Morristown, Tennessee, and Juarez, Mexico, are being drawn closer together by the global economy, and the way their inhabitants live and work (or don’t) is a testament to how the dislocating effects of so-called free-trade agreements have cemented into place a permanent, migratory underclass within our borders, and within Mexico’s.

Immigrant day laborers in Austin perform some of the city’s most critical jobs but find themselves at the center of a town battle over the location of their depot, which nobody wants in their backyard.

Shooting clandestinely, with smuggled equipment and under threat of arrest, director Micha Peled gains extraordinary access into life at a blue-jeans factory in China to give us an unprecedented look at the current state of Chinese labor.

From Mexico to the Philippines to Tennessee, this remarkably prescient film, completed in 1986, examines the consequences both at home and abroad of the then relatively new American business practice of outsourcing manufacture and assembly jobs.

Each year thousands of Jamaicans spend six months cutting sugar cane by hand in Florida. They arrive with hopes of decent wages and a better life, only to find themselves exploited in ways that recall the shameful days of slavery.

Travis Wilkerson reconstructs the 1917 lynching of labor organizer Frank Little, drawing a parallel between the environmental degradation wrought by the Anaconda Mining Company in Butte, Montana, and the shattered dreams of social revolution.

Drilled in American popular culture and pronunciation, young Indian workers at a call center in Mumbai inhabit a surreal virtual world where their American identities, often eagerly adopted if ill fitting, are at odds with the reality of their lives.

Members of the United Mine Workers take over the Pittston Coal Company and wait for the cops to attack in this verité recounting of one of the most important labor struggles of the second half of the twentieth century.