LABOR DAY 2026 WATCH LIST

With changing laws and an increased reliance of management and production on AI, the discussion about worker solidarity and collective bargaining, and about what’s at stake for union members who are walking the picket lines to preserve their jobs, Labor Day celebrations rise to a new level of relevance. According to the Cornell University Labor Action Tracker, there have been 444 official labor actions — strikes and protests — taken across the USA thus far in 2026, from January 1 to September 1. The actions covered a range of issues, incuding pay, healthcare, working conditions and job protection against the introduction of AI into the workplace. We can consider among those workers most concerned about the impact AI has on thier job security all of our colleagues in entertainment and media. The power of collective bargaining will determine how successful labor unions will be in their demands for fair compensation. safe working conditions and job protection.

Labor actions in the entertainment indusstry impact millions of movie lovers and fans whose lives are shaped to some extent by cinema. Remember the sense of loss and debrivation we felt duriing the ongoing 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. But quality of life has also been deeply affected by other union actions by workers who provide essential services and deliver the basic and luxury goods we’ve come to rely on. This Labor Day, let’s celebrate workers and the power of collective bargaining by watching documentaries and truth-based labor-centric narrative features about the lives of labor leaders and union actions that reflect positive change. Here is a list of suggestions in no particular order. Enjoy the trailers, too:

AMERICAN DREAM (1990, Rereleased 2026)
It’s been slightly over 40 years since Hormel factory workers in Austin, Minnesota, went on a nearly year-long strike to protest slashed wages and benefits — and 35 years since Barbara Kopple’s revealing film about the strike, American Dream, won the Best Documentary Oscar in 1991. And what lingers most after watching the movie’s new 4K restoration is the feeling of how relevant so much of it still is decades later. Sure, fashions may have changed since the mid-’80s, and filmmaking equipment is more sophisticated these days but we still live in a world (or at least a country) in which the rich continue to get richer while the working class struggles to make ends meet. And when the latter dares to stand up for themselves, they’re met with disdain, condescension, and an unyielding devotion to capitalism. Let’s just say that the parade of White men in suits defending Hormel’s anti-worker policies and choices in 1985 doesn’t feel very far removed from the politicians and business leaders who are still prioritizing profit over people in 2026.

MADE IN DAGENHAM (2010)
Director Nigel Coles truth-based dramatization of the 1968 sewing machinists’ strike at Ford’s Dagenham car factory in Britain follows female workers who walked off their production lines in protest against sexual discrimination. Sally Hawkins stars as Rita O’Grady, a fictional character who is a self effacing wife whose husband also works at the Ford factory. Rita is traditional and conservative, a devoted mom and a compliant laborer — until she is pushed by the plant’s other female sewing machine operators to become their spokesperson and labor leader. As she is treated in ways that make her angry, she steps up to not only challenge the executives in her a male-dominated union to support the women in their demands, she also successfully argues for pay equity before British authorities. Hawkins brilliantly captures the complex character whose arc is one of enhanced empowerment and success. The successful Dagenham strike led to the Equal Pay Act 1970, which gave the women what they wanted and deserved. Bob Hoskins, Miranda Richardson, Geraldine James, Rosamund Pike, Andrea Riseborough, Jaime Winstone, Daniel Mays and Richard Schiff form the fine ensemble cast that brings a sense if authenticity to the fictionalized telling of the story of the Dagenham strike.

NORMA RAE (1979)
Directed by Martin Ritt, the film is based on the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, a union activist during the long-lasting labor dispute at the J.P. Stevens mills in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. From (1963 to 1890) the Stevens company repeatedly harassed or fired union activists. In the dramatized version of Sutton’s story, Sally Field stars in the film as Norma Rae, a single mom who supports her family on her paltry wages she received from the company. Norma Rae is enlisted by the union rep to become a union organizer, to convince her co-workers to vote for unionization of the mill workers. When management notices what she’s what she’s doing, they fire her. Her family has worked at the mill for three generations, and she has no other job opportunities. Yet, she remains union strong. In the film’s most famous scene, Norma Rae stands on a work table in the factory and, holds high a cardboard placard with UNION handwritten on it in bold letters. Norma Rae and Sally Field were widely acclaimed: the film premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival where it competed for the Palme d’Or, while Field won the Best Actress Prize. It was theatrically released to critical and commercial success. At the 52nd Academy Awards, the film was nominated for /Best Picture and three other awards, including its win for Best Actress for Field. And as recently as 2011, the film was selected to be preserved in the National Film Registry.

HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A (1976)
Documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple chronicles the thirteen-month Brookside Strike, the 1973 protest by 189 coal miners and their families against work conditions in the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company’s Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. Kopple and her crew spent years following the families who were reluctant and suspicious of her at first, but she gained their trust to the point where they opened their homes to her, allowing her to document the the devastating hardships they faced — poverty and deprivation, black lung disease and abject depression — while they persisted in their strike for safer working conditions, fair labor practices, and decent wages. Koppel went with them to picket in front of the New York Stock Exchange, interviews miners affected by black lung disease, and recorded it when miners were shot at while striking. Koppel was a young filmmaker with a strong sense of justice. Harlan County, U.S.A. was her first feature documentary and she won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 49th Academy Awards.

SILKWOOD (1983) Directed by Mike Nichols from a screenplay by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, this truth based drama is abut Karen Silkwood, the union organizer who blew the whistle on the dangerous workplace conditions at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant where workers were regularly exposed to death-dealing radiation. Silkwood was harassed, threatened and purposefully contaminated by the company. In one scene in the film, Karen activates a radiation alarm at the plant — and is shown to have 40 time the legally allowable amount of radioactive contamination in her body. Her death in a roadside accident was suspected (thought never proven) to be murder. After her death, the 1979 lawsuit, Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee, resulted in the jury granting a record $10 million in damages to the Silkwood estate, which eventually settled for $1.3 million. The film Silkwood is factually accurate in representing her story. The project was in development for nine years, originating a Warner Bros. with Jane Fonda slated to play Silkwood. But after legal complications involving the release of research materials, Warner Bros. withdrew and the film went to ABC Motion Pictures, with Nichols directing and Meryl Streep cast as Karen. Silklwood was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Actress for Streep, Best Supporting Actress for co-star Cher, Best Director for Nichols, Best Screenplay for Ephron and Arlen and Best Editing for Sam O’Steen.

WHO MOVES AMERICA (2026)
Director Yael Bridge’s Who Moves America demonstrates and celebrates the solidarity and power of 340,000 UPS Teamsters, both full-time and part -time workers who unite to approve a new five-year contract. Documenting teamster representatives in Local 542 in San Marcos, California; Local 804 in Brooklyn, New York; and Local 82 in Louisville, Kentucky, in affiliation with 340,000 members across the U.S., navigating intense 2023 contract negotiations and building solidarity. It focuses on workers’ fight for better conditions, including perspectives from a California driver, a New York strike veteran, and a Kentucky part-timer, featuring Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. This instructive, exemplary model of strategizing and unifying in the face of corporate resistance proves the power of proactive organization and, as representatives assert, “fighting for what is right.”

MATEWAN (1983)
John Sayles wrote and directed this dramatizaton about the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners’ strike in 1920 in Matewan, a small town in the hills of West Virginia. At the start of the film, union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper in his first onscreen role) arrives in Matewan, West Virginia to support and organize miners striking against wage cuts at Stone Mountain Coal Company. His (and our) his introduction to the town is seeing a mob of angry white miners beating up black miners who intended to cross the picket line. The scene immediately shows how racial tensions — specifically that local White miners don’t want to admit Black and Italian immigrant miners to the union — are dividing the workers and distracting them from the cause — higher pay and better working conditions — they have in common. The plot involves a lot of intensely engaging intrigue and action, with a company spy infiltrating the strikers’ ranks, attacks by ‘security; thugs hired by the company, and false accusations levied against Kenehan to sully his reputation and diminish his influence. The film launched Chris Cooper’s career. The supporting ensemble — including James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Will Oldham, David Strathairn, Kevin Tighe and Gordon Clapp — brings true grit to the film, which won critical acclaim but was a box office bust that earned about half of what it cost to produce. Fortunately for movie lovers, it was rereleased by the Criterion Collection in 2019.

ROGER & ME (1989)
Filmmaker Michael Moore has made a career of challenging big business’ greed, corporate exploitation of workers, government corruption and other factors that deprive workers of fundmental on-the-job rights to fair pay, equal opportunity, workplace safety, job security, healthcare and other benefits. Moore’s style is to use irreverent gut punchhumor to undermine powerful corporate employers and their disregard for workers’ rights. Roger & Me was Mooore’s first hit. It chronicles his own attempts to meet with General Motors CEO Roger Smith for a confrontational interrogation about the auto manufacturer’s treatment of its employees, including then current massive layoffs at it’s Flint, Michigan plant — at a time when corporate earnings — and corporate leadership’s salaries were soaring. General Motors was moving its operations to Mexico, and laying off 35,000 auto workers. The closure of the US-based plants would severaly impact auto workers’ financial wellbeing and the local community’s economic stability. Flint is Michael Moore’s home town, and auto manufacturing played a huge role in the community’s economy. Moore’s father worked in the auto industry, so the closure had personal impact. Moore was, at the time, working as a journalist assigned to cover the xGeneral Motors plant closure, but he was getting such an unbelievable runaround while researching the story, he decided to capture it all on film. Moore’s happens to be quite a showman, and his dramatic presentation on screen applealed to audiences across the nation and around the world. His own persona may dominate Roger & Me, but in the film, he revealed not only the current local situation, but also chronicled several decades of the history of General Motors’s employer-employee relationships.

ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
Designated by AFI as one if the greatest films ever made, On The Waterfront received 12 Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Eva Marie Saint (in her film debut), Best Director for Elia Kazan and Best Screenplay for Budd Schulberg. The film, inspired by a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the now-defunct NY Sun newspaper, centers on Terry Malloy, an ex-prize boxer (Brando) who has left the ring to become a longshoreman who is coerced to support corrupt union leaders, one of whom is his older brother. His conscience is shaken when he witnesses a union-sanctioned murder and he ultimately takes a stand against the corrupt bosses. Schulberg’s script focuses not on collectivity, but on union disfunction and the greed of leaders. Despite the film’s enduring importance to the art of cinema and it’s themes concerning equity, loyalty and justice, the production is somewhat shrouded in lasting political controversy that comes into focus when issues of equity and solidarity — like those related to the current WGA and SAG/AFTRA strike — are front and center in the news. On The Waterfront was made shortly after both Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had testified before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), the administration agency that was charged with identifying former members of the US Communist Party and questioned their current loyal to the US government and way of life. Recognizing cinema’s influence in shaping society, HUAC was intent upon blacklisting film workers who’d been Communist Party members during the 1930s so they couldn’t make subversive pro-Communist/Soviet films. Many film workers who were called to testify before HUAC refused to collaborate in what they deemed to be a witch hunt and took the blacklist status rather then expose colleagues to undue scrutiny by naming names. However, Kazan and Schulberg were among those who cooperated with HUAC, naming names and thereby destroying the careers and disrupting the personal lives of colleagues who’d been trusted friends. History has put various spins on Kazan’s and Schulberg’s HUAC collaboration — some justify it, others still hold Kazan and Schulberg accountable for ‘ratting.’ At this moment of American film worker solidarity, it’s interesting to look back to a Hollywood moment when solidarity was not expressed and to acknowledge the resulting grief that permeated the creative community.

SALT OF THE EARTH (1954)
Based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico, Director Herbert J. Biberman’s film, scripted by Michael Wilson, follows fictional characters who go on strike against their company for higher wages and better working conditions. The majority of the miners are Mexican-Americans who want wages and working conditions equal to those given to white workers who are doing the same or less demanding jobs. The unionized workers who go on strike. The company refuses to negotiate, then imposes a Taft-Hartley Act injunction on the union — allowing for the arrest of any miner who pickets. However, seeking safety by citing a loophole in the law, the miner’s wives walk the picket line in support of their husband’s demands. Watch the film to see what happens from there. Yes, continued hardships follow, but this film has a strongly feminist point of view (unusual for the early 50s) and women rally successfully and in complete collectivity to support the union and their working husbands. The film’s neorealist style is supported by casting actual miners and their families to act in the film, and the performances are beautifully authentic. It’s important to note, too, that both director Biberman and screenwriter Wilson had been called before HUAC, refused to name names and were blacklisted — yet they were able to make this beautifully crafted film about the power of solidarity and collectivity in demanding economic equity and social justice.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This list has been updated from our Labor Day @025 Watch List.