
This extraordinary documentary is an unflinching record of the workers’ struggle during Japan’s economic rebirth in the 1980s, centered on Tokyo’s Sanya “yoseba”—a slum community dating from the 19th century where day laborers lived in terrible conditions while they sought work.
Narrator (voice)

This extraordinary documentary is an unflinching record of the workers’ struggle during Japan’s economic rebirth in the 1980s, centered on Tokyo’s Sanya “yoseba”—a slum community dating from the 19th century where day laborers lived in terrible conditions while they sought work.
1985-01-25
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7.7In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed ceramics workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - the take - has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.
7.5This 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.
6.7This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.
6.3In China’s popular live-streaming showrooms, three millennials – a karaoke singer, a migrant worker and a rags-to-riches comedian – seek fame, fortune and human connection, ultimately finding the same promises and perils online as in their real lives.
7.3When workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota are asked to take a substantial pay cut in a highly profitable year, the local labor union decides to go on strike and fight for a wage they believe is fair. But as the work stoppage drags on and the strikers face losing everything, friends become enemies, families are divided and the very future of this typical mid American town is threatened.
0.0A highly choreographed review of the Industrial Age as we know it today – an intense and playful roller coaster ride that demands the viewer confronts how “work works.” Culled entirely from archival footage, the film unfolds in the filmmakers’ trademark, and humorously critical, cinematic voices.
4.7Warsaw's Central Railway Station. 'Someone has fallen asleep, someone's waiting for somebody else. Maybe they'll come, maybe they won't. The film is about people looking for something.
Migrating is seldom an easy solution. It is rather a journey, that begins with a journey. After more than eight years of campaigning, the immigrant cleaners outsourced at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London continue to demand being brought in-house. Limpiadores charts the history of their and others’ campaigns – from winning the London Living Wage to the deportation of nine colleagues, and the day-to-day invisible labour of cleaners on our campus.
The story of the children who work 12-14 hour days in the fields without the protection of child labor laws. These children are not toiling in the fields in some far away land. They are working in America.
7.8The drastic economic development in South Korea once surprised the rest of the world. However, behind of it was an oppression the marginalized female laborers had to endure. The film invites us to the lives of the working class women engaged in the textile industry of the 1960s, all the way through the stories of flight attendants, cashiers, and non-regular workers of today. As we encounter the vista of female factory workers in Cambodia that poignantly resembles the labor history of Korea, the form of labor changes its appearance but the essence of the bread-and-butter question remains still.
6.8A film about non-territorial office space, multi-mobile knowledge workers, Blackberries and Miles&More. A road movie discovering the working world of tomorrow. This documentary will take you on a journey through the post-industrial knowledge and services workshops, our supposed future working place. In this new world work will be handled more liberally. Time clocks cease to exist. Attention is not compulsory any more. The resource “human“ comes into focus. The film closely follows the high-tech work force – people who are highly mobile and passionate to make their work their purpose in life. Further episodes resume this topic and lead into the world of modern office architecture and into the world of Human Resource Management.
The lowest paid teachers in the nation are in the middle of a statewide walkout in Oklahoma. From start to finish, Walkout follows the teachers as they get organized and demand raises from their state legislature. From crowded classrooms to a packed state capitol, Walkout offers an in-depth, personal look at the latest strike at the heart of a nationwide movement for education funding.
8.0Inside the life of former baseball star Curt Flood whose fight against MLB's 'Reserve Clause' led to reform, but destroyed his career.
0.0After consolidating itself as a tourist destination in the mid-1960s, this small coastal village has become the dormitory town for the workers of a Nuclear Power Plant. With the liberal promise of prosperity and socioeconomic wellfare, many workers left their homes to move to the small city and started working at the new Nuclear Power Plant. The collective unrest and the silence, cut off by the great gusts of wind, articulate the landscape of the village that is now under the aid of the Nuclear Power Plant.
This 1996 documentary takes a nostalgic ride through history to present the experiences of Black sleeping-car porters who worked on Canada's railways from the early 1900s through the 1960s. There was a strong sense of pride among these men and they were well-respected by their community. Yet, harsh working conditions prevented them from being promoted to other railway jobs until finally, in 1955, porter Lee Williams took his fight to the union.
5.0Few of us have stopped to consider the lives of the workers who manufacture the objects that make up our daily lives. We use these objects without knowing anything about the Foxconn plants in which they are made, or even where these factories are located, let alone who works in them. One such worker was the young Chinese poet Xu Lizhi, who, at the age of 24, jumped out of a building not far from where he worked at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen.
2.0A documentary that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in a intimate and thoughtful walk through Poblenou Cemetery in Barcelona, better know as "El Santet", to see what is happening at its surrounding areas and, especially, inside: work, buildings, people watching over those who are no longer here, cemetery workers... A trip through a space that is closer than we think.
6.3Auguste Lumière directs four workers in the demolition of an old wall at the Lumière factory. One worker is pressing the wall inwards with a jackscrew, while another is pushing it with a pick. When the wall hits the ground, a cloud of white dust whirls up. Three workers continue the demolition of the wall with picks.
0.0Man-pulled rickshaw, which have served Kolkata for over eight decades face virtual extinction as a result of legislation introduced by the State Government in 1981. This would rob over 100,000 people of a living. The film analyzes the critical situation, and on the basis of concrete facts and figures, questions whether such a step would be fruitful at all. The image of a man pulling a man is a depressing and a negative one - but not more negative than that of the image of a man going without food.
3.3Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives captures a spirited group of women who taught themselves how to deliver babies on a 1970s hippie commune. Today as nearly one third of all US babies are born via C-section, they fight to protect their knowledge and to promote respectful, safe maternity practices all over the globe. From the backs of their technicolor school buses, these pioneers rescued American midwifery from extinction, changed the way a generation approached pregnancy, and filmed nearly everything they did. With unprecedented access to the midwives' archival video collection, as well as modern day footage of life at the alternative intentional community where they live, this documentary shows childbirth the way most people have never seen it--unadorned, unabashed, and awe-inspiring.