Daily Stream: Labor Day watch list

2. Harlan County, USA (1976)
(Requires signup for free trial of The Criterion Channel)

Documentary legend Barbara Kopple won an Oscar for her feature about the long and sometimes violent Brookside Strike in rural Kentucky, for which she spent years embedded with the 180 coal miners seeking better, safer working conditions.

3. Salt of the Earth (1954)

Three casualties of the Hollywood blacklist—director Herbert J. Biberman, writer Michael Wilson, and producer Paul Jarrico—collaborated on this independent production to dramatize the practice of racial discrimination in a New Mexico zinc mine, the efforts of Mexican and Mexican-American workers to unionize for fair treatment, and the union busting moves on the part of the mine company. Actual mine workers participated in the film, which was boycotted on its initial release for its alleged Communist sympathies.

4. Support the Girls (2018)

The great Regina Hall leads Andrew Bujalski's look at one day in a Hooters-like establishment and the Herculean efforts of Hall's manager to provide a positive environment for her service staff in a workplace in which their objectification is written into the business plan.

5. Union Maids (1976)

Ohio treasure Julia Reichert's first Academy Award nomination came out of this absorbing, inspiring portrait of three women who were instrumental in efforts to organize workers in Chicago in the 1930s, and to fight back the brutality of opposition from business interests.