A prizefighter-turned-longshoreman with a conscience goes up against labor leaders to expose corruption, extortion, and murder among the union ranks.

A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider, whom takes the youth under his wing.

Set at the beginning of the Civil War, Tap Roots is all about a county in Mississippi which chooses to secede from the state rather than enter the conflict. The county is protected from the Confederacy by an abolitionist and a Native American gentleman. The abolitionist's daughter is courted by a powerful newspaper publisher when her fiance, a confederate officer, elopes with the girl's sister. The daughter at first resists the publisher's attentions, but turns to him for aid when her ex-fiance plans to capture the seceding county on behalf of the South.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

Alí and José María, friends on a work trip in an old Volkswagen, get stranded in a village and make friends, but they discover that their job could alter the fate of the place.

A gallery of characters in Brooklyn in the 1950s are crushed by their surroundings and selves: a union strike leader discovers he is gay; a prostitute falls in love with one of her clients; a family cannot cope with the fact that their daughter is illegitimately pregnant.

In 1969, an administrator runs against the corrupt president of the United Coal Miners Union, and becomes the target of a murder plot.

Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.

Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.

Two coworkers decide to blackmail the corrupt demolition company they work for by setting up a fake accident.

A union leader dies in a sleazy hotel room, then the wife, mistress, police, co workers, reporters, colleagues, and political figures arrive to the hotel and each has its own intentions.

A waitress destined for a better life falls in love with a handsome stranger, only to find that he is already married.