An ex-fighter gets a job working on the gang-ridden waterfront under a crooked gangster boss.

From the longtime New York Times labor correspondent comes an in-depth look at working men and women in America, the challenges they face, and how they can be re-empowered. Wage stagnation, low-wage work, and blighted blue-collar communities have become an all-too-common part of modern-day America. Behind these trends is a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Greenhouse rebuts the often-stated view that labor unions...

In our current political climate, people are looking for answers - and alternatives. The promise of unions is that their 'members be unlimited': that they don't belong to the rich, the powerful, or special interests, but to all workers. How did the idea of unionism arise? Where has it flourished? And what are its challenges in the 21st century? From Britain to Bangladesh, from the first union of the 18th century to today, from solidarity in Walmart...

John P. Merrick, the world's richest man, gets word that someone is trying to unionize a department store he owns. To thwart this blatant act of democracy, Merrick changes his name and takes a menial job at the store to catch the union activists without detection. Once he himself is subjected to the humiliating treatment by the department supervisor, Hooper, Merrick starts to wise up-and soften up.

"Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the...

A semidocumentary of the year-long struggle by Chicano zinc miners in New Mexico striking against unsafe working conditions. When an injunction is issued against the workers from picketing, the wives take up battle with a fury, leaving the husbands to care for home and children. They finally overcome the forces of the mine owner and the law that backs them up.

Fanny Sellins was a union activist who fought and gave her life for equality and labor reform.

"Is labor's day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? In this new book, 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--labormovement is now more relevant than ever in our increasingly unequal society. The inequality reshaping the country goes beyond money and income: the workplace is more authoritarian than ever, and we...

District attorneys Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi work to expose the corrupt and murderous leader of the longshoremen's union.

"In the 1950s, Ellie and Brick are teenagers in love. A basketball star, Brick could escape his abusive father and be the first person in his working-class family to go to college. But when Ellie becomes pregnant, they marry, she gives up her dream of nursing school, and Brick gets a union card instead. This riveting novel tells the story of three generations in a working-class family; especially Brick and Ellie's daughter Samantha. Illuminating issues...