The Navigators (Ken Loach, 2001)

The firebrand gets his teeth into the subject of rail privatisation, from his customary bottom-rung angle. A railway maintenance crew find job security swept out from under their feet when their organisation is privatised and carved up. The workers' mockery of the modish buzz-speak inflicted on them soon turns to disbelief and frustration as corners are cut and long-standing worker rights abused in the new drive to outcompete their former colleagues.
At one point, one of the characters is given a brief speech criticising the laxity of the working atmosphere as it used to be, but this seems tokenistic on the part of the director and writer, and that's fair enough: they make a convincing attack on the revised status quo utilising the double prongs of clearly informed verisimilitude - it might almost be a fly-on-the-wall documentary - and black humour at junctures exposing the farcical and half-baked application of new working practices by the befuddled management. It is a full-blooded polemic, of course, but there is an art to distilling so much prosaic reality into compelling drama.

7/10