A rare and unflinching documentary that follows underground labor organizers in southern China as they fight for the rights and safety of migrant workers in one of the world’s most repressive labor environments. Filmed over eight years, the documentary provides an intimate look at the daily risks, strategic decisions, and moral commitments of organizers working outside the state-controlled union system.

The film centers on staff from grassroots labor NGOs in Guangdong—many of them former workers themselves—who provide legal support, negotiate with factories, train worker leaders, and help workers build confidence to collectively demand unpaid wages, safe conditions, and dignity on the job. Viewers see how organizers navigate surveillance, intimidation, police harassment, raids, detention, and constant political pressure. Their work is dangerous, exhausting, and often heartbreaking, yet grounded in deep solidarity with the migrant workers whose lives mirror their own.

Rather than sensationalizing conflict, We the Workers shows the slow, patient, relational work of movement-building: listening to grievances, teaching collective bargaining, preparing workers for retaliation, and building trust in a context where independent organizing is treated as a threat to the state. The film also portrays internal tensions—burnout, family strain, strategic disagreements—making clear that labor organizing in China is not only politically risky but emotionally demanding.

The documentary offers one of the most detailed portraits ever captured of China’s informal labor movement at its peak in the early 2010s, a period when workers staged thousands of strikes across the Pearl River Delta. It records how organizers try to transform anger into coordinated action, and how even small wins—back pay, safety improvements, accountability—carry enormous meaning in a system stacked against workers.

Since the time of filming, China’s space for labor organizing has narrowed dramatically. Many of the organizations depicted have been shut down; several organizers have been detained or forced out of the work; and the 2015 “labor crackdown” in Guangdong effectively dismantled much of the region’s independent labor infrastructure. Yet the issues driving the film—wage theft, dangerous conditions, pressure on migrant workers—remain widespread, and worker-led organizing continues to re-emerge in new, often more covert forms.

We the Workers now stands as a historical record of a moment when China’s worker movement was growing, hopeful, and remarkably bold despite immense repression.