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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…

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…

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers

An inside look at how the experiences of Black workers created lifelong revolutionaries. Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries offers a fresh perspective on class, race, and revolution in the United States.

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

This is a best-selling book about working-class life in one small Ohio town 40 years ago and now, and the history of that one town reveals a fractured American landscape that is widespread but seldom seen. Beth Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, and was a paper girl delivering the daily newspaper to people’s homes.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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

Not Yet Lost

Set in turbulent 1937 Detroit, this novel portrays the Eastern European immigrant struggle when difficult economic times, xenophobia, “Fordism,” secret societies, and Communist-led labor organizations buffeted the demographic.

On the Clock

A marvelous debut from the hugely talented young French writer Claire Baglin, this tender and painful portrait of working-class life finds shards of poetry inside the twin hardships of poverty and service work

Organizing Professionals

Amidst unprecedented levels of union organizing in higher education, Gary Rhoades combines the perspectives of a scholar and labor movement activist and leader to provide a comprehensive analysis of organizing campaigns and collective bargaining agreements for faculty (contingent and tenure-track), graduate students, and postdoc employees. Academic…

Picket Line The Lost Novella

Picket Line is the never-before-published, prescient story of a budding agricultural strike in Texas, the racial tension brewing in the fields.

Precarious

In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their…

Raising Class Consciousness

This book focuses on the unequal power dynamics embedded in technological change. Offering critical and international perspectives on labor and communication, the book demonstrates how the adoption and implementation of technologies are political processes shaped by economic incentives, worker organizing and state intervention.