We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
On the other hand, Season 4 of For All Mankind depicted a strike of private sector workers in such an unrealistic, ham-fisted way that it couldn’t be taken seriously – much like many of the other half-assed story-lines that were crammed into the show for Seasons 3 and 4.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_season_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_and_Girls_(The_Office)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Rae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesar_Chavez_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Waterfront
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn_(film)
But it's true the topic hasn't been en vogue for a while.
Some of them are more recent, but even the most recent movie (the Chavez one) is over a decade ago, got panned by critics and looks to be a relatively low budget film. The sort of thing people into pop culture are likely to not know about.
I think the fact you can't find anything this decade is pretty telling
I also admitted the topic hasn't been popular of late. Your comment didn't say anything about recency. It's likely that the dwindling percentage of Americans in unions has something to do with fewer recent depictions of labor struggles in TV and movies.
Same reason all sorts of other stuff has gone nearly extinct.
Mainstream entertainment media is subject to the same eyeball-hour based economics as everything else and that content doesn't resonate with enough people.
(I think that’s the real reason these movies don’t get made: they’re too “Communist” for American audiences.)
https://jacobin.com/2019/06/tiananmen-square-worker-organiza...
Who, despite all his flaws, (unlike the president, generally speaking) is not a bad person. But is very much a dictator (which was his job as the commander of a military vessel).
Everyone went back to being friends the next episode.
For reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Association_(Star_Trek:_De...
Although it might not be the type of movie you’re looking for, because the miners lost.
There's also Made in Dagenham. There's probably lots of french language films with workers struggle. The one that springs to mind is the hilarious satire Louise-Michel
It's also one of few depictions of strikes in US TV that treated the strikers with substantially more sympathy than their counterpart. Incidentally, this is another parallel to Babylon 5, which also had a strike, and were the negotiator that was brought in was a really unsympathetic caricature.
DS9 even managed to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, and still painted the strikers in a good light.
It speaks to the foundational values of the franchise being widely accepted that the strike episode is what is remembered as the labour thing, as if a lot of people would like the results of an egalitarian society but have been taught that the means to achieve it are somehow controversial.
In Critique of the Gotha Program he outright ridiculed what is now the German SDP for demanding that "the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society".
He went on to write: "Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."
Later in the same text he then reiterated the traditional socialist slogan, that explicitly also rejects equal distribution: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
For one the slogan of communist movements tend to be 'from each according to ability, to each according to need', and secondly it is more likely that a communist society would use scientific academies or committees rather than rely on inventors to accomplish technological or other achievements.
You're right though, its definitely better than the babylon 5 episode.
I also kinda like the Babylon 5 episode, but it has an entirely different feel to it, and the way it is resolved does make it weaker overall - it's the captain rather than the strikers that seal the win. The main strength of the Babylon 5 episode is that caricature of the negotiator and the visual presentation of the conflict, that feels like it is referencing an old-fashioned way of presenting conflict in US media that is made toothless by focusing on the anger while giving little play to the issues. Only in the Babylon 5 case, the extreme caricature of the negotitator gives him the more negative portrayal often given to strikers.