Labor Documentaries for May Day

Looking for something inspiring to binge when you get home from marching this International Workers’ Day? Check out these five classic labor documentaries, all available online for free.

These docs provide critical labor history of the sort typically omitted from school textbooks. As the Trump regime attempts to reduce the labor movement to rubble, it’s a great time to review past conflicts so we can understand our present and build a better future.

Union Maids (1976)

Directed by Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, Miles Mogulescu
Stream for free on Kanopy with a public library card, or on YouTube

“If you’re going to work, and there’s a union, join it. No matter what kind it is. Any union is better than none. And if there isn’t one, then organize one.” So opens Union Maids, establishing the tone of this oral history of woman-led labor organizing in Depression-era Chicago.

Union Maids weaves together the personal stories of radical rank-and-file organizers Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki, and Sylvia Woods—who, after experiencing the daily exploitation of domestic life, set out to build race, gender, and class solidarity in the workplace.

Interviewed in their late 60s and early 70s, the women reflect with pride and clarity on their 1930s experiences agitating for safety measures in packinghouses, textile mills, and stockyards, how they educated their fellow workers to avoid yellow-dog contracts (where employers made new hires pledge not to join a union), and the power of downing tools when the bosses ignored their demands for better pay or a slower pace.

In stunning archival footage, we get to see the vibrant character of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was opening its arms to radicals, women, immigrants, and workers of color while the American Federation of Labor remained dedicated to cultural conservativism and craft unionism.

Union Maids is an ode to the class war of nearly a century ago and the women who led their co-workers into battle and emerged victorious.

The Wobblies (1979)

Directed by Stewart Bird, Deborah Shaffer
Stream for free on Kanopy with a public library card, or on YouTube

State repression and anti-communist witch hunts greased the gears of the war machine and slowly bled out a mighty union that once had 100,000 members. Do these depressing details sound familiar, as Trump and the corporate class place their boots on labor’s neck? Yet the mood of The Wobblies manages to remain damn near jolly.

Punctuated by tunes from the Little Red Song Book, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, interviewed in their elder years, look back on their efforts to abolish the wage system and form One Big Union with the gratification and dignity that comes from a lifetime of fighting the good fight.

Former IWW lumberjacks, textile workers, and agricultural labors recall major strikes, like the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the Loggers Strike of 1917 in Spokane, Washington. There were some victories, and even more losses. But to hear it from these geriatric Wobblies, what kept them going was the nourishing power of solidarity. “An injury to one is an injury to all” was more than a slogan—it was the mold for their whole project.

Final Offer (1985)

Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson
Stream for free on National Film Board of Canada

Final Offer, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, offers an exhilarating peek behind the curtain of the knock-down-drag-out negotiations between General Motors and the United Auto Workers’ Canadian branch in 1984.

Director Sturla Gunnarsson was granted unprecedented access to the union’s activities—both on the shop floor, where the rank and file stand their ground against harsh management, and in closed-door parleys between union leader Bob White and the GM suits.

Wildcat strikes, shouting matches over conference tables and hotel telephones, and intense divisions between White and his UAW counterparts in Detroit all combine to create pressure-cooker stakes. This film shows just how much it takes to to extract even moderate gains from the corporate class.

Finally Got the News (1970)

Directed by Stewart Bird and Peter Gessner
Stream for free on YouTube

An illuminating companion piece to Final Offer, Stewart Bird and Peter Gessner’s documentary debut Finally Got the News highlights Black workers’ struggles in the auto industry in the late ’60s.

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Filmed nearly 20 years after Walter Reuther solidified the UAW’s power with the seismic Treaty of Detroit, Finally Got the News centers a group called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, voicing the insights of those who felt left behind by the UAW’s shortcomings on racial equality.

At Chrysler’s main assembly plant in Detroit, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement was formed as a direct challenge to the UAW slate. Black organizers, using a Marxist-Leninist framework, called for workers to own the means of production and reshape a union that had left Black workers behind. The film is an incredible collection of interviews, archival footage of picket lines and leafleting, and revolutionary quotables.

Harlan County, USA (1977)

Directed by Barbara Kopple
Stream on Max, or for free on DailyMotion

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning, Criterion-preserved masterpiece remains the best-known labor documentary for good reason.

In breathtaking style, Kopple captures the poverty of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, and their violent clashes with scabs and police as they strike to force the Eastover Coal Company to recognize their contract with the United Mineworkers.

The film also captures the aftermath of the murder of insurgent union presidential candidate Jock Yablonski in 1969. UMWA President Tony Boyle was convicted of conspiracy to murder his rival.

One segment shows the indelible moment where hundreds of miners in hard hats traveled to Wall Street to picket Duke Power, the Fortune 500 company that owned Eastover. Half a century later, in 2022, miners from Alabama traveled north to do the same, to draw attention to BlackRock’s shareholder strangulation of Warrior Met Coal and its crushing of their strike.

As history keeps echoing, the question in the film’s iconic soundtrack never gets old: Which side are you on?

Erik Abriss is a freelance writer and mutual aid organizer based in Los Angeles.