Books and films
Books and films that help us understand collective action.
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Todo han de ser / Everything must be
This is the story of the rise, between the 1930s and 1950s, of Eddie Florio, an Italian-American, through the ranks of the criminal underworld vying with unions for control of American ports. Starting as an informant and later becoming a union leader, Florio's rise was fueled by his utter lack of scruples.
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Una causa per cui combattere / A cause worth fighting for." The Resistance in the factories of Veneto and the strikes of March 1944 in the Vicenza area.
March 1, 1944: General strike of the Italian working class. In the preceding months, regular and widespread work stoppages had already affected the Veneto and Northern Italy, where the workforce, hostile to forced relocation and weakened by working conditions and food shortages, thus staged a veritable form of resistance to the German occupation.
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Παρεμποδίζοντας την Αποστασία / Preventing Apostasy Julian 1965: social protest and the Left
The Julian Revolution of the summer of 1965, after George Papandreou was forced to resign from the prime ministership by King Constantine II and the organization of the Apostasy, constituted the greatest social explosion of post-war Greece and one of the most significant conflict episodes of modern Greek society, having been characterized as the "Greek May".
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A Living: Working Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor
A Living is a vivid portrait of the working lives of the patients who visit Dr. Michael Stein, a primary care doctor in urban America.
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Chatto Windus Mining Men.
This is the story of the last generation of British fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs. Men for whom the masculine world of pit was all they had ever known, who reluctantly emerged into the daylight for the final time, and others who were happier to consign the dust and darkness to the past.
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Mining Memories: Tales of Hardship, Tales of Joy
A new book on Durham Coalfield communities is a timely testament to working class resilience, says MARY HULL, bringing together evocative tales of ‘marras’, meetings, strikes and marches as well as banners, brass bands and allotments. Full of hope and laughter, sadness and anger, it seeks to hand the area’s rich and radical history on to the next generation.
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Organizing Amazon: Building Worker Power under Conditions of Fragmentation, Precarity and Regimentation
Between August 2022 and July 2024, GMB Union membership at Amazon’s BHX4 Coventry warehouse skyrocketed, with 37 days of strike action resulting in a 28.5% pay rise. Yet despite this, the union narrowly lost a ballot that would have forced Amazon to grant formal recognition.
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State of Struggle
Long time vice president of the PCS John McInally traces the history of the civil service trade union movement from its origins and in a final chapter analyses the present political situation and the potential for socialist advance. The book includes fascinating detail of the sharp battles between the rising Broad Left and the State-backed Moderates, the…
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Steelworkers in struggle: An oral history of the 1980 national steel strike
Using oral histories gathered from trade unionists, this book explores the national steelworkers strike of 1980 and asserts its significance as a key turning point in modern British history. The strike was nominally a response to a 2% pay offer made by British Steel Corporation (BSC), at a time when inflation was 17%, but was generated by the widespread…
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Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930
Ruby Oram’s Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) examines how working people and reformers in Chicago debated secondary education curricula for girls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Debates over the curriculum for junior high and high school “manual…
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Box 25. Archival Secrets, Caribbean Workers, and the Panama Canal
When acclaimed labor historian Julie Greene researched her book The Canal Builders, which went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, she explored a cache of first-person essays written in 1963 by the Afro-Caribbean people, mainly Jamaican and Barbadian, who migrated to the Isthmus of Panama to work as diggers, track shifters, or domestic…
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City, Space and Trade Unionism The Spatiality of Labour in the Metal Industry
This book examines the transformation of the workers' movement in Spain's metal sector, one of the country's most unionised industries.
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City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers
Robert Snyder tells the story of COVID-19 in the words of ordinary New Yorkers, illuminating the fear and uncertainty of life in the early weeks and months.
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Class Warfare in Black Atlanta
Between 1966 and 2015, the city of Atlanta was transformed. In the late 1960s, Black politicians ascended to the top of the power structure for the first time thanks to newly enfranchised Black working-class voters.
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Class War on Workers
This 100-page book is a lively and comprehensive account of the year-long struggle against the vicious government of Maggie Thatcher.
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Driver
Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers.
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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution
A young Socialist, raised in New York, took to the streets, mobilizing the masses for the sake of a more equitable society and civil liberties for all. No, it’s not Zohran Mamdani.
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Empire of Labor How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work
Empire of Labor tells the story of how hired workers experienced and responded to the rise to power over the long eighteenth century of the English East India Company (EIC), which perennially hired thousands of people in and around its settlements in Bengal. Focusing on boatmen and silk reelers as well as sailors and soldiers—a remarkable look at both…
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Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity
Most accounts of interracial solidarity focus on white union activists. In Freedom Train, Cedric de Leon, a former organizer and elected leader in the US labor movement, argues that we can't comprehend the history of workers' triumphs in the United States without investigating the role of Black liberation.
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Get on the Job and Organize Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
A 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
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Gunpoint Capitalism: Enforcing Industrial Order in Karachi
On 11 September 2012, over 250 workers of Ali Enterprises, which produced jeans for the German discount retailer KiK, perished in a fire in their Karachi factory. Was this an accident or an arson attack?
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Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike
Inspiring stories of resilient women leading a miners' strike, defying gender norms to fight for economic justice.
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I Didn't Come Here to Lie My Life and Education
An intimate, inspiring memoir by educator and labor union leader Karen Lewis, a formidable fighter, a staunch defender of teachers and students
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Ingram
A picaresque novel set against the backdrop of working-class Texas, Ingram invites readers to see the world through the eyes of a child who drifts through a tough American landscape of corn farms and oil fields, guided by diner waitresses, migrant workers, and criminals, trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t care about him anymore than a jungle or…
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Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today
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…
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Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj
In November 1913, a recruitment notice appeared in the first issue of an underground newspaper in San Francisco, the Hindustan Ghadar. The paper was founded by a charismatic anarchist from India named Har Dayal with the help of a group of Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley.
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𝑴𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒓 2‑10
Mater 2-10 (translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae) introduces us to Yi Jino, a former factory worker in his mid-fifties about to embark on an unusual endeavour. Having protested in vain against the actions of his former employers, a company that feigned bankruptcy in order to close down a factory and set up again elsewhere (to save…
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Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America
When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that “Men is cheep here to Day,” he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union’s war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent.
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Miners And The Great War
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, despite many difficulties and falling manpower, coalmining was the most important industry in Great Britain. It employed around a million persons in well over 3,000 pits ranging from small hillside drift mines with a few hands to substantial collieries with workforces and pit communities the size of villages and…
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No Neutrals There US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine
No Neutrals There tells the shameful story of how U.S. labor leaders supported and helped fund the century-long Zionist project of colonization, occupation