheriff. If it sounds like a Western, it kind of is. The town of Matewan is now home to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, founded in 2015 and expanded in 2020, a direct beneficiary of the interest the film generated in a conflict most Americans were never taught. Available only on Blu-ray or DVD.
Two Days, One Night (2014)
Marion Cotillard’s character has one weekend to visit 16 co-workers and talk a majority into giving up their bonus so she can keep her job. It’s a bit of a fantastical premise, to be sure, but the Dardennes brothers film is a fable on how austerity-era employers pit workers in precarious jobs against each other, and Cotillard’s Oscar nomination kept the argument in front of far more people than a small Belgian drama usually reaches. Rent or buy on Apple TV or Prime Video.
Roma (2018)
Alfonso Cuarón shot this film in black-and-white and based it on personal experience. Cleo, an Indigenous live-in housekeeper for a fracturing middle-class family in 1971 Mexico City, is modeled on Libo, the woman who raised him. She holds the household together for the entire film, but legally, at the time it’s set, she had few rights. Mexican domestic workers had no mandatory social security until a Supreme Court ruling in December 2018, two weeks after the theatrical release of Roma. It won three Oscars two months later. Netflix.
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
In this dystopian tale set in an alternate-reality Oakland, California, Cassius Green, a Black telemarketer played by LaKeith Stanfield, discovers that his “white voice” gets results, then climbs past his striking co-workers into a corporate nightmare. The satire keeps escalating until it’s basically science fiction. Director Boots Riley has revealed that workers have messaged him in the years since saying they’d gotten co-workers to watch it before a union vote — proof that even a dark comedy can drive real-world change. Buy on Apple TV or rent on Fandango at Home.
Documentaries
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Kopple lived with striking Kentucky coal miners for over a year, and the danger was real — strikebreakers shot at her crew on the picket line, and the killing of a miner was among the events she captured on film. Kopple prominently featured the miners’ wives in the film because they were playing such an important role in the strike. The film won an Oscar for Kopple, who effectively invented the modern American labor documentary. HBO Max.
Powaqqatsi (1988)
Godfrey Reggio’s visual tone poem has no dialogue, no plot, no union drive — just Philip Glass’ score under spellbinding images of the labor that keeps the world running. Opening with a stunning six-minute sequence of hundreds of workers hauling ore up muddy walls by hand in Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine, the film is a stunning depiction of the oppressive conditions for workers and a visual condemnation of what Reggio called a “dogma/religion of progress and development.” Prime Video.
Roger & Me (1989)
General Motors was posting record profits in the 1980s while chairman Roger Smith closed Flint, Michigan, assembly plants and moved the jobs to Mexico for cheaper, nonunion labor, cutting the local workforce from 80,000 to roughly 50,000. So Michael Moore, in his first film, decided to get personal, spending the movie chasing Smith around the country, refusing to let him blame the company’s offshoring on “the economy” and trying to make him understand how many lives he wrecked. No surprise, he never gets the meeting. Rent or buy on Apple TV or Prime Video.
American Factory (2019)
Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s Oscar-winning documentary tells the story of Fuyao, a Chinese auto-glass manufacturer, as it reopens a Dayton, Ohio, United Auto Workers plant GM had shuttered in 2008, promising the return of thousands of jobs. What came back: American workers earning roughly half their old GM wages working under Chinese managers frustrated by what they saw as low productivity and the looming threat of another union. The film highlights an unmistakable contrast: what an American job used to guarantee, against what cheap labor, both abroad and at home, is willing to settle for. Netflix.
Union (2024)
Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s documentary is a fly-on-the-wall look at Chris Smalls — who was fired by Amazon in 2020 after leading a COVID-safety walkout — and his fight to organize the company’s Staten Island warehouse into the first successful union election at any Amazon facility in the country. Distributors said they loved it, then passed anyway, perhaps unwilling to cross the country’s second-largest private employer. The directors self-distributed instead, partnering with unions, economic-justice groups and college campuses, while making the Amazon Labor Union itself a distributor whose cut of the profits funded its own organizing and Solidarity Fund. Rent or buy on Apple TV or Prime Video.
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