"From Katherine Newman, award-winning author of No Shame in My Game, and sociologist Hella Winston, a sharp and irrefutable call to reenergize this nation's long-neglected system of vocational training. After decades of off-shoring and downsizing that have left blue collar workers obsolete and stranded, the United States is now on the verge of an industrial renaissance. But we don't have a skilled enough labor pool to fill the positions that will...

"Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Longtime scholar of the American union movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the labor movement as we have known it for most of the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he asserts that this death has been a long time coming--the organizing principles chosen by the labor movement at midcentury have come back to haunt the movement today....

The Edge of Anarchy by Jack Kelly offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the U.S. Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities. This epochal...

"The coronavirus pandemic threw life into a tumult for American workers, igniting new class struggles and further stoking those already under way. Across the country, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, both with labor union backing and without it. Nurses, teachers, grocery clerks, farmers, food processing workers, and many more fought for higher wages, paid sick leave, better healthcare, and, above all else,...