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Top 10 Books to Celebrate May Day |
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Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor
by Kim Kelly
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Esquire This revelatory and inclusive book unearths the stories of the people--farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees--behind some of the labor movement's biggest successes (The New York Times) from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly. Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor's relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law. The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this definitive and assiduously researched thought-provoking must-read (Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president), Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that untold history and shows how the rights the American worker has today--the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job--were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears. Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon's warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland's Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s. Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell is essential reading for anyone who believes that workers should control their fate (Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight).
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Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States
by J. Albert Mann
You need to work to live. That's the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries. Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees. But workers have always found a way to fight back. Lokono tribespeople resisted Columbus and his colonizers. Enslaved people led walkouts and rebellions. Textile workers demanded a wage that would let them have fun, not just survive. Miners died for the right to unionize. From 30,000 young seamstresses striking in the early 1900s to Uber drivers organizing for change today, people have learned we're stronger when we are united. [This book examines] the history of the worker actions that brought us weekends, pay equality, desegregation, an end to child labor, and so much more--
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Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
by Jaz Brisack
The leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements shares stories from the front lines to help us organize our own workplaces and better understand the aims and goals for a resurgent trade union movement and how workers all over the country can join in solidarity with it (Senator Bernie Sanders).Get on the Job and Organize is a compelling, stirring narrative of the Starbucks and Tesla unionization efforts, telling the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in our era of political and social unrest. As one of the exciting new faces of the American Labor Movement, Jaz Brisack argues that while workers often organize when their place of work is toxic, it's equally important to organize when you love your job. Here, Brisack delivers practical advice on how workers can and should stand up for their rights, especially when electoral politics seem to have failed us. With an accessible tone, a deep love of labor history, and profound empathy, Brisack puts recent efforts into the context of Americans' long tradition of organizing. In the process, they show us that we, too, can improve our workplaces, from how to educate ourselves and our colleagues, to what backlash to expect and how to fight it, to what victory looks like even if the union doesn't necessarily win. A fascinating insider account (Publishers Weekly), richly detailed, and with never-before-reported scenes, Get on the Job and Organize is a bold and galvanizing call to fight for the workplaces we deserve.
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The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
by Hamilton Nolan
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics today, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan. Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential--or allow it to be squandered--will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come. In chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers the actual places where labor and politics meld. He highlights how organized labor can and does wield power effectively: a union that dominates Las Vegas and is trying to scale nationally; a successful decades-long campaign to organize California's child care workers; the human face of a surprising strike of factory workers trying to preserve their pathway to the middle class. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the fiery and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader, to try to fix what is broken. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces in rural West Virginia to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor solidarity can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself. A labor journalist for more than a decade, Nolan helped unionize his own industry. The Hammer is a urgent on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement.
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Working 9 to 5: A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie
by Ellen Cassedy
A must-read for any activist or reader in search of inspiration. --Liz Shuler, president, AFL-CIO 2022 Sarton Awards Finalist for Memoir 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medalist - Women's Issues category 9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film--it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends. Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes, and ages. They took on the corporate titans. They leafleted and filed lawsuits and started a woman-led union. They won millions of dollars in back pay and helped make sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination illegal. The women office workers who rose up to win rights and respect on the job transformed workplaces throughout America. And along the way came Dolly Parton's toe-tapping song and a hit movie inspired by their work. Working 9 to 5 is a lively, informative, firsthand account packed with practical organizing lore that will embolden anyone striving for fair treatment.
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Worked Over: How Round-The-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream
by Jamie K. McCallum
An award-winning sociologist reveals the unexpected link between overwork and inequality.Most Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules. Work hours declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories, but they've increased significantly since the seventies. Worked Over traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to a new rhythm of work, and describes how we might gain a greater say over our labor time -- and build a more just society in the process. Popular discussions typically focus on overworked professionals. But as Jamie K. McCallum demonstrates, from Amazon warehouses to Rust Belt factories to California's gig economy, it's the hours of low-wage workers that are the most volatile and precarious -- and the most subject to crises. What's needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle, and throughout Worked Over McCallum recounts the inspiring stories of those battling today's capitalism to win back control of their time.
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Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire
by Sarah E. Bond
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped build an empire A New Yorker Best Book of the Year First-rate. . . . A sterling example of historical revisionism.--Publishers Weekly From plebeians refusing to join the Roman army to bakers withholding bread, this is the first book to explore how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices--and their labor--acknowledged. Sarah E. Bond explores Ancient Rome from a new angle to show that the history of labor conflicts and collective action goes back thousands of years, uncovering a world far more similar to our own than we realize. Workers often turned to their associations for solidarity and shared identity in the ancient world. Some of these groups even negotiated contracts, wages, and work conditions in a manner similar to modern labor unions. As the world begins to consider the value--and indeed the necessity--of unionization to protect workers, this book demonstrates that we can learn valuable lessons from ancient laborers and from attempts by the Roman government to limit their freedom.
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What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People
by Ashley M. Jones and Rebecca Gayle Howell
By 1968, most Americans felt that the War on Poverty had been lost, cast out to the shadows of the Vietnam War. That same year, the Poor People's Campaign marched on Washington in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination, motivated by King's desire for economic justice. The campaign was a multiracial effort that aimed to alleviate poverty for African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Indigenous people. In 2017, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival was launched with the goal to bring King's "revolution of values" to fruition. In What Things Cost, Ashley M. Jones and Rebecca Gayle Howell present an anthology of contemporary poems that speak to the current state of the labor movement. Designed to be a fundraiser for The Poor People's Campaign, What Things Cost employs the power of verse and storytelling to illuminate the painful difficulties of building a healthy life in modern America. Like the campaign itself, the poems bridge lived experiences of struggle across racial and historical divides. The effect is a folkloric journey through America's contemporary landscape. The common theme of work threads through this rich literary quilt, revising outdated American Dream mythology. Jones and Howell blanket tales of hardship, gratitude, guilt, grievance, and solidarity within this volume, with the goal of creating an economically just country
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Picket Line: The Lost Novella and Two New Stories
by Elmore Leonard
This is the best of a magnificent writer's magnificent books.--Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried Three stories from the late, best-selling Elmore Leonard--the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever (New York Times Book Review): Picket Line is the never-before-published, prescient tale of a budding agricultural strike in Texas, accompanied by Chick Killer and Ice Man.If a man comes out of the field and goes on the picket line, even for one day, he'll never be the same... Chino and Paco Rojas seem well-mannered, at least for Chicanos, to the white cops that pull them over for littering on the long drive from California to Trinity, Texas. So well-mannered, in fact, that Captain Frank McKellan lets them off with a warning and recommends them a job at Stanzik Farms, the largest independent melon grower in the area.But Chino and Paco didn't drive all this way for work. Instead, Chino is looking for a mysterious man, Vincent Mora, whose new Valley Agricultural Workers Association is causing a scene striking against the farm owners.Stanzik's fields and Mora's union bring together a cast of unlikely characters: Connie Chavez, a former picker and blossoming revolutionary who leads with a bullhorn and a fearless mouth; Bud Davis, a white Xavier University student working for spending money; Harold Ritchie, a local marine-turned-cop; Luis Tamez, a striker whose grandson served with Harold in Vietnam; and many more, including the pragmatic Chino, who finds himself pulled irrevocably into the cause. Some are neighbors, others just passing through. Some know each other well, or at least thought they did...before the picket line.This never-before-published gem from master storyteller Elmore Leonard describes the early days of an unprecedented farmers' movement; the complex cast of Chicanos, Anglos, and migrants that impact the union; and the careful balance of passion, patience, and pure, stupid guts that it takes to hold the line. Also included in this edition are the short stories Chick Killer, following the iconic Karen Sisco as she confronts a serial murderer, and Ice Man, a visionary tale of abuse suffered by Native Americans at the hands of an immigration officer. These gripping and enduring stories showcase Leonard at his best, and their subjects are more relevant today than ever.
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Rednecks
by Taylor Brown
Winner of the Southern Book Prize for FictionAn NPR Best Book of 2024An Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Southern Book of 2024Co-winner of the 2024 Weatherford Award in FictionAudie Award for Best FictionA historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history. Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars--from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term redneck would come to have an unexpected origin story. Brimming with the high stakes drama of America's buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, Doc Moo Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author's own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners' revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank's grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson. Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as The Most Dangerous Woman in America, struggles to maintain the ear of the miners (her boys) amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief Smilin Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the gun thugs of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars. Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today's unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that's both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.
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