Fight like hell :

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Title :

Fight like hell : the untold history of American labor / Kim Kelly ; [foreward by Sara Nelson].

Title:

Fight like hell :

Author:

Kelly, Kim, (journalist)

Format:

Books

Physical Description:

xxviii, 418 pages : 24 cm.

ISBN:

9781982171056

Production / Publication Information:

New York, NY : One Signal Publishers/Atria Books 2022.

Summary:

"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 working-class 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 work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnists 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."--Amazon.

Bibliography note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Language:

English

Subject Term:

Labor movement -- United States -- History.

Labor unions -- United States -- History.

Working class -- United States -- History.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	331.88 KEL	31330009198916	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Amesbury Public Library	331.8809 KEL	32114002694991	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Billerica Public Library	331.88/KELL 2022	33934004522604	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Burlington Public Library	331.88 KEL	32116003882822	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library	331.88/KEL	31482003023549	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	331.88 KELLY	32120001410214	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groton Public Library	331.88 KEL	37003701841497	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	331.8809/KELLY K	31479007592537	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Ipswich Public Library	331.88 KELLY	32122002947384	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	331.88 KEL	31549004932413	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lawrence Public Library	331.88 KEL	31549004947148	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library	331.88 KEL	31481005607853	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library	331.88 KEL 2022	32124002079077	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library	331.88 KELLY	32126001864631	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	331.8809 KEL	32128004075231	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	331.8809 KELLY	31478010234764	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library	331.88 KEL	31550002522321	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Tewksbury Public Library	SOCIAL ISSUES / LABOR / KEL	32132003322883	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Topsfield Town Library	331.88 KELLY	32133002619659	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library	331.88 KEL	31990005097295	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library	331.88 KEL	32136003634114	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

A 2022 New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You'll Love
A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year

"Kelly 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

A revelatory, inclusive history of the American labor movement, 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 working-class 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 assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that 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 shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist and union organizer Kelly debuts with a rousing look at the contributions of marginalized groups to the U.S. labor movement. She begins by placing the "middle-aged Black warehouse workers" who tried to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Alabama in 2021 within a "long lineage of working class heroes," including the 19th-century female mill workers who fought for a workday shorter than 16 hours. Kelly also recounts how an 1881 strike by Black laundresses in Atlanta brought the city's laundry services to a halt on the eve of the International Cotton Exposition, and profiles U.S. labor secretary Frances Perkins, who helped enshrine workplace protections in New Deal legislation after having witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Elsewhere, Kelly examines how convict leasing helped prop up the South's "faltering post-Confederate economy" and sketches the history of the 1891--1892 Coal Creek War in Tennessee, when "involuntary, incarcerated laborers" were brought in as strikebreakers but were freed repeatedly by the miners they were meant to replace. Shedding new light on key players and episodes within a diverse range of industries--from textile and trucking to sex work--this invigorating labor history is also a powerful call for today's workers to fight for their rights. Agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

Kirkus Review

A working-class view of American labor unions and their history in securing economic justice, however fleeting. "As I write this," writes journalist and labor activist Kelly, "eleven hundred coal miners in rural Alabama are still out on a strike that began on April 1, 2021." Even as knowledge workers flee corporate life, spurred by the pandemic revelation that they can work anywhere, these coal miners are bound to geography and largely overlooked because coal is unpopular in a time of climate change. So it is with the larger history of labor unionism, Kelly suggests, at least in part because so many women and minority members were instrumental in it but are often written out of history. By way of one example, the author considers the case of a woman named Lucy Parsons, who grew up enslaved in the South and, with a husband who had fought for the Confederacy but later converted to anarchism, helped organize workers around the Haymarket riots of 1886. Sadly, Parsons refused to acknowledge her ethnicity and "focused her energies solely on behalf of white factory workers." Nonetheless, Black activists were essential to working people's efforts to secure better conditions, as Parsons was to gaining the eight-hour workday. Here Kelly examines the militancy of Mohawk ironworkers who helped build the skyscrapers of 1920s New York, "walking across two-inch-thick beams hundreds of feet in the air without so much as a tremble," and of the multiethnic Coalition for Immokalee Workers, which exposed what amounted to slave labor on Southern farms in our own time. Injustices continue, from coal miners to immigrant workers bound to company stores and housing in Midwestern meatpacking plants. "Collective working class power was behind every stride forward this country has made," Kelly writes in an urgent closing section, "grudgingly or otherwise, and will continue to be the animating force behind any true progress." A well-reasoned argument for restoring unions to their former role in the lives of American workers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Labor journalist Kelly looks back to the early days of U.S. industrialization in this freshly inclusive review of the country's labor history. Beginning with the mill girls of Rhode Island and Massachusetts in 1824, she moves forward chronologically, providing insightful glimpses into dozens of strikes, union actions, and bloody confrontations. Kelly purposefully highlights events involving often overlooked groups, including Indigenous, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American women. Readers will also find famous episodes covered, such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Haymarket massacre, but the emphasis is on people and events that remain relatively unknown. Kelly's well-documented research and straightforward writing style allow her to pack an enormous amount of material into these pages, but the narrative never reads as dull or dense. Moving from one topic to another--miners to harvesters to cleaners--she provides a concise but comprehensive narrative that serves as an excellent entry point for new understanding of work in America. With union movements enjoying renewed support and influence, readers will find a lot of value in this previously "untold" history.

Library Journal Review

Kelly's sweeping history of the American labor movement casts a wide swath from the trailblazing Pawtucket women weavers' mill turnout in 1824, to the 2020 effort to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL. Focusing on women and workers of color, invariably low-paid physical laborers, Kelly's episodic survey details workplace contributions of usually ignored but essential folk. She marches with fiery Jewish girls in New York's garment district, with women on the picket lines of southern mills, and with Black workers in Appalachian mines. She reaches across the country, covering disabled workers, sex workers, and prisoners' work, and the diversified labor of Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Pacific Islander workers, particularly immigrants, in the fields and factories and on the rails and roads. S Kelly lauds revolutionaries and freedom fighters across class, gender, and race lines (Lucy Parsons; Mother Jones; Dr. Marie Equi; Cesar Chavez; Dorothy Lee Bolden) as vanguard workers who pushed for change in working conditions, psychology, and in society to redress capitalism's cruelties. VERDICT This accessible, inspiring, and instructive read belongs in school libraries, in university classrooms, and in general readers' hands for its lessons about workers' united power and the unfinished business of workplace justice.--Thomas J. Davis

Foreword	p. xi
Prologue	p. xvii
1 The Trailblazers	p. 1
The Mill Girls of Lowell, Massachusetts	p. 6
"The Blood of Souls in Bondage"	p. 10
The Freed Black Washerwomen of Jackson, Mississippi	p. 12
A Showdown in Atlanta	p. 17
2 The Garment Workers	p. 21
The Fiery Jewish Girls (Farbrente Yidishe Meydlekh) of New York City	p. 24
"Burning Death Before Our Eyes"	p. 27
Frances Perkins: Labor Activist Turned Architect of the New Deal	p. 31
"A Turning Point in My Life": Sue Lo Kee and the National Dollar Stores Factory Strike	p. 34
Viva La Huelga: Rosa Flores and the San Antonio Farah Strike	p. 35
3 The Mill Workers	p. 43
Innovation and Bloodshed on the Picket Line	p. 45
Ola Delight Smith and the Battle to Organize the South	p. 48
Militancy in the Southern Mills: The 1934 Textile Strike	p. 52
4 The Revolutionaries	p. 57
Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Eight	p. 59
Ben Fletcher and the Rise of Racial Capitalism	p. 65
The United States of America vs. the Wobblies	p. 68
Dr. Marie Equi, Portland's "Queen of the Bolsheviks"	p. 70
The Bloody Responses to Revolt	p. 74
5 The Miners	p. 79
Women Break Open the Mines of Appalachia	p. 82
Black Labor and the Coal Creek War	p. 85
They Called Her Mother Jones	p. 89
The West Diversifies the Workforce	p. 92
Indigenous and Latino Workers Hold the Line	p. 94
A Half Century Later, Back Where We Began	p. 98
The 2021 Warrior Met Coal Strike	p. 102
6 The Harvesters	p. 105
Hawaii's Masters and Servants	p. 106
Sugar and Blood	p. 109
Los Braceros, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Mexican-American Migration	p. 113
"Crusader in Rubber Boots and a Big Skirt"	p. 116
"Si, Se Puede!"	p. 120
Nagi Daifuliah and the Largest Farmworker Strike in History	p. 123
"We Want Dignity and Respect"	p. 128
7 The Cleaners	p. 131
Waiting to Work	p. 133
"The Bronx Slave Market"	p. 135
Building Power in the Power Laundries	p. 137
Dorothy Lee Bolden and the World Ahead	p. 141
"Ya Basta!" ("Enough Is Enough")	p. 149
8 The Freedom Fighters	p. 153
"Shoot to Kill Any Negro Who Refuse[s] to Surrender Immediately"	p. 155
The Pullman Railway Porters	p. 160
The Pullman Maids' Double Bind	p. 163
"You're Supposed to Be Scared When You Come in Here"	p. 167
"There Was No One More Able to Pull It Together Than Bayard Rustin"	p. 169
9 The Movers	p. 177
Brewing Up Trouble	p. 181
"No Red-Baiting, No Race-Baiting, No Queen-Baiting!"	p. 185
"We Put the 'Trans' Back in Transportation"	p. 188
Reagan Declares War on Labor	p. 192
Freedom to Fly	p. 197
10 The Metalworkers	p. 205
A Midwestern Revolution	p. 207
Building Multiracial Alliances in the Michigan Auto Industry	p. 212
Arab Solidarity in Dearborn, Michigan	p. 214
Fighting Sexual Harassment on the Assembly Line	p. 216
Steel Pride	p. 219
11 The Disabled Workers	p. 223
Circuses for Bread	p. 227
"Handicapped Workers Must Live, Give Us Jobs"	p. 234
Section 504, a Civil Rights Act for the Disabled	p. 241
"They Know We're Desperate for Work": Taking on the Subminimum Wage	p. 246
12 The Sex Workers	p. 251
San Francisco's "Barbary Coast"	p. 253
"All I Ask Is for a Living Wage and I'll Get Out of It Myself"	p. 257
Ah Toy and the Chinese Immigrant Workers' Struggle	p. 260
Margo St. James's COYOTEs and the HIV/AIDS Crisis	p. 265
The Movement Takes Center Stage	p. 270
Performers' Rights and Community Care	p. 277
13 The Prisoners	p. 285
The Rise of Prisoners' Labor Unions	p. 292
Women's Prisons and Rebellion	p. 295
The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee	p. 300
California's Incarcerated Firefighters	p. 306
Epilogue	p. 311
Endnotes	p. 319
Bibliography	p. 361
Acknowledgments	p. 403
Index	p. 407

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Library Journal Review

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