The "global assembly line" stretches from Third World nation to Third World nation, and ends at our crowded department stores. Lorraine Gray, award-winning director of With Babies and Banners and founder of the Women's Labor History Film Project, explores the complex problems that affect workers in the U.S. and abroad when manufacturing industries close their labor-intensive operations here to search the globe for lower-wage work forces in the "free trade zones." In interviews, American industrialists in the Philippines, Mexico and the Silicon Valley explain with remarkable self-assuredness their motivations in exploiting a "willing" workforce which is made up of some 90 percent women. The women themselves reveal another side of the picture as they tell of their new role as breadwinners for their families, working against enforced quotas for below-subsistence wages, in dangerous health conditions and without job security. But many are experiencing a new and dramatic sense of interdependence with their fellow workers and they have begun to reach out for dignity and social justice. In these candid interviews, and with a searching camera, Lorraine Gray has captured on film a moment of great change in the world labor picture. Selected for M.O.M.A.'s New Directors/New Films '86