Best Laborer Movies & TV Shows

After being raised in an Oklahoma orphanage, 15 year-old Donald makes his way to California during the depression. He meets Emogene, the daughter of poor migrant farm laborers, and together they set out to break the cycle of poverty and ignorance.

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

Buckley is an unethical reporter who manipulates the news for his own benefit as much as he reports it. When he is in Paris to get a medal for being rescued from his alleged kidnappers, he finds that his boss, Stevens, at the Chicago Globe is going with his old gal Dolly. When Stevens learns that Dolly is staying with Buckley in Moscow, he fires Buckley. To get his job back, Buckley and Lefty stage a great news story about the shooting of the last Romanoff, but the plan backfires and they are now in line to be shot by the Commissar.

Cupertino, Italy, 1623: A simple-minded and clumsy young man joins a Franciscan order as a hired hand, overcoming his intellectual and social challenges with a pure heart and a simple faith. God performs a miracle through him, quite literally raising him to sainthood.

A World War I veteran’s dreams of becoming a master architect evaporate in the cold light of economic realities. Things get even worse when he’s falsely convicted of a crime and sent to work on a chain gang.

In the 1890s, 10-year-old Yohan is sent away from home to survive on his own as a child laborer. He experiences hardships and overcomes his fears by relying on bravery and hope to make the best of his circumstances.

Successful movie director John L. Sullivan, convinced he won't be able to film his ambitious masterpiece until he has suffered, dons a hobo disguise and sets off on a journey, aiming to "know trouble" first-hand. When all he finds is a train ride back to Hollywood and a beautiful blonde companion, he redoubles his efforts, managing to land himself in more trouble than he bargained for when he loses his memory and ends up a prisoner on a chain gang.

A young field administrator for the TVA comes to rural Tennessee to oversee the building of a dam on the Tennessee River. He encounters opposition from the local people, in particular a farmer who objects to his employment (with pay) of local black laborers. Much of the plot revolves around the eviction of an elderly woman from her home on an island in the River, and the young man's love affair with that woman's widowed granddaughter.

Pili lives in rural Tanzania, working the fields for less than $1 a day to feed her two children and struggling to manage her HIV-positive status in secret. When she is offered the chance to rent a sought-after market-stall, Pili is desperate to have it. But with only two days to get the deposit together, Pili is forced to make increasingly difficult decisions with ever-deepening consequences. How much will she risk to change her life?

An unemployed construction worker heading out west stops at a remote farm in the desert to get water when his car overheats. The farm is being worked by a group of East European Catholic nuns, headed by the strict mother superior, who believes the man has been sent by God to build a much needed church in the desert.

Los Angeles teenager Ritchie Valens becomes an overnight rock 'n' roll success in 1958, thanks to a love ballad called "Donna" that he wrote for his girlfriend. But as his star rises, Valens has conflicts with his jealous brother, Bob, and becomes haunted by a recurring nightmare of a plane crash just as he begins his first national tour alongside Buddy Holly.

Alvin York a hillbilly sharpshooter transforms himself from ruffian to religious pacifist. He is then called to serve his country and despite deep religious and moral objections to fighting becomes one of the most celebrated American heroes of WWI.

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.

Fed up with her small-town marriage, a woman goes after the big time and gets mixed up with the mob.

Two men, working as professional boxers, come to blows when their careers each begin to take opposite momentum.

Upper-class female reporter is (despite herself) attracted to hulking laborer digging a tunnel under the Hudson river.

A businessman mingles with German laborers to learn more about their lives.

In California, a Mexican-American is falsely accused of killing the farmer he was working for after the racist farmer stiffed his immigrant employee with a bad check.

Bickford Waner, an apparently naive young man from Fort Worth, arrives in the tiny Texas town of Dime Box and takes on a variety of menial jobs. He's befriended by Reese Ford and his wife Molly, but before long Molly has seduced Bickford. Only with the arrival of Bickford's former girlfriend Janet Conforto is it revealed that Bickford is actually the notorious train robber Kid Blue. Humiliated by a scandal arising from his affair with his friend's wife, Bickford gives up on going straight and plots a crime.

A young boy, his family, and the migrant workers they hire to work their cotton farm struggle against difficult odds to raise and sell the crop. Meanwhile, the boy dreams of living in better conditions. However, with this particularly tough farming season, the boy learns that his challenges guide him in discovering who he really is.

When the skeleton of his murdered predecessor is found, Sheriff Sam Deeds unearths many other long-buried secrets in his Texas border town.

Handsome Italian laborer Kieron Moore works as caretaker of the Neopolitan villa inherited by plain-Jane Englishwomen Margaret Johnston and Dulcie Gray. Johnston is swept off her feet by the raffishly charming Moore, and before long they are wed.

Proud, though poor, Bob wants his little girl to have a beautiful (and costly) brand-new dress for her First Communion. His stubbornness and determination get him into trouble as he turns to more and more questionable measures, in his desperation to raise the needed money. This tragic flaw leads him to risk all that he loves and values, his beloved family, indeed even his immortal soul and salvation, in blind pursuit of that goal.

Pregnant out of wedlock, an educated young woman is pressured by her father into an arranged marriage with a lonely farmer in this drama set during WWII.

In effect, modern cow town Spurline is run by Virgil Renchler, owner of the Golden Empire Ranch. One night, two of Virgil's henchmen go a little too far and beat a "bracero" ranch hand to death. Faced with an obvious cover-up and opposition on every hand, sheriff Ben Sadler is goaded into investigating. His unlikely ally: Renchler's lovely, self-willed and overprotected daughter. Will Ben survive Renchler's wrath?

Nicholas Nickleby, a young boy in search of a better life, struggles to save his family and friends from the abusive exploitation of his coldheartedly grasping uncle.

Alejandro, a tough and ambitious Latino street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, young Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his 16-year-old sister, Isamar.

Come Back, Africa chronicles the life of Zachariah, a black South African living under the rule of the harsh apartheid government in 1959.

Passengers on a ship traveling from Mexico to Europe in the 1930s represent society at large in that era. The crew is German, including the ship's Dr. Schumann, who falls in love with one of the passengers, La Condesa. A young American woman, Jenny, is traveling with the man she loves, David. Jenny is fascinated and puzzled by just who some of the other passengers are.

Fired for messing up an important contract, Dagwood takes a job as a manual laborer for a construction firm while trying to get his old job back.

A black laborer turns preacher after accidentally killing a man.

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.

Maya is a quick-witted young woman who comes over the Mexican border without papers and makes her way to the LA home of her older sister Rosa. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers' union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro to bring its "justice for janitors" campaign to the building. Sam finds Maya a willing listener, she's also attracted to him. Rosa resists, she has an ailing husband to consider. The workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Rosa and Maya as well as workers and management may be set to collide.

The same situation is played out in different cities (New York, Berlin and Tokyo). A lover has to choose whether to commit to a partner who is returning home. In each case there are other people involved, an ex-partner and someone else in a "permanent" relationship, what do they choose to do?

The American Dream becomes a nightmare for a group of undocumented day laborers hired by a wealthy couple. What they expect to be their biggest payday turns into a terrifying fight for survival.

Will Cole is a charismatic 35 year old paper mill laborer who seems to celebrate a life of bad choices. He lives and behaves as if he was still 18, womanizing and drinking and rejecting responsibility because he sees no reason to take life seriously. Surprisingly enough, despite his devil-may-care attitude, he has several important people in his life. He maintains a special relationship with Stan, an old mentor who lives in a nursing home, and Ruth, the only woman he truly cares about. Andrew is his best friend but grows tired of Will's antics, and he is soon to be married and moving on. Will constantly has something up his sleeve but his pranks inevitably bring pain and tragedy to those closest to him, forcing him to reevaluate his life and make some difficult decisions. (IMDb)

A comedic thriller that re-imagines Mark Twain's iconic literary characters of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" as grown men in current day.

When a possessed pair of jeans begins to kill the staff of a trendy clothing store, it is up to Libby, an idealistic young salesclerk, to stop its bloody rampage.

Nino Culotta is an Italian immigrant, newly arrived in Australia, and attempts to understand the aspirational values and social rituals of everyday urban Australians of the 1950s and '60s.... and assimilate.

A look at the lives of migratory farm workers, focusing on one family.

Three laborers on a Northern California marijuana plantation become increasingly paranoid when they learn that their boss has been murdered. They know enough to run, taking with them enough of the crop to pay them for services rendered. Hooking up with go-between Lucy in the next town, they plot their next move.

A lonely TV weatherman strikes up an unusual friendship with a middle-aged Latino migrant worker.

Henry Dussard, a young American, inherits a picturesque but badly neglected olive farm in southern France and is determined to make it operational again despite cautionary advice from the local priest and a pretty villager. Desperate for laborers, the inventive Dussard turns to the zaniest crew of olive pickers ever recruited - four mischievous monkeys! As former members of an Air Force space team, these intelligent chimps quickly pick up on their new responsibilities - but prove to have a turbulent effect on the local townspeople.

The Yosemite Valley Railroad, which runs through the breathtaking scenery and stunning vistas of Yosemite National Park, is on the brink of failure. The grandson of a Chinese railroad laborer embarks on a romantic, but ultimately doomed, quest to save this railroad from being sold for scrap. His love of trains finds him working as a railroad-man, instead of at his father's profitable business. He manages to locate a wealthy eccentric investor to help him acquire the railroad, but its financial inviability makes this a quixotic reprieve, at best. The film also portrays the anti-Asian racism present in America at the conclusion of World War II.

Twelve-year-old Mexican-American Marcos (Jose Alcala) recalls the hardships of the previous year, reflecting on the arduous trek his migrant-worker family made from Texas to the Midwest during harvest season. Along the way, Marcos learns plenty about the harsh realities of bigotry and the power of family in America of the 1950s. The coming-of-age Chicano drama is based on Tomas Rivera's semiautobiographical 1971 novella.

The film tells the story of an imigrant to Argentina who works for the railway company of this land. Being a witness to the history of the land of silver in this century the film is also a shortcut of the changes in Argentina during the last 100 years.

A disenchanted young Professor of Semantics at a California college learns of a distant relative's death in Missouri. He journeys cross-country to the funeral, then decides to spend the summer there and work as a laborer for a power-line company. In time, he meets a girl and falls in love but then faces an important decision as to which direction he wants his life to go.

Ellen Saunders is an heiress on a cruise to Europe being pursued by a day laborer mistaken for a prominent mining engineer. During the cruise, he foils two crooks trying to get their hands on her lucrative nickel mine.

Natasha sets out to break up with four of her five boyfriends in a single day. There’s Victor, the melodramatic poet. Jack, the angry laborer. Tom, the friend with benefits. Winston, the nice guy. As Natasha’s story progresses, we begin to experience her world and its inhabitants, while finding out exactly what it is she wants. Ultimately it is a story detailing the frustrations of being young and in search of love.

Ramona, a young girl growing up on her adoptive mother's rancho in California, falls in love with the Indian lad Alessandro. When Ramona is denied permission to marry Alessandro, the two lovers elope, only to find a life of great hardship and unhappiness amidst the bigotry and greed of the white landowners.