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 as seven—led what they called a “turnout,” which would become the first factory strike in US history.

The girls worked at a dam-powered cotton mill, where their bosses had met the night before and decided to cut their pay by 25 percent while simultaneously extending their thirteen- to fifteen-hour workdays by yet another hour. The day after the bosses announced these new conditions, 102 workers blocked the mill entrances at start time. They held a meeting there, just outside the factory, in front of their bosses and the rest of the town. They resolved not to go inside to work, and by the next day, their turnout had spread to the other cotton mills in town. It lasted a week, until one of the mills mysteriously caught fire, in what was perhaps the first act of industrial sabotage in this country’s long, rich history of industrial sabotage. The day after the fire, mill owners negotiated better hours and pay and safer conditions with the teenage strike leaders.

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 history. One response to this period of great and growing labor strife was a legislative one—the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The NLRA was created as a system to manage industrial conflict. It, through the government agency it precipitated, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supports labor organizing through its power to compel employers to recognize unions and bargain over working conditions. The NLRB represented a significant shift in the government’s stance with regard to unions: from repression to what has been called “integrative prevention.” The legislation marked a turning point in union density, too—membership shot up, because the government was suddenly regulating and protecting workers’ rights, and the strike wave that led to its passage died down as strikes became more limited to the bread-and-butter issues of wages and benefits that arose during contract renewal fights at already union worksites.

Of course, the NLRA is not what gives workers the right to organize. Working people have the right to assemble and can withhold their labor with or without the NRLA. They had been doing so and winning since long before 1935, both in the United States and around the world. And, anyway, almost immediately after its passage, the protections that were established by the NLRA were peeled away.

In 1938, just three years after the NLRA’s passing, the Supreme Court ruled in its Mackay Radio decision that while workers could not be fired for striking, they could be permanently replaced. Under the Mackay doctrine, as it came to be called, if workers struck for economic gains like raises and improved working conditions, the employer could hire permanent replacements—scabs, as they are otherwise known—and then not have to give the workers their jobs back when the strike was over. For workers, the difference between the terms fired and permanently replaced was of little importance if both meant they were out of a job. After a short curve of learning how to wield this new crushing tool, bosses realized that, since they can hire scabs to keep production moving during a strike, there is little incentive to reach an agreement with current employees at the bargaining table.

Despite the modest protections of the NLRA and the active threat of the Mackay doctrine, workers in the mid-1940s launched another massive strike wave, which included over five million workers at public utilities and in industries like coal and steel, meatpacking, and auto manufacturing. In 1946 in Pittsburgh alone, 120,000 workers went on strike. This time, instead of passing legislation that would calm strife as it had in 1935, Congress did the opposite. In 1947, it ratified the Taft-Hartley Act, or the Labor-Management Relations Act, even over the veto of President Harry S. Truman. This vile law establishes a litany of constraints on union activity. It prohibits certain strikes and boycotts. It limits union political power by banning federal campaign contributions. It allows states to pass right-to-work laws, which were first championed by Jim Crow architects as a way to prevent the coming together of Black and white workers into the same unions.

At the meeting, I talk about Good Boss/Bad Boss/Sad Boss as the kind of menu of tactics the company will draw from. I said some version of a thing I have now said thousands of times in meetings and house calls: Good Boss is when they buy off or try to buy off workers, with favors and fixes or even pay raises, to quell the anger that drives the organizing, to make it seem as though workers don’t need a union after all. Bad Boss is when they terrify or try to terrify workers through threats, like plant closure and rumors like “Wherever the union goes, Immigration follows,” so that fear overpowers the driving anger. Sad Boss is when they play the strange game of pretending to suffer a deep, personal heartbreak as the result of workers deciding to organize, in hopes that the workers’ anger will be confused or blunted by empathy for the boss.

There was some laughter at this last idea. There often is. Imagine John or Adam or another of the supervisors, I said, putting on a weepy, childish face. The laughter was nervous but rippled through the room as it was meant to. People looked at one another and scoffed and smiled. I had lifted this joke from Dario, who had, I imagine, lifted it from the more experienced organizers who’d trained him. It worked. The crack in the facade of the all-powerful bosses that had first appeared over the weekend of house visits now deepened. The atmosphere in the hall shifted as workers sat together in this collective levity, imagining these more puerile versions of their imperious bosses.

Just months into her first job, Clara and her coworkers walked out over the company’s pay system, which involved the workers keeping track of piles of tiny tickets representing their production. They were not allowed to keep the tickets on the sewing tables. They were not allowed to place them in their pockets. The company was betting that they would lose track of the tickets, and they did. Some of the girls who walked out were as young as eight. They worked in corners of the factory called “kindergartens,” where they trimmed threads on finished garments for fourteen hours a day and where they had to hide in boxes on the rare occasion that an inspector showed up to enforce new laws prohibiting children from working at night.

Clara was not resigned to living her life as a piece of machinery, as she claimed the work was designed to make her feel. When her shift ended at night, she would walk to the public library, where she read through its vast collection of Russian classics. Then she would stumble home to sleep a few hours before going back to the factory in the morning. In her second year in New York, she joined a free night school, where she learned to read in English, and during lunch at the garment factories, she would read aloud to the younger girls from Dickens and Shelley and George Eliot and Thomas Hood. She started reading Marx in classes at the Rand School, too, and then formed a small fist of a study group that wandered the streets during lunch, to talk without their bosses being able to listen in.

After the decision was made to strike at Cooper Union in 1909, after the workers gathered there raised their hands and recited the oath, a delegation of fifteen women (along with a man, appointed to lead them) ran to nearby halls to report the decision to the thousands of workers who had overflowed from the main meeting. In these halls, too, the strike was unanimously approved. In the morning, they went in to work at shirtwaist factories across the city. They sat at their machines and waited for the walkout to begin. At one factory, a sixteen-year-old worker named Rose Perr later reported that the women sat silently for what seemed a long time, that the room was alive with some kind of energy, but that no one moved until somehow they were all on their feet at once, without any one of them having taken the lead.

Manuel and Dario and the director told stories about fucked-up campaigns they had worked on across the country—bosses buying off workers, and calling Immigration to deport workers, and hiring people to stalk and beat up workers. They told stories of the scrappy antics of organizers, who, under the make-or-break urgency of factory strikes, stole truck keys and threw them into sewage grates or funneled sugar into gas tanks or smeared cement paste into the padlocks of factory gates in the middle of the night. I remember thinking that I understood the function of this all-night swapping of stories, that it was driven by the righteous indignation and pride that sustained people through the insanity of the job of union organizing—and at the same time worked to replenish it. It was a way to take control of what our stories mean. And as I sat on the motel bed listening, my own anger became more immediate and available, and it covered over the shame and sadness I had felt before. Looking back, I wonder if the exercise worked on the others in this way as well, if being able to center anger, to uncomplicate our relationship to the fight or at least uncomplicate our responses to it, comes with practice, like hope, and if practicing was what we were doing together in that room.

Inside the factory that afternoon, the managers shut down production and held a pizza party. For the first time in the factory’s twenty-plus-year history, all of the workers on each shift were allowed in the lunchroom at the same time. La Sandra had decorated with balloons and streamers and wall signs that read THANK YOU FOR VOTING NO! and NO TO UNIONS, and WE ARE UNITED (NOT UNITE). She stood in front of the workers and interpreted for El Mero Mero, who thanked the workers for their loyalty to the company and said that the company had acquired several new hospital contracts and that there would be increased production flowing through the factory, and that workers would have to work hard and cooperatively to achieve the level of production output that would be required, and that if anyone there didn’t want to work hard or if anyone there was unsatisfied with how the vote had gone, they knew where the door was and they should leave right now.

Our work together was more targeted than the swath of home visits I was doing with the other committee members—we needed to fill gaps in the record Paul was assembling. We had Antonia’s statement about her warning, but needed to talk to Reina, who was working near Antonia on that day, so she could testify about what Antonia told her when she got back to her iron machine. We had Pollo’s statement about La Sandra saying that the factory would close if the workers unionized, but we needed Alberto, who was in the same meeting, to corroborate Pollo’s story. According to Paul, the trial would hinge on this kind of corroborative testimony. But Reina and Alberto and others who had seen and heard the company break the law—Guillermo and Lupe and Santos—were afraid, and so the conversations we were having with them were longer and more difficult than any we’d had before. At first, the visits ended with I don’t know, or Let me think about it, or I still support the union, but my family needs this money, to which you would say, Your family deserves more money than we are making, and so does mine.