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Blue Collar
A trio of Wayne County, Michigan, auto workers, two black—32-year-old Ezekiel "Zeke" Brown from Detroit, Michigan, and two-time ex-convict, 35-year-old Sam "Smokey" James from Mississippi, who spent time in Michigan State Prison —and one 33-year-old white, a Polish-American from Hamtramck, Michigan, Jerry Bartowski. The three men are fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and the union brass. Smokey is in debt to a loan shark over a numbers game, Jerry works a second job as a gas station attendant to get by and finds himself unable to pay bills including the orthodontics work that his daughter needs, and Zeke is in trouble with the IRS for tax evasion by filing returns showing fictitious children in order to reduce his family's taxable income.
Coupled with the financial hardships on each man's end, the trio hatch a plan to rob a safe at United Auto Workers union headquarters. They commit the caper but find only $600 in petty cash. However, they do come away with a ledger which contains evidence of the union's illegal loan operation and ties to organized crime syndicates in Las Vegas, Chicago and New York. They decide to make an attempt to blackmail the union with the information. Meanwhile, a local loan shark has given Smokey advice on how to crack the safe in exchange for a percentage of the robbed proceeds. He gets busted by the police for his ties in an unrelated crime and attempts to get off or receive a softer conviction in exchange for spilling off the information about the trio's robbery & blackmailing. This information subsequently gets back to the union, and they begin to retaliate strongly by turning the tables on the three friends. Jerry experiences a near miss one evening when a pair of hired thugs show up at his house to attack his wife, but both get intercepted and beaten up by Smokey. The next day at work, a suspicious accident at the plant results in Smokey's death that is investigated as a work accident caused by negligent safety protocols, which Zeke and Jerry realize was a murder coordinated by the union bosses due to the incriminating knowledge they possess against the union.
FBI agent John Burrows attempts to coerce Jerry into material witness or cooperating witness on the union's corruption, which would make him an adversary of his co-workers as well as the union bosses. At the same time, corrupt union bosses succeed in coopting Zeke to work for them with promises of upward mobility being promoted to shop steward and increased remuneration. Zeke, happy with his new duties and higher pay, pragmatically prescinds from seeking justice for Smokey's murder, as it would jeopardize his newfound standing within the ranks of the union. Jerry attempts to convince Zeke to take steps to avenge Smokey's death, but Zeke rebukes him, telling Jerry that nothing will bring Smokey back and that they should just move forward. Later that evening, two gunmen, hired by the mob, try to shoot Jerry in a drive-by shooting while traveling through the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel. This evolves into a chase where Jerry ends up crashing his car but is rescued by the police. Disgusted with Zeke's capitulation and terrified after an attempt on his life, Jerry decides to cooperate with the FBI and a United States Congress special Congressional committee that have been investigating the union.
In the end, as Jerry enters the plant with federal agents, Zeke confronts him. Once friends, Jerry and Zeke now turn on each other as a heated discussion escalates into them attempting to attack each other, confirming the prescient earlier narrative that union corruption divides workers against one another.