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One left-led union they discuss is also the subject of Howard Kimeldorf’s Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Kimeldorf analyzes the stark differences between two mostly male dockworkers’ unions, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast, th…

Most CIO organizing was based on a mass collective action, high-participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and cooperative engagement in class struggle. Strikes, the kind that could shut down production—strikes in which most if not all workers walk off the job in a high-risk collectiv…

Today’s service worker has a radically different relationship to the consuming public than last century’s manufacturing worker had. People buying a car don’t meet and confer with the workers whose hands create it; they don’t walk up and down the assembly line insisting that a tweak this way or that…

Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordina…