Books and films
Books and films that help us understand collective action.
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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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Motown South: Organized Labor In the Battery Belt
The electric vehicle industry is booming in the American South; so much so that the region has earned the nickname the “Battery Belt”. But why are producers setting up shop in states such as Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee?
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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
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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.
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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
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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…
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Partners: How Starbucks Baristas Started a Labor Revolution
When a group of baristas in Buffalo, New York, announced their intention to form a union, Starbucks responded with an elaborate, illegal anti-union campaign. Featuring on-the-ground footage from workers and organizers, Partners takes us to the front lines of the historic campaign.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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Red Harbor: The Radical Roots of the Pacific Northwest Labor Movement
In Red Harbor, Aaron Goings resurrects the forgotten history of lumber workers in a bastion of labor radicalism, examining the conflict as workers faced down an alliance of employers, police, and violent anti-radicals, including the Ku Klux Klan. But he goes beyond these clashes to illuminate the vital roles of families, immigrants, and working-class…
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Roy Reuther and the UAW: Fighting for Workers and Civil Rights
This biography of Roy Reuther examines his tumultuous life, including the triumphs and tragedies in the labor and civil rights movements.
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Shadow Ticket
Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case.
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Solidarity Betrayed
Solidarity Betrayed reckons with the labor movement’s failures on sexual harassment. Ana Avendaño draws on decades of organizing experience to provide a compelling insider’s account of trade unions’ complicity, collusion, victim blaming, and lack of perpetrator accountability.
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Stinkbug
In this wildly original and deeply unhinged story, Sinéad Stubbins turns her keen but empathetic eye on the lies we tell about ourselves in order to belong. Part anxious millennial fever dream, part searing workplace satire, this corporate gothic novel is perfect for fans of Yellowface, Nightbitch and Such a Fun Age.
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Strike Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire
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
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Strike While the Needle Is Hot: A Discography of Worker’s Revolt
This book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.
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Striking Ore: The Rise and Fall of Union Power in the Pilbara
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Pilbara iron ore industry was a bastion of militant unionism – 'union power'. Today, it is almost completely un-unionised.
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Such a Good Man
In these inventive and formally daring stories, Dustin M. Hoffman shines a light into the dark corners of American suburbia.
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Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union
The world's most iconic union?When Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of Britain's largest union, Unite the Union, spoke to the delegates of the 2016 Teamster convention, he declared, "The Teamsters is the most iconic trade union on our planet and you should be proud." The delegates loved it and gave him a rapturous welcome.But, was iconic the best way…