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The Uprising of the 20,000 was part of a wave of strikes that blew the top off of whatever had been containing the remaining rage and militancy of workers during the Gilded Age, a time that, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, marked the greatest level of economic disparity in US his…

UNIONS ARE ESSENTIALLY working people standing together, in solidarity, to form collective power in the workplace and sometimes beyond. One root of this type of power in the United States stretches back to 1824, when in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hundreds of girls—teenagers mostly, but some as young …

Ana and Dario had been building lists, too, and had enough information to blitz their respective targets at CleanCo and ACE. The director called organizers from around the country—over a dozen of them—and told them to get flights to Phoenix for the last weekend in April, about two weeks away. We wa…

I asked Pollo about the “wash alley,” the department where he worked, told him I’d never seen the kinds of machines he works on. He described the tunnel washers in the plant, using his arms to gesture. As long as a bus, he said. He described moving bags of linen from the soil-sort area to the wash …

Now, when I think about what seemed at the time a very clear understanding of unions and power, I feel mostly perplexed. Of course it is better to organize than not organize—that is not the question. But I no longer subscribe to that top-down theory, nor do I think of power as a finite sum, a thing…