Harlan County, USA

Harlan County, USA is a 1976 Oscarwinning documentary film covering the Brookside Strike, an effort of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Companyowned Eastover Coal Companys Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky in 1973. Directed and produced by Barbara Kopple, who has long been an advocate of workers rights, Harlan County, U.S.A. is less ambivalent in its attitude toward unions than her later American Dream, the account of the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota in 198586.

Kopple and her crew spent years with the families depicted in the film, documenting the dire straits they find themselves in while striking for safer working conditions, fair labor practices, and decent wages following them to picket in front of the stock exchange in New York, filming interviews with people affected by black lung disease, and even catching miners being shot at while striking.The most significant point of disagreement in the Harlan County strike was the companys insistence on including a nostrike clause in the contract. The miners were concerned that accepting such a provision in the agreement would limit their influence over local working conditions. The sticking point was mooted when, a few years after this strike, the UMWA folded the agreement that was eventually won by this group of workers into a global contract. ........

Source: Wikipedia