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Throughout the late 1930s and through the 1940s, workers continued to form unions in record numbers and income inequality steadily fell. In just four years, from 1934 to 1938, the percentage of nonagricultural workers in unions jumped from 11.5 percent to 26.6 percent. This would have been unimagin…

The industries the unions were targeting to make major gains for all workers included steel and automotive industries, where the employer class was making the biggest profits. The unions knew that the governors controlled the state-based National Guard units. Unions went all out, raising more money…

[...] To win passage of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised by exempting two occupations dominated by African Americans—agricultural and domestic labor—from the provisions of the NLRA. This effectively condemned many African Americans to a second-class status under the first n…

There’s something else that is fundamental to and instructive about these stories, something bigger and more important than any one issue: in order to unionize and win big, workers need to build and rebuild deep solidarity. People can choose their friends, but they can’t choose their comrades. Stri…

West Virginia in 2018 was already a right-to-work state, where workers have no right to collective bargaining, where union membership is voluntary, and where the entire apparatus of the state is aimed at preventing exactly what wound up happening: an explosion of worker power. To Peters and other r…