In the fall of 1945, just weeks after the war ended, Reuther was pushing two highly ambitious bargaining demands that he hoped would chart a course for postwar industrial America. First, he sought a 30 percent raise for the UAW’s 175,000 members at GM (equivalent to thirty-three cents an hour). GM’s workers were feeling explosive frustration after years of a no-strike pledge and wages lagging behind inflation. Moreover, Reuther argued that GM could afford to grant large raises while keeping its prices frozen because its production had risen 50 percent since 1941, its productivity was climbing by nearly 3 percent a year, and it had a 28 percent return on investment in some quarters. He believed passionately that workers should share in the benefits of their own and their company’s increased productivity. Second, Reuther demanded that GM agree not to raise its sticker prices, fearing that if the nation’s largest corporation hiked its prices, it would generate a wave of me-too price increases across America. That, Reuther feared, would wipe out much of the raises the workers received. That second demand grew directly out of the wartime practice of administering, and limiting, price increases. Indeed, Reuther pressed President Harry S. Truman’s Office of Price Administration to back him by ordering GM not to raise its prices. That second demand also reflected Reuther’s, and much of labor’s, view at the time that unions should have a real voice on fundamental issues like production and prices.

GM vigorously disagreed with Reuther. It offered a thirteen-and-a-half-cent raise (a 12 percent raise) and scoffed at the demand that it not raise its sticker prices. Joined by other automakers and the steel industry, GM urged the Truman administration to eliminate price controls. (To help raise take-home pay, GM also proposed getting Congress to legislate a forty-five-hour workweek to replace the existing forty-hour week. Reuther denounced that proposal as a major step backward, saying that GM was baiting the union and asking for a strike.) Reuther told GM that he would lower the UAW’s demand for a 30 percent raise if GM opened its books to demonstrate that it couldn’t afford such an increase. GM insisted that wages should have nothing to do with profit levels and refused to open its books or up its wage offer. “I am greatly exercised—perhaps unduly so—by the philosophy of ‘capacity to pay,’ ” Alfred Sloan wrote to another CEO. (Many workers saw GM’s stance as manifestly unfair, although GM’s view from the 1940s has come to dominate corporate America’s current view, with many companies refusing to give their workers raises large enough to keep up with inflation, even when their profits are soaring. That’s one of the factors fueling today’s income inequality.) Charles E. Wilson, GM’s president, told Reuther, “We shall resist the monopolistic power of your union to force this 30 percent increase in basic wages.” “Automobiles,” Wilson added, “would shortly cost 30 percent more to produce.”

Thanks to Reynolds’s ingenuity as a mediator and the city council’s eagerness to end the confrontation, a deal was finally reached. Unlike Loeb, the council agreed to bargain with the sanitation workers’ union and allow a dues checkoff. The council said the city was too financially strapped to grant anything but meager raises because it had spent so much on police overtime during the strike. Fortunately, a bighearted industrialist, Abe Plough, chairman of a large pharmaceutical company, donated nearly $60,000 ($430,000 today) to pay for an immediate raise for the sanitation workers. That made it possible to increase pay by ten cents an hour on May 1 and five cents more on September 1 (Loeb had originally offered a raise of eight cents an hour).

When Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was elected president in 1976, the controllers hoped that after eight years of Republican presidents, Carter would bargain over wages (something not previously allowed under federal rules) and would move hundreds of controllers into higher job classifications to lift their pay. But Carter did neither thing. The 1979 oil shock pushed inflation to double-digit levels, and to help keep the budget deficit from soaring, Carter turned stingy on federal employee raises. From 1973 to 1981, federal employees’ pay slipped 3.1 percent a year, after factoring in inflation. This infuriated the controllers, who were already upset that they earned 18 percent less on average than private-sector air traffic controllers.

Carter’s embrace of airline deregulation made the controllers’ on-the-job stress even worse. Deregulation increased air traffic, encouraging the creation of low-cost airlines like People Express, which had a $29 fare from Newark to Boston and a $39 fare from Newark to Columbus, Ohio. Deregulation also spurred large airlines to develop a hub-and-spoke strategy, which meant a stress-inducing surge in takeoffs and landings each morning and late afternoon at many airports.

The controllers’ big hope was that the Air Line Pilots Association, with forty thousand members, would honor their picket lines and decline to fly. That would have assured a PATCO victory. But the pilots’ union, which PATCO had done little to cultivate, was angry because the controllers went on strike during the peak summer flying season, when pilots’ hours and earnings soared. In a crushing blow to the strike, the pilots decided against honoring PATCO’s picket lines.

There are thousands of examples of American companies moving operations abroad—to make televisions in China, refrigerators in Mexico, or shirts and slacks in Bangladesh. Many corporations told unions to swallow concessions or else they would move production overseas. Here’s one example: In 1988, General Electric said it would close an aging factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that made electrical motors and relocate abroad unless the union agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. “There’s a bunch of guys in Thailand, Korea, and Brazil who get up every morning and try to figure out how to eat your lunch and take your market share,” said David C. Genever-Watling, the head of GE’s motor division. The Fort Wayne workers voted by more than two to one to accept an 11 percent pay cut to save their jobs. [...]

SPEAKING AT A NEWS CONFERENCE for the very first time, Takele Gobena, an Uber driver in Seattle, awkwardly approached the microphone to convey two messages: first, that Uber drivers needed a union and, second, that Uber paid miserably. Gobena, a gangly, twenty-six-year-old refugee from Ethiopia, said his hourly earnings came to less than the minimum wage after factoring in gas, insurance, and other expenses. Fearing retaliation, Gobena said, “I know Uber will probably deactivate me tomorrow. But I’m ready because this is worth fighting for.”

It didn’t take that long. At 6:50 that evening, a few hours after several websites posted articles about the news conference, Uber emailed Gobena to notify him he had been deactivated, Uber lingo for being fired. The company said his auto insurance had expired.

Within minutes, Gobena grabbed his smartphone, photographed his insurance card (which showed that his insurance policy was still in force), and emailed the photo to Uber and to Mike O’Brien, the city councilman who had organized the news conference. O’Brien sent the photo to several journalists to show that Uber’s reason for firing Gobena was poppycock. Badly embarrassed, Uber reinstated Gobena the next day. Uber vigorously denied that it had retaliated against Gobena, insisting it was all a mistake.

For each step forward, though, there was often a step or two back. In 1944, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, bowing to Roosevelt administration pressure, promoted eight African Americans to streetcar motormen. The Transit Workers Union supported those promotions, but forty-five hundred white workers, opposed to the promotions, went on strike, preventing 300,000 people from getting to work and disrupting war production. Union leaders were unable to persuade the strikers to return to work, and the federal government sent in more than five thousand soldiers to help end the strike.