Labor
Showing 1–32 of 39 results
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Who’s Got the Power?
The Resurgence of American Unions$25.99An essential and timely guide to the changing landscape of the labor movement, from a veteran labor organizer
“The best overview of the recent labor upsurge we have yet seen. This will remain a must-read as the movement advances into the future.” —Erik Loomis, author of A History of America in Ten Strikes
At a time of great uncertainty for American workers and their unions, Who’s Got the Power? reminds us that unions are still a source of hope, taking readers on a journey through the resurgence of the American labor movement in the wake of a pandemic that changed everything. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, unions seemed to be fading into history. But the pandemic didn’t just disrupt the workplace; it reignited a movement.
Longtime organizer and labor historian Dave Kamper details how labor reemerged with newfound strength, as workers began to question the status quo and demand more from their employers. Interviewing workers and labor leaders across the country, Kamper captures the stories of those on the front lines, from Frito-Lay workers in Kansas and Chicago teachers, to Amazon warehouse employees in New York and Detroit autoworkers, offering a compelling account of how, in industry after industry, strikes, protests, and bold negotiations signaled the rise of a more coordinated effort to reclaim control over working conditions. Grounding the present with rich historical examples, and drawing upon his years of experience making union concepts accessible to the general reader, Kamper provides a front-row seat to a new wave of labor activism that isn’t just about wages and benefits—it’s about dignity and solidarity.
An up-to-the-minute look at a brand-new phenomenon, Who’s Got the Power?, featuring a foreword by Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson, is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the seismic changes in American labor today.
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Labor’s Partisans
Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today$29.99The top American writers on labor provide vital historical context for the current upsurge in union organizing
In 1954, the American labor movement reached its historic height, with one-third of all nonagricultural workers belonging to a union—and much higher percentages in the nation’s key industries. That same year, a group of writers and activists, many with close ties to organized labor, founded Dissent magazine, which quickly became the publishing home for the most important progressive voices on American unions.
Today, at a time of both resurgent union organizing and socialist politics, the need for this rich tradition of ideas is as pressing as ever.
With over twenty-five contributions by some of the nation’s most influential progressive voices, Labor’s Partisans brings to life a history of labor that is of immediate relevance to our own times. Introduced and edited by leading labor historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti, this essential volume reveals the powerful currents and debates running through the labor movement, from the 1950s to today.
Combining stunning writing, political passion, and deep historical perspective, Labor’s Partisans will be a source of ideas and inspiration for anyone concerned with a more just future for working people. -
Power Lines
Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement$17.99The essential anthology on the most effective ways to organize a labor movement for environmental justice, from leading organizers in the field
The corporate elite have long pitted climate and labor movements against each other through a “jobs vs. the environment” narrative that maximizes profits. But over the last few years, labor unions and climate organizers have been pushing back against this framework and organizing for a real just transition.
Featuring contributions from key organizers in climate justice and labor, Power Lines tackles the most pressing questions facing those who are trying to build a movement for economic and environmental justice. The collection provides practical organizing models and strategies as well as inspiration for the possibility of making change on climate.
Power Lines moves beyond an analysis of the class politics of climate change or the strategic imperative of federal climate legislation, making the case for the urgency of a robust labor–climate justice movement. It also shows us how we can build that movement by sharing some of the most creative and effective organizing happening on the ground right now.
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Worn Out
How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion’s Sins$26.99An insider’s look at how the rise of “fast fashion” obstructs ethical shopping and fuels the abuse and neglect of garment workers
“With years of expertise in the fashion industry, Alyssa’s reporting is consistently deep and thoughtful, and her work on sustainability and ethics has changed how I view the clothes I wear.”
—Brittney McNamara, features director at Teen VogueOurs is the era of fast fashion: a time of cheap and constantly changing styles for consumers of every stripe, with new clothing hitting the racks every season as social media–fueled tastes shift.
Worn Out examines the underside of our historic clothing binge and the fashion industry’s fall from grace. Former InStyle senior news editor and seasoned journalist Alyssa Hardy’s riveting work explores the lives of the millions of garment workers—mostly women of color—who toil in the fashion industry around the world—from LA-based sweatshop employees who experience sexual abuse while stitching clothes for H&M, Fashion Nova, and Levi’s to “homeworkers” in Indonesia who are unknowingly given carcinogenic materials to work with. Worn Out exposes the complicity of celebrities whose endorsements obscure the exploitation behind marquee brands and also includes interviews with designers such as Mara Hoffman, whose business models are based on ethical production standards.
Like many of us, Hardy believes in the personal, political, and cultural place fashion has in our lives, from seed to sew to closet, and that it is still okay to indulge in its glitz and glamour. But the time has come, she argues, to force real change on an industry that prefers to keep its dark side behind the runway curtain. The perfect book for people who are passionate about clothing and style, Worn Out seeks to engage in a real conversation about who gets harmed by fast fashion—and offers meaningful solutions for change.
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One Fair Wage
Ending Subminimum Pay in America$24.99 – $25.00From the author of the acclaimed Behind the Kitchen Door, a powerful examination of how the subminimum wage and the tipping system exploit society’s most vulnerable
“No one has done more to move forward the rights of food and restaurant workers than Saru Jayaraman.” —Mark Bittman, author of The Kitchen Matrix and A Bone to Pick
Before the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country, more than six million people earned their living as tipped workers in the service industry. They served us in cafes and restaurants, they delivered food to our homes, they drove us wherever we wanted to go, and they worked in nail salons for as little as $2.13 an hour—the federal tipped minimum wage since 1991—leaving them with next to nothing to get by.
These workers, unsurprisingly, were among the most vulnerable workers during the pandemic. As businesses across the country closed down or drastically scaled back their services, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. As in many other areas, the pandemic exposed the inadequacies of the nation’s social safety net and minimum-wage standards.
One of New York magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City, one of CNN’s Visionary Women in 2014, and a White House Champion of Change in 2014, Saru Jayaraman is a nationally acclaimed restaurant activist and the author of the bestselling Behind the Kitchen Door. In her new book, One Fair Wage, Jayaraman shines a light on these workers, illustrating how the people left out of the fight for a fair minimum wage are society’s most marginalized: people of color, many of them immigrants; women, who form the majority of tipped workers; disabled workers; incarcerated workers; and youth workers. They epitomize the direction of our whole economy, reflecting the precariousness and instability that is increasingly the lot of American labor.
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On the Job
The Untold Story of America’s Work Centers and the New Fight for Wages, Dignity, and Health$26.99The inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and leading the fight for today’s workers
For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface.
On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country’s most vulnerable—but essential—workers. Noted public health expert Celeste Monforton and award-winning journalist Jane M. Von Bergen crisscrossed the country, speaking with workers of all backgrounds and uncovering the stories of hundreds of new, worker-led organizations (often simply called worker centers) that have successfully achieved higher wages, safer working conditions and on-the-job dignity for their members.
On the Job describes ordinary people finding their voice and challenging power: from housekeepers in Chicago and Houston; to poultry workers in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Springdale, Arkansas; and construction workers across the state of Texas. An inspiring book for dark times, On the Job reveals that labor activism is actually alive and growing—and holds the key to a different future for all working people.
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Murder in the Garment District
The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States$26.99The thrilling and true account of racketeering and union corruption in mid-century New York, when unions and the mob were locked in a power struggle that reverberates to this day
In 1949, in New York City’s crowded Garment District, a union organizer named William Lurye was stabbed to death by a mob assassin. Through the lens of this murder case, prize-winning authors David Witwer and Catherine Rios explore American labor history at its critical turning point, drawing on FBI case files and the private papers of investigative journalists who first broke the story. A narrative that originates in the garment industry of mid-century New York, which produced over 80 percent of the nation’s dresses at the time, Murder in the Garment District quickly moves to a national stage, where congressional anti-corruption hearings gripped the nation and forever tainted the reputation of American unions.
Replete with elements of a true-crime thriller, Murder in the Garment District includes a riveting cast of characters, from wheeling and dealing union president David Dubinsky to the notorious gangster Abe Chait and the crusading Robert F. Kennedy, whose public duel with Jimmy Hoffa became front-page news.
Deeply researched and grounded in the street-level events that put people’s lives and livelihoods at stake, Murder in the Garment District is destined to become a classic work of history—one that also explains the current troubled state of unions in America.
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A History of America in Ten Strikes
$17.99 – $28.99Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times
An “entertaining, tough-minded, and strenuously argued” (The Nation) account of ten moments when workers fought to change the balance of power in America
“A brilliantly recounted American history through the prism of major labor struggles, with critically important lessons for those who seek a better future for working people and the world.” —Noam ChomskyPowerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers’ strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.
For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past.
In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers’ struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up.
Strikes include:
Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830–40)
Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861–65)
The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886)
The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902)
The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912)
The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937)
The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946)
Lordstown (Ohio, 1972)
Air Traffic Controllers (1981)
Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)
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The Hamlet Fire
A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives$26.95
“Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics.”
—The Washington Post
A “gifted writer” (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame. Twenty-five people—many of whom were black women with children, living on their own—perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors.
Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.
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Making It
Why Manufacturing Still Matters$24.95 – $24.99A veteran New York Times economics correspondent reports from factories nationwide to illustrate the continuing importance of industry for our country.
In the 1950s, manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of US income. But over the decades, that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent, at the same time that real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing’s share of the US economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy. Meanwhile Americans are only vaguely aware of the many consequences—including a decline in their self-image as inventive, practical, and effective people—of the loss of that industrial base.
Reporting from places where things were and sometimes still are “Made in the USA”—New York, New York; Boston; Detroit; Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Indiana; Los Angeles; Midland, Michigan; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; St. Louis; and Washington, DC—Louis Uchitelle argues that the government has a crucial role to play in making domestic manufacturing possible. If the Department of Defense subsidizes the manufacture of weapons and war materiel, why shouldn’t the government support the industrial base that powers our economy?
Combining brilliant reportage with an incisive economic and political argument, Making It tells the overlooked story of manufacturing’s still-vital role in the United States and how it might expand.
“Compelling . . . demonstrates the intimate connection between good work and national well-being . . . economics with a heart.” —Mike Rose, author of The Mind at Work -
The Fight for Fifteen
The Right Wage for a Working America$15.99 – $17.95“Rolf shows that raising the minimum wage to $15 is both just and necessary, lest the American dream of middle class prosperity turn into a nightmare” (David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist).
Combining history, economics, and commonsense political wisdom, The Fight for $15 makes a deeply informed case for a national fifteen-dollars-an-hour minimum wage as the only practical solution to reversing America’s decades-long slide toward becoming a low-wage nation.
Drawing both on new scholarship and on his extensive practical experiences organizing workers and grappling with inequality across the United States, David Rolf, president of SEIU 775—which waged the successful Seattle campaign for a fifteen dollar minimum wage—offers an accessible explanation of “middle out” economics, an emerging popular economic theory that suggests that the origins of prosperity in capitalist economies lie with workers and consumers, not investors and employers.
A blueprint for a different and hopeful American future, The Fight for $15 offers concrete tools, ideas, and inspiration for anyone interested in real change in our lifetimes.
“The author’s plainspoken approach and stellar scholarship illuminate in-depth discussions about the deliberate policy decisions that began to decimate the middle class at the start of the 1980s as well as the insidious new ways in which big business continues to attack American workers today via stagnant wages, rampant subcontracting, unpredictable scheduling, and other detrimental practices associated with the so-called ‘share economy.’” —Kirkus Reviews
“David Rolf has become the most successful advocate for raising wages in the twenty-first century.” —Andy Stern, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy -
Out of Sight
The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe$25.95 – $25.99A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes.
In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice.
In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis—a historian of both the labor and environmental movements—follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable.
In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA—were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers’ hands.
“The story told here is tragic and important.” —Bill McKibben
“Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country—for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.” —Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
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Only One Thing Can Save Us
Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement$17.95 – $25.95Is labor’s day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan argues that even as organized labor seems to be crumbling, a revived—but different—labor movement is the only way to stabilize the economy and save the middle class.
The inequality reshaping the country goes beyond money and income: the places we work have ever more rigid hierarchies. A “perceptive, informed, and witty utopian thinker” (Michael Kazin, Bookforum), Geoghegan makes his argument for labor with stories, sometimes humorous but more often chilling, about the problems working people like his own clients—from cabdrivers to schoolteachers—face, increasingly powerless in our union-free economy. He explains why a new kind of labor movement (and not just more higher education) is the real program the Democrats should push.
Written “in the disarming style of a self-deprecating lawyer in a beleaguered field” (Kim Phillips-Fein, The Atlantic), Only One Thing Can Save Us is vintage Geoghegan, bearing unparalleled insights into the real dynamics—and human experience—of working in America today.
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The Smartphone
Anatomy of an Industry$18.95 – $18.99A technology reporter’s behind-the-scenes history of the device that has taken over our lives.
How have smartphones shaped the way we socialize and interact? Who tracks our actions, our preferences, our movements as recorded by our smartphones? These are just some of the questions that Elizabeth Woyke, a journalist who has covered the industry for Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, and MIT Technology Review, addresses in this book.
Including photos and an in-depth look at the early decades of mobile communication, The Smartphone offers not only a step-by-step account of how smartphones are designed and manufactured but also a bold exploration of the darker side of this massive industry, including the exploitation of labor, the disposal of electronic waste, and the underground networks that hack and smuggle smartphones.
Featuring interviews with key figures in the development of the smartphone and expert assessments of the industry’s main players—Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung—The Smartphone is the perfect introduction to this most personal of gadgets. Your smartphone will never look the same again.
“The author does a good job explaining the relationships among the makers, carriers and developers, and she delivers an engrossing chapter on design trends.” —Kirkus Reviews -
Bitter Chocolate
Anatomy of an Industry$17.95 – $27.95This shocking exposé of the corruption and exploitation at the heart of the multibillion-dollar cocoa industry is “an astounding eye-opener that takes no prisoners” (Quill & Quire, starred review).
Bitter Chocolate is both an absorbing social history and a passionate investigation into an industry that has institutionalized abuse as it indulges our whims. Award-winning journalist Carol Off traces the fascinating evolution of chocolate from the sixteenth century banquet table of Montezuma’s Aztec court to the bustling factories of Hershey, Cadbury, and Mars. In what will be a shocking revelation to many, Off exposes how slavery and injustice remain a key aspect of its production even today.
In the Ivory Coast, the world’s leading producer of cocoa beans, profits from the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry fuel bloody civil war and widespread corruption. Faced with pressure from a crushing “cocoa cartel” demanding more beans for less money, poor farmers have turned to the cheapest labor pool possible: thousands of indentured children who pick the beans but have never themselves known the taste of chocolate.
“Bitter Chocolate is less a book about chocolate than it is a study of racism, imperialism and oppression as told through the lens of a single commodity.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto) -
Labor Rising
The Past and Future of Working People in America$20.95When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker threatened the collective bargaining rights of the state’s public sector employees in early 2011, the massive protests that erupted inresponse put the labor movement back on the nation’s front pages. It was a fleeting reminder of a not-so-distant past when the “labor question”—and the power of organized labor—was part and parcel of a century-long struggle for justice and equality in America.
Now, on the heels of the expansive Occupy Wall Street movement and midterm election outcomes that are encouraging for the labor movement, the lessons of history are a vital handhold for the thousands of activists and citizens everywhere who sense that something has gone terribly wrong. This pithy and accessible volume provides readers with an understanding of the history that is directly relevant to the economic and political crises working people face today, and points the way to a revitalized twenty-first-century labor movement.
With original contributions from leading labor historians, social critics, and activists, Labor Rising makes crucial connections between the past and present, and then looks forward, asking how we might imagine a different future for all Americans.
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Wage Theft in America
Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting PaidAnd What We Can Do About It$17.95 – $20.99“This book will give you an entirely new perspective on work in America.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
In what has been described as “the crime wave no one talks about,” billions of dollars’ worth of wages are stolen from millions of workers in the United States every year—a grand theft that exceeds every other larceny category. Even the Economic Policy Foundation, a business-funded think tank, has estimated that companies annually steal an incredible $19 billion in unpaid overtime. The scope of these abuses is staggering, but activists, unions, and policymakers—along with everyday Americans in congregations and towns across the country—have begun to take notice.
While the first edition of Wage Theft In America documented the scope of the problem, this new edition adds the latest research on wage theft and tells what community, religious, and labor activists are now doing to address the crisis—from passing state and local wage-theft bills to establishing mayoral task forces and tapping agencies that help low-wage workers in spotting wage theft.
Citing hard-hitting statistics and heartbreaking first-person accounts of exploitation at the hands of employers, this updated edition of Wage Theft In America offers concrete solutions and a roadmap for putting an end to this insidious practice. -
The Lexicon of Labor
More Than 500 Key Terms, Biographical Sketches, and Historical Insights Concerning Labor in America$17.95 – $18.95A thoroughly updated edition of the clever, fun-to-read compilation of union language and lore. “Worth reading aloud while walking the picket line.” —The Seattle Times
First published in 1998, The Lexicon of Labor found a large and appreciative following among readers who were grateful to have the vibrant, powerful language of the labor movement captured in a lively single volume. This long-awaited revised and updated edition includes dozens of new terms and developments that will introduce a new generation to the labor lexicon.
From Frederick Douglass to César Chávez, from the Haymarket Riots in 1886 to the Change to Win federation formed in 2005, this classic labor lexicon provides concise, enlightening sketches of over five hundred key places, people, and events in American labor history. A practical resource for students and journalists, The Lexicon of Labor is as entertaining for longtime union members seeking to get reacquainted with the traditions of the movement as it is for newcomers wishing to discover the unique language and history of unionism.
The Lexicon of Labor also includes explanations of major legislative acts, definitions of key legal terminology, and complete listings of all the member unions of the AFL-CIO and independent unions in the United States. It is the perfect introduction to the history of labor in America.
“A handy reference for individuals who want an introduction to U.S. labor terminology and labor history.” —Library Journal
“Fills a longstanding void . . . by far the largest compilation of definitions of words and phrases used in the specialized vocabulary of unionists.” —Northwest Labor Press -
Studs Terkel’s Working
A Graphic Adaptation$22.95Comics impresario Harvey Pekar brings to vivid life Terkel’s bestselling masterpiece, with comics by America’s leading illustrators
Ever since Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel’s Working first documented American workers’ hopes and dreams, that “deep penetration of American thought and feeling” (Los Angeles Times) has sold over a million copies, captivating readers with accounts of how their fellow citizens make a living.
A masterpiece of words, Working is now adapted into comic-book form by Harvey Pekar, the blue-collar antihero of his American Book Award–winning comics series American Splendor. Brilliantly scripting and arranging Terkel’s interviews, Pekar collaborates with established comics veterans and some of the comic underground’s brightest new talent, selected by editor Paul Buhle. Readers will find a visual palette of influences from Mexican, African American, superhero, and feminist art, each piece an electric melding of artist and subject. This is a book that will both delight Terkel fans and introduce his work to a whole new audience—a fitting tribute to an American legend.
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Wal-Mart
The Face Of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism$21.95 – $60.00A collection of essays that “do an incredible job of balancing the wonders and horrors of the force that is Wal-Mart” (Booklist, starred review).
Edited by one of the nation’s preeminent labor historians, this book marks an ambitious effort to dissect the full extent of Wal-Mart’s business operations, its social effects, and its role in the United States and world economy. Wal-Mart is based on a spring 2004 conference of leading historians, business analysts, sociologists, and labor leaders that immediately attracted the attention of the national media, drawing profiles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books. Their contributions are adapted here for a general audience.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Pennsylvania Railroad declared itself “the standard of the world.” In more recent years, IBM and then Microsoft seemed the template for a new, global information economy. But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wal-Mart had overtaken all rivals as the world-transforming economic institution of our time.
Presented in an accessible format and extensively illustrated with charts and graphs, Wal-Mart examines such topics as the giant retailer’s managerial culture, revolutionary use of technological innovation, and controversial pay and promotional practices to provide the most complete guide yet available to one of America’s largest companies.
“Like archaeologists who pick over artifacts to understand an ancient society, the scholars here [are] examining Wal-Mart for insights into the very nature of American capitalist culture.” —The New York Times
“Stimulating perspectives on the world’s largest corporation.” —Publishers Weekly -
Amazonia
Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut$15.95 – $24.95A “funny, contemplative” memoir of working at Amazon in the early years, when it was a struggling online bookstore (San Francisco Chronicle).
In a book that Ian Frazier has called “a fascinating and sometimes hair-raising morality tale from deep inside the Internet boom,” James Marcus, hired by Amazon.com in 1996—when the company was so small his e-mail address could be james@amazon.com—looks back at the ecstatic rise, dramatic fall, and remarkable comeback of the consummate symbol of late 1990s America.
Observing “how it was to be in the right place (Seattle) at the right time (the ’90s)” (Chicago Reader), Marcus offers a ringside seat on everything from his first interview with Jeff Bezos to the company’s bizarre Nordic-style retreats, in “a clear-eyed, first-person account, rife with digressions on the larger cultural meaning throughout” (Henry Alford, Newsday).
“Marcus tells his story with wit and candor.” —Booklist, starred review -
The Betrayal of Work
How Low-wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans And Their Families$16.95 – $25.95Following its publication in hardcover, the critically acclaimed Betrayal of Work became one of the most influential policy books about economic life in America; it was discussed in the pages of Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, the Washington Post, Newsday, and USA Today, as well as in public policy journals and in broadcast interviews, including a one-on-one with Bill Moyers on PBS’s NOW. The American Prospect‘s James K. Galbraith’s praise was typical: “Shulman’s slim and graceful book is a model combination of compelling portraiture, common sense, and understated conviction.”
Beth Shulman’s powerfully argued book offers a full program to address the injustice faced by the 30 million Americans who work full time but do not make a living wage. As the influential Harvard Business School newsletter put it, Shulman “specifically outlines how structural changes in the economy may be achieved, thus expanding opportunities for all Americans.” This edition includes a new afterword that intervenes in the post-election debate by arguing that low-wage work is an urgent moral issue of our time. -
Taxi!
$24.95Drawing on conversations with the drivers themselves, Taxi! details both the pressures and triumphs of life behind the wheel. Mathew reveals in this highly readable, fast-paced survey of New York s taxi business, that just about everything has been dramatically altered except the yellow paint.
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Unfinished Work
$21.95 – $65.00 -
Low Pay, High Profile
The Global Push for Fair Labor$18.95 – $60.00While critics have decried antiglobalization as an aimless—and endless—assortment of causes, the fight for fair labor is arguably the movement’s greatest success. The industrial sweatshop has become a byword for corporate-led globalization; the world’s lowest-paying jobs have been the subject of high-profile media coverage; and exposés of sweatshop conditions have become a staple of investigative reporting and public attention. As a result, fair labor standards are now on the negotiating table of world trade agreements.
Although the fight is far from over, in Low Pay, High Profile, Andrew Ross presents case studies from around the world—from the health hazards faced by Asian microchip workers and recyclers of electronic waste to the controversy over Nike’s contract with Manchester United, the world’s leading soccer club—to show how and why the movement found the strength and energy to shake the confidence of corporate and financial elites. Here is an unabashedly partisan inquiry into the cruelty and indignity of the modern workplace that shows how critique combined with action can bring world-changing results.
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Which Side Are You On?
$17.95When it first appeared in hardcover, Which Side Are You On? received widespread critical accolades, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In this new paperback edition, Thomas Geoghegan has updated his eloquent plea for the relevance of organized labor in America with an afterword covering the labor movement through the 1990s. A funny, sharp, unsentimental career memoir, Which Side Are You On? pairs a compelling history of the rise and near-fall of labor in the United States with an idealist s disgruntled exercise in self-evaluation. Writing with the honesty of an embattled veteran still hoping for the best, Geoghegan offers an entertaining, accessible, and literary introduction to the labor movement, as well as an indispensable touchstone for anyone whose hopes have run up against the unaccommodating facts on the ground. Wry and inspiring, Which Side Are You On? is the ideal book for anyone who has ever woken up and realized, You must change your life.
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To Move a Mountain
Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia$25.95To Move a Mountain is an inspirational account of how a group of Appalachian men and women, politicized by the disaster of local plant closings, became unlikely activists in the Tennessee statehouse and the protests in Seattle.
Eve Weinbaum’s firsthand look at the devastation wrought by the closings of community-sustaining factories become moving stories in the age of corporate globalization. With striking portraits of managers, workers, organizers and local officials, the book sets the Appalachian plant closings squarely in the economic and political context of economic development strategies and uncovers a government and economic leadership whose policies show little regard for the workers they leave behind. Yet the repeated defeat of the workers sparked an astonishingly fiery economic justice movement in Tennessee, as factory workers were transformed into sophisticated activists, generating coalitions, starting allied campaigns for living wages, and writing groundbreaking legislation.
With careful consideration of what made some movements flourish and others die, To Move a Mountain is at once a detailed and intricate ethnography and an inspiring story on the evolution of seemingly insignificant local organizing efforts into sustained social movements.
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The Unmaking of the American Working Class
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From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend
An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States$18.95 – $21.99Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” —The American Prospect
Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal).
Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly).
“A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky -
Making Work Pay
$18.95Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect and the Economic Policy Institute and former columnist for both Business Week and the Boston Globe. The author of Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? and Going Big (The New Press), he holds the Ida and Meyer Kirstein Chair at Brandeis University and lives in Boston.
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Help Wanted
Tales from the First Job Front$16.95 – $25.00Help Wanted is a collection of candid first-person accounts by young people from across the nation, who talk about their first forays into the real world of work. The Chicago Tribune called author Sydney Lewis “the legitimate heir to Studs Terkel,” and Terkel himself said, “Sydney Lewis is a natural to do this book. She’s on the same wavelength as the young people recounting their first jobs. In its honesty and innocence, it’s a strongly moving as well as revealing work.”
Help Wanted discusses everything from difficult coworkers, tough bosses, and criticism to stringent deadlines, dress codes, and harassment and is a testament to how young people are prepared—or not prepared—for their entry into the workforce. It also offers tips for surviving the first months on the job and other advice not found in typical career guides.
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Working-Class New York
Life and Labor Since World War II$25.95 – $27.99A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise
More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all.
Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power.
A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.
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