1920s vision of city and work conditions in 2000.

Satire of the assembly line in a gramophone factory: tyrannical managers, timid workers.

Pennsylvanian miner forms a breakaway union, taking on owners and strikebreakers.

Classic; light-hearted view of Taylorism.

Efficiency expert and accountant sent to assess failing Hollywood studio.

Working-class life; the son of a Welsh coalminer uses his education to fight dangerous working conditions.

Welsh mining family, community and work at the turn of the nineteenth century; labour dispute and challenge owners.

Store owner, sensing union unrest, goes undercover on the shopfloor to uncover union activists.

A group of women in a wartime factory producing lenses for Japanese planes.

Labour politician’s story; socialist values eroded by seductive powers of establishment from the 1870s to the 1930s, with strikes, hunger marches, depression.

Efficiency expert tries to run his house along time-and-motion principles

Workers in agricultural machinery factory set up a co-operative, until a currency crisis destroys credit.

Connivance of management and unions to perpetuate inefficiencies and halt technology.

Union corruption on New York’s docks in the 1940s with ‘D&D’ (deaf and dumb) code of longshoremen.

Driver rebels against employer practices and dangerous schedules in the world of trucking.

Dispute between workers and plantation owners in Malaysia in the context of political conflicts between villages, government and communist rebels.

Lives of labourers and achieving unionisation during change in Egypt.

A son’s efforts to destroy the corporation that drove his father to suicide.

Classic satire on unions, the closed shop and management practice in post-war British employment.

A worker defies a strike call in a Midlands factory, becoming a ‘blackleg’ and ‘sent to Coventry’.

New York insurance clerk’s (‘Desk Number 861’) relations with bosses; ideas of the Orwellian workplace.

A long-serving accountant in an Edinburgh tweed-making firm clashes with US consultant/efficiency expert.

Nottingham engineering factory worker; alienation and pay systems (piecework).

An early attempt at dealing with racism and the aspirations of immigrants in Britain via standing as a trade union shop steward.

Critique of Castro’s Cuba.

Factual; Catholic miners fight Protestant employers over working conditions in nineteenth century Pennsylvania.

A satire on Western capitalism’s effects on India as a sales manager saves the factory by creating a labour dispute.

Sharp political satire of Gujurati dairy co-op workers’ clash with middlemen exploiting villagers.

Industrial conflict

Oppressive US factory jobs; car workers exploited by their own union.

US textile worker turns union activist.

A satire on the US way of doing business with a car salesman drawn into an all-out trade war with a rival.

The frustration of demotion from the company’s HQ to night manager at a 24-hour drugstore in the US.

Discrimination; the role of laws in the US as a woman fights to be accepted as a coal miner.

The true story of a worker campaigning against a US nuclear plant; includes trade unions and union decertification.

A satirical film of a ‘salaryman’s’ supreme dedication when asked to give a speech at the wedding of the VP’s son.

Narrative of struggle of trade unionism birth in slaughter and packing houses in First World War Chicago.

Satirical and blackly comic look at bureaucracy.

Vacuum cleaner salesmen (honest and con man) team up to hustle people out of money.

Ruthless mergers and acquisitions.

Classic; xenophobic view of work and employee relations in a Japanese car plant in a US town.

Labour, ethnic and racial troubles; violent clashes with striking miners in 1920s Virginia.

Mailroom worker in large US corporation establishes second identity as a wheeler-dealer company executive.

Classic; rivalry between unscrupulous aluminum siding salesmen in Baltimore in 1963.

A car designer battles to manufacture his revolutionary new automobile in post-war America.

Set of twins mismatched at birth meet again later on opposing sides of a property development battle.

Discrimination; impact of legislation in Australia; gender in newspapers; ethnicity in health care.

Set in post-miners’ strike Scottish town ravaged by unemployment, with an out-of-work miner forced to turn to illegal bare-knuckle boxing.

Efficiency expert examines work practices in a Melbourne shoe factory.

History of (in)famous leader of the US Teamsters union.

Classic; view of work, teams and motivation via a day in the life of US real-estate salesmen.

One of US’s political power brokers using bribery, blackmail and murder to achieve ambitions.

Steinbeck’s tale of itinerant labour working the fields of California during the Depression.

Power struggles in takeover bid against American conglomerate, Nabisco, in 1983.

Help for oppressed miners, depicting a hellish coalmine at the centre of this tale of industrial exploitation.

An organisation dealing with AIDS in the workplace.

The investigation of a death and nuances of Japanese etiquette at a conglomerate in the US.

Dewan A study of the exploitation of small farmers in India by an MNC.

Office politics and sexual harassment in the workplace, set in a hi-tech Seattle company.

A former miners’ union activist forms an unlikely relationship with the manager of a Durham coalmine.

Local communities set against the backdrop of the UK miners’ conflict and pit closures.

A priest tries to improve working conditions in a nineteenth century Belgian textiles industry.

True story of sexual harassment in the US workplace and a court case to stop the advances of a fellow employee.

Truck-driver pursuing long-term disability benefits after an accident discovers that the union is in the hands of the mafia in the US.

Changes in workforce gender composition and unemployment in the Sheffield steel industry.

Big-business politics as corporate marketing director has integrity tested on joining a hi-tech computer firm.

Camaraderie among a gang of Northern England cash-in-hand workers painting electricity pylons.

The tedium of corporate office life and the tedious routines of work, with redundancies in a computing company.

Rivalry and a new recruit unsettle a close-knit team of New York air-traffic controllers.

A whistle-blower in a tobacco company exposes scandalous practices.

Management trainee scheme at a French factory where the father was a worker; protest over firings, 35-hour working week.

Set against the backdrop of the 1984 miners’ strike.

Illegal immigrant office cleaners, some from Mexico, in Los Angeles take collective action to secure benefits, better pay and the right to join a union.

The dreams of easy money of US salesmen (brokers selling worthless stock) are just as deluded as the people they fleece.

Set in Silicon Valley as software designer discovers a sinister secret behind the employer’s ambition.

Office politics and PC pieties when accountant whose job is under threat pretends to be gay in the hope that the boss will not want to appear to be discriminatory.

A French consultant does not tell his family he has lost his job; covers work and the vacancy it fills in people’s lives.

Behind the scenes of a smart London hotel and migrant workers who prop up the economic structure.

Tensions in the workplace in a French provincial bottle factory and the atmosphere of modern factory routines.

Satirical and light-hearted take on the US dotcom boom as a top marketing man quits his job and teams up with software geeks to create a revolutionary new PC.

US cosmetic make-up company rivals with different views on worker motivation.

Unregulated working practices flourishing in modern China via a tale of a scam at an independent coal mine.

An account of the costs of globalisation, IMF and ‘free’ trade using the example of the Jamaican economy.

An enigmatic clerk achieves existential autonomy by doing only the work he feels like doing in a grim office.

History of the US corporation, obsessed by profit, devoid of social responsibility, and exploiting.

Shipbuilding job losses and the demoralising effects of unemployment (i.e. hiding true age from interview panels).

An account of how Argentinean workers responded to the 1990s economic crisis by forming co-operatives.

Modern corporate capitalism; concerns a middle-aged head of sales at a US magazine that has been taken over by a large corporation with a new, young whiz kid who comes to downsize, cut jobs and boost profits.

Shows the abandonment of free health care and education in China.

Shows a bleak future after being laid off after three decades in a Glasgow shipyard.

Presents Howard Hughes as an old-style businessman who is fanatically reluctant to delegate.

The company’s rise and its practices, such as pay that is so low that full-time employees are on welfare, hours of unpaid overtime demanded, illegal workers locked in every night.

A true story of a female iron miner fighting harassment in the workplace in a pioneering lawsuit – the first ever class action for sexual harassment.

Tension among Scottish trawler crew smuggling Chinese immigrants into the UK from Belgium.

A compilation of the best of the documentary following the trials and tribulations of husband-and-wife double-glazing entrepreneurs.

Life in Mumbai and tensions between different communities.

Comedy about rivalry for the monthly award given to conscientious workers at a Wal-Mart-type store.

Working conditions in fast food suppliers and outlets; Mexican illegal workers in the US.

The drowning of 23 illegal Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004, with examples of other low-paid jobs such as meat-packing, onion and fruit-picking, and gang masters.

The story of a homeless and almost penniless salesman whose ambition was a job on the trading floor of Dean Witter, the stockbroking firm, open to a 20-strong group of unpaid interns, only one of whom wins a trading job.

An investigation of business corruption based on a disguised version of the Elf Aquitaine 1990s scandal in France.

A corporate psychiatrist is hired to spy on the boss by a rival; the idea of ‘human resources’ and department treating humans as economic units.

A salaryman loses his job but keeps his unemployment from his family.

An account of the starving ‘wage slaves’ in 1840s Manchester.

An industrial novel that includes the reciprocal responsibilities of employers and employees.

An exposure of working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry, and the low-skilled and disadvantaged workers. It made such an impact that new legislation was introduced to reform food production.

Set in the late nineteenth century, it recounts how power and wealth were achieved.

First use of the phrase ‘white collar worker’, describing the ‘petty underlings of the business world, … the poor office clerks … who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar, regard themselves as members of the capitalist class’. The author understood the appeal of the office to people whose boiler-suited fathers had known nothing other than dirty factory work.

A satirical portrait of ‘efficiency’ and business in a medium-sized city.

The portrayal of a brutal, standardised, emotionless society dominated by mass production.

The pursuit of the ‘American Dream’; the dehumanising effects on workers in the age of mechanisation, ‘efficiency’, mass production and assembly lines.

The turbulent inner life of a banker searching for identity in his chosen profession.

Classic novel of working conditions in the nineteenth century; important to the labour movement.

Executives ready to bury emotions and values in the name of corporate uniformity.

Highlights the often brutal nature of early post-war US labour relations.

A novel about inter-personal conflicts in a publishing house.

Alienation and frustration on the shopfloor.

Includes a portrayal of the tedium of organisational life and parody of the self-important boss.

An anthropological account of people in Sheffield after the decline of the steel industry.

Compares industrial and academic worlds.

Black comedy about corporate culture and executives in an office.

A fascinating record of working life by an assembly worker in a GM plant.

Childhood in the Lancashire cotton town of Blackburn in the 1920s.

HR manager and ‘strange’ turn-around specialist; differences on company reorganisation.

Insights into the various human problems of management indicated in novels and plays.

HR manager in a multinational conglomerate in Chicago involves a clinically insane temporary secretary who brings a sexual harassment claim. It illustrates how the office provides comfort, laughter, reassurance, and even drinks and food, and how unsettling it is to be sacked by a blue-chip employer.

Set against the backdrop of the hasty and symbolic privatisation of a fictional Moscow vodka factory after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Depicts the way in which factory bosses reared in the planned economy turned into ruthless market-minded owner-managers and what their colleagues and workers thought. Also involves organised crime, which turns out to have been running the factory for years with the tacit consent of the authorities; the overlap between business, government and gangsterdom in Russia’s move to capitalism.

French corporate life and how to work less hard, by a part-time economist and manager at state-owned Electricité de France. This challenges managers with a damning portrayal of the futility of work and the absurdity of organisational life.

A satirical take on corporate culture born from the author’s FT column documenting the travails of Chief Personal Ethics Champion at a-b global (UK) – self-aggrandising, cliché-sprouting Martin Lukes.

Centres on a salaryman at a Japanese TV network whose life is thrown into disarray when he is fired on his 40th birthday.

The failure of a telesales person working for a London publisher selling advertising space in publications who ends up stacking shelves at a supermarket.

A study of boredom and disaffection in an advertising agency.

A group of journalists plug away pointlessly on a doomed newspaper.

A collection of stories on a range of occupations/work, geographical and historical locations.

A look at low-wage work in the US; the author assumed a new identity working as a waitress, a shelf stacker at Wal-Mart and a housekeeper.

A trawl through films depicting labour-capital conflicts.

Exposing the fast-food industry around the world; includes low-wage immigrant labour and workplace injury.

Demonstration of technology coupled with effective bureaucratic organisation and a strategic alliance with the Nazis using Hollerith tabulating machines to conduct a census later used for other purposes.

A journalist working in, and living on, low-paid work (e.g. hospital porter).

The labour struggles of taxi drivers and the grim economics of driving yellow cabs, where most of the money goes to cab company owners and where even minor problems, such as a few tickets or a short illness, can spell disaster. It notes the former mayor’s staunch opposition to organised labour. The plight of individual drivers is described, mainly recent immigrants, facing an enormous bureaucracy and strong business interests.

This takes the same approach as her book above (Nickel and Dimmed) but this time focuses on the white-collar world – the middle managers and account executives who toil at the corporate coalface, ‘who did everything right’ (e.g. earned degrees, postponed child-bearing and dedicated themselves to climbing career ladders) but who are now in trouble. The author set out to find a job as a PR director or speech-writer and found a white-collar ‘netherworld’ full of people who were downsized or outsourced or were still employed but heard ‘the drumbeats of layoffs’; or had survived cuts but were burning out doing the jobs of two people.

A collection of short stories recounting the human side and wide spread of the financial world on Wall Street, tackling issues such as working conditions in a Honduras factory.

Exposes the poor conditions and pay and long hours in China’s factories and Dongguan’s assembly lines through the workers’ eyes – for example, the Yue Yuen factory employs 70,000 to make Nike and Adidas shoes – and the role of migrant labour and hence the remittance economy.

Organisational socialisation and culture; the author’s experience of being recruited and inducted.

The tale of a Goldman Sachs insider of how Wall Street went off the rails during the 1990s stock market bubble and the pernicious effects of failure to manage conflicts of interest at the heart of the financial system.

The story of one of Britain’s greatest brand makers.

A shocking, funny and culturally sympathetic tale of the perils of doing business in Asia’s ‘wild west’. A first-hand account of one of the most expensive forays.

A management consultant exposes the consulting firm he worked for.

The author (whose real name is Neil Glass) exposes his former work in consultancy and the tricks used, such as creating ‘client dependency’; includes the example of the UK’s NHS.

An entertainingly indiscreet memoir of the author’s years with large investment banks as corporate financiers lost their influence and independence to financial trading.

A tale of investment banking and Wall Street; it confirms the worst fears.

The rise of the symbol of India’s transformation.