Best movies like Harlan County U.S.A.

After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade is a 1979 documentary film directed by Lorraine Gray about the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936–1937 that focuses uniquely on the role of women using archival footage and interviews. It provides an inside look at women's roles in the strike. The film was one of the first to put together archival footage with contemporary interviews of participants and helped spur a series of films on left and labor history in the US utilizing this technique. The film was also important in helping bring into view the history of American women being active in the public sphere, particularly in union and labor actions. The film was, further, ground breaking because it was produced and directed by women. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.

A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States -- Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines, where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit.

Based on the true story of Homer Hickam, a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry against his father's wishes, and eventually became a NASA scientist.

A woman faces harassment and humiliation when she goes to work as a coal miner to support her small son and ailing dad.

In 1969, an administrator runs against the corrupt president of the United Coal Miners Union, and becomes the target of a murder plot.

When 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.

County Durham England 1984 the miners strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green starting a class war with the lower classes suffering caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot who after leaving his boxing club for the day stubbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne the audition is for the royal Ballet school in London.

This is the tale of industrial strife at WC Boggs' Lavatory factory. Vic Spanner is the union representative who calls a strike at the drop of a hat; eventually everyone has to get fed up with him. This is also the ideal opportunity for lots of lavatorial jokes...

1935 documentary about the hard working life of Welsh coal miners.

A North Korean coal miner struggles to realize her dream of becoming a circus acrobat.

Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, 1876. A secret society of Irish coal miners, bond by a sacred oath, put pressure on the greedy and ruthless company they work for by sabotaging mining facilities in the hope of improving their working conditions and the lives of their families.

Filmed in the coal country of West Virginia, "Matewan" celebrates labor organizing in the context of a 1920s work stoppage. Union organizer, Joe Kenehan, a scab named "Few Clothes" Johnson and a sympathetic mayor and police chief heroically fight the power represented by a coal company and Matewan's vested interests so that justice and workers' rights need not take a back seat to squalid working conditions, exploitation and the bottom line.

At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die. Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

Naive Stanley Windrush returns from the war, his mind set on a successful career in business. Much to his own dismay, he soon finds he has to start from the bottom and work his way up, and also that the management as well as the trade union use him as a tool in their fight for power.

A man in his fifties reminisces about his childhood growing up in a Welsh mining village at the turn of the 20th century.

In a town where half the men die down the coalpit, Margaret MacNeil is quite happy being single in her small Cape Breton island town. Until she meets Neil Currie, a charming and sincere bagpipe-playing, Gaelic-speaking dishwasher. But no matter what you do, you can't avoid the spectre of the pit forever.

In 1984, a group of LGBT activists decide to raise money to support the National Union of Mineworkers during their lengthy strike. There is only one problem: the Union seems embarrassed to receive their support.

In a Welsh coal mining valley, a young man with a beautiful singing voice is called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice when a pit disaster threatens.

In the 1920s, the rights of American workers to join a labor union was still considered an open question, and African-Americans were routinely denied their civil and economic rights. 10,000 Black Men Named George, the title, refers to the fact Pullman porters were often called "George" by white passengers, which was considered a racial slur.

The Stars Look Down is based on A. J. Cronin's 1935 novel of the same name, about injustices in a mining community in North East England. While the novel follows the development of three young men in the small mining town, the film focuses on just one of them; the smart David Fenwick who gets a scholarship to university, meets a girl who only marries him because her former boyfriend has abandoned her, and eventually returns to the mine town as a teacher and takes part in a futile rescue effort when the mine is flooded, trapping both his father and his younger brother.

In a small American coal town living in the shadow of a recent mining accident, the disappearance of a teenage boy draws three people together—a surviving miner, the lonely wife of a mine executive, and a local boy—in a web of secrets.

A power-mad union boss resorts to murder to eliminate witnesses scheduled to testify against him. The eclectic cast includes Mickey Rooney, Mamie Van Doren, Mel Torme, Jay North, Vampira, Charles Chaplin Jr., Jackie Coogan and Norman Grabowski.

A Kentucky woman whose mine-worker husband is nearly killed in a cave-in, and whose father is slowly dying of black lung disease, joins the picket lines for a long, violent strike.

A proud patriarch battles union organizers and a powerful conglomerate threatening the family-owned lumber and mining operation which he runs with his three sons, his daughter and his nephew in this pilot film to "The Yeagers" TV series that actually ended months before it aired.

Jim Cole, heir to a mining operation, takes over the mine, which is suffering from unexplained low production, and is facing a strike by the miners. Jim will soon loose the mine if production doesn't increase and the sabotage continues. Mary Norsen, office-secretary, accidentally learns of a plot by Fred Johnson to wreck the mine and force Cole to sell his coal-mine. She and her brother, Joe, join Cole in his fight to stop Johnson.

A biography of the civil-rights activist and labor organizer Cesar Chavez. Chronicling the birth of a modern American labour movement, Cesar Chavez tells the story of the famed civil rights leader and labour organiser torn between his duties as a husband and father and his commitment to securing a living wage for farm workers. Passionate but soft-spoken, Chavez embraced non-violence as he battled greed and prejudice in his struggle to bring dignity to working people.

In the early 1900s, the legendary Joe Hill emigrates with his brother to the United States. But after a short time, he loses touch with his brother. Joe gets a few jobs but is struck by all the injustice and tragedy going on. He becomes active in the forbidden union IWW, a union for workers without trades. It is forbidden to demonstrate and to speak in public but Joe gets around that by singing his manifests with the Salvation Army. He manages to get more and more people to go on strike with him but he also makes powerful enemies doing that. Finally he gets connected with a murder and during the trial he fires his lawyer and takes upon himself to become his own defender.

Dramatization of the true story of the so-called Willmar Eight, a group of Minnesota bank workers who braved freezing conditions whilst picketing their branch in a struggle for union rights.

A simple Pennsylvania coal miner is drawn into the violent conflict between union workers and management.

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?

Glace Bay, Nova Scotia Canada, 1901. Willie MacLean is a 10-year-old boy with a love for horses and liking to school to cape the difficult times his family has. Willie's stern, but benevolent father is a coal miner in a local mine along with his older brother John. But when Willie's father is injured and John is killed in an accident at the mine, Willie is forced to step into his brother's shoes to support his older sister Nelle, and two younger sisters until their father recovers. Willie soon finds work at the mine lonely (aka: the pit) and unfriendly in which he forms a bond with a pit pony horse in order to make it though each day.

A ham-handed cautionary fable against communism, the film concerns a group of Civil War veterans who are appalled by the burgeoning radical movement in America.