A powerful historical drama based on the true story of Black and white meatpacking workers in Chicago during the 1910s, and the extraordinary—yet fragile—experiment in interracial union organizing that unfolded in the city’s vast slaughterhouses. Originally produced for PBS’s American Playhouse, the film remains one of the clearest portrayals of how labor movements confront racism, exploitation, and political violence.

The story follows Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a Black sharecropper who travels north during the Great Migration and begins working on the “killing floor” of a Chicago meatpacking plant. There, he encounters brutal working conditions, rampant wage theft, and systematic efforts by employers to divide Black and white workers. Despite these pressures, Frank becomes involved in early efforts to build a multiracial union—a movement that challenged both corporate power and deep-seated racial hostilities.

The film depicts the real-life struggle of the Chicago stockyards organizing drive, supported by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. It portrays the immense courage it took for Black workers to join union efforts at a time when unions often excluded them, and the equal courage required of white workers willing to break with racist norms to build collective power.

As the movement gains momentum, the film brings viewers to the 1919 Chicago Race Riot—one of the deadliest racial violence episodes in U.S. history—showing how employers, police, and political elites weaponized racism to crush interracial solidarity. The violence becomes the ultimate counter-strategy against worker unity, demonstrating that the fight for economic justice is inseparable from the fight against white supremacy.

What sets The Killing Floor apart is its unflinching honesty about both the possibility and precarity of cross-racial organizing. It shows the slow, patient movement work: building trust, recruiting coworkers, debating strategy, confronting internal tensions, and trying to keep the organizing alive under enormous pressure. It is also a celebration of workers who resisted—not perfectly, but with extraordinary resolve.

Today, The Killing Floor is recognized as one of the most important labor films ever made. It was restored by the Film Foundation and released widely in 2020, bringing new attention to its lessons about race, union power, and the strategies employers still use to divide workers. Its focus on interracial organizing speaks directly to contemporary fights in Amazon warehouses, fast food, logistics, and manufacturing—where corporations continue to rely on racial division to weaken worker power.