The Labor Library of Southern California

A stirring biography of a hero in the struggle for economic justice and a book that probes the question: Whatever happened to labor liberalism in America?Excellent . . . gripping. . . . Mr. Lichtenstein has produced more than a biography. He has given us an elegantly written and unfailingly intelligent portrait of American labor in the mid-twentieth century.--Alan Brinkley, New York Times Book Review In an ideal union of scholarship and literature, Nelson Lichtenstein properly places labor leader Walter Reuther in the center of the most important social and political movements of the 20th century. This is an important book.--Julian BondAA meticulously researched, clearly written and quickly paced story . . . a masterful portrayal of the social and political stage on which the labor leader performed. --Washington Post Book World

From the carpenter's union in colonial Philadelphia to the strike in 2007 by Chinese restaurant delivery men in New York City, the history of how brave working people struggled to gain fair wages, reasonable hours, and secure lives by forming labor unions is a powerful American story filled with drama and intrigue.

Carlitos' mother is a janitor. Every night, he sleeps while his mother cleans in one of the skyscrapers in downtown L.A. When she comes home, she waves Carlitos off to school before she goes to sleep. One night, his mamá explains that she can't make enough money to support him and his abuelita the way they need unless she makes more money as a janitor. She and the other janitors have decided to go on strike. Will he support her and help her all he can? Of course, Carlitos wants to help but he cannot think of a way until his teacher, Miss Lopez, explains in class how her own grandfather had fought for better wages for farmworkers when he first came to the United States. Finally, Carlitos knows how he can show his mamá how proud he is of her. He and the other children in his class make posters and Carlitos joins the marchers with a very special sign for his mom! ¡Sí, Se Puede! is a Jane Addams Peace Award Honor Book, a Skipping Stones Honor Book, as well as a selection for The Best of Beyond Difference, a recommended list of the top 10 diversity books published in 2002. Diana Cohn, the author, is a social activist. As an elementary teacher, she discovered there were few books for children that discussed social issues, so she began to write as an avocation. She now works as Program Director for the Solidago Foundation, a foundation that supports communities working for economic and environmental justice. She lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California. Francisco Delgado, the illustrator, grew up in Juárez, Chihuahua, but completed high school in El Paso, Texas. He will -receive his MFA at Yale in Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking in May 2002. Francisco is becoming known nationally for his political paintings that satirize U.S. icons blind to the mestizo and immigrant communities of Mexico. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.Luis J. Rodriguez(Always Running) adds the afterword and a poem. La mamá de Carlitos es conserje. Cada noche mientras el duerme su mamá limpia un edificio en el centro de L.A. Una noche su mamá le explica que al menos de que ganara mas como conserje, no gana suficiente dinero para mantenerlo a el y a su abuelita como ella quisiera. Ella y los otros conserjes han decidido entrar en huelga. ¿Acaso el la apoyará y ayudará en todo lo que pueda? Claro, Carlitos quiere ayudar, pero no sabe como hasta que ve a su mamá en la televisión dando un discurso enfavor de la huelga. Al fina, Carlitos encuentra la manera de enseñarle a su mamá lo orgulloso que esta de ella. ¡El y su compañeros de clase hacen carteles y Carlitos se une a la marcha con un cartel muy especial para su mamá! ¡Si, se puede! Incluye un ensayo escrito por el aclamado autor Luis J. Rodríguez sobre Dolores Sánchez, una de las mujeres involucradas el Paro de Conserjes de L.A. El libro también incluye un póster con un poema de Rodríguez e información sobre las uniones dirigido a los grados 4-6.

From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day. From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first real factories in America, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the con­test between labor and capital for their share of American bounty has shaped our national experience. Philip Dray's ambition is to show us the vital accomplishments of organized labor in that time and illuminate its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. There Is Power in a Union is an epic, character-driven narrative that locates this struggle for security and dignity in all its various settings: on picket lines and in union halls, jails, assembly lines, corporate boardrooms, the courts, the halls of Congress, and the White House. The author demonstrates, viscerally and dramatically, the urgency of the fight for fairness and economic democracy--a struggle that remains especially urgent today, when ordinary Americans are so anxious and beset by eco­nomic woes.

National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistWinner of the California Book AwardA searching portrait of an iconic figure long shrouded in myth by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of an acclaimed history of Chavez's movement.Cesar Chavez founded a labor union, launched a movement, and inspired a generation. He rose from migrant worker to national icon, becoming one of the great charismatic leaders of the 20th century. Two decades after his death, Chavez remains the most significant Latino leader in US history. Yet his life story has been told only in hagiography--until now. In the first comprehensive biography of Chavez, Miriam Pawel offers a searching yet empathetic portrayal. Chavez emerges here as a visionary figure with tragic flaws; a brilliant strategist who sometimes stumbled; and a canny, streetwise organizer whose pragmatism was often at odds with his elusive, soaring dreams. He was an experimental thinker with eclectic passions--an avid, self-educated historian and a disciple of Gandhian non-violent protest. Drawing on thousands of documents and scores of interviews, this superbly written life deepens our understanding of one of Chavez's most salient qualities: his profound humanity. Pawel traces Chavez's remarkable career as he conceived strategies that empowered the poor and vanquished California's powerful agriculture industry, and his later shift from inspirational leadership to a cult of personality, with tragic consequences for the union he had built. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez reveals how this most unlikely American hero ignited one of the great social movements of our time.

Welcoming women, Blacks, and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor's outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as "unorganizable." Wobblies organized the first sit-down strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6,000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado (1927), and the first "no-fare" transit-workers' job-action (Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful, and world-famous strikes and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in the annals of working class emancipation. Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers' culture. All but a few of America's most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs. IWW cartoons have long been recognized as labor's finest and funniest. The impact of the IWW has reverberated far beyond the ranks of organized labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory and practice of direct action, solidarity, and "class-war" humor have inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and are a major source of ideas and inspiration for today's radicals. Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to "make this planet a good place to live" (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW's incomparable experience. Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art, and lore. This new edition includes 40 pages of additional material from the 1998 Charles H. Kerr edition from Fred Thompson and Franklin Rosemont, and a new preface by Wobbly organizer Daniel Gross.

An update to the classic history of labor and unions for a post-9/11 world. Highly acclaimed and widely read since its first publication in 1986, American Workers, American Unions provides a concise and compelling history of American workers and their unions in the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Taking into account recent important work on the 1970s and the Reagan revolution, the fourth edition newly considers the stagflation issue, the rise of globalization and big box retailing, the failure of Congress to pass legislation supporting the right of public employees to collective bargaining, the defeat in Congress of legislation to revise the National Labor Relations Act, the emasculation of the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, and the changing dynamics of blue-collar politics. In addition to important new information on the 1970s and 1980s, the fourth edition contains a completely new final chapter. Largely written by Timothy J. Minchin, this chapter provides a rare survey of American workers and their unions between 9/11 and the 2012 presidential election. Gilbert J. Gall presents new information on government workers and their recent battles to defend workplace rights.

This contributor volume brings the best work of such established historians as Morris Schappes, Nathan Godfried, and Eric Foner together with the newer voices of Elizabeth Sharpe and Jennifer Bosch. Its eleven essays challenge the boundary between the older, institutional labor history and the more recent social histories of working people. By combining a focus on culture, women's history, and race relations that is characteristic of the best of the latest working class history with an emphasis on formal protests, leadership, and power, the volume suggests that a truly new labor history will reflect a variety of concerns and draw on diverse inspirations. In three chapters elucidating new features of labor biography and working-class politics, the volume's opening section considers George Edwin McNeill, the Socialist Party's efforts to free Eugene Debs, and the Socialist Party's left wing. Turning to women in labor history, the next section includes two chapters on Union W.A.G.E., an organization of mainly white, working class women, and Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Hull House. In a third section on African-American history, two scholars consider Black labor and African-American laborers in the Reconstruction era. The final section considers culture, education, and the working class. These chapters analyze the role of broadcasting and the Socialists' effort to establish an alternative radio station; labor education in the 1920s; the literary portrayal of sailors in Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the victims of the Rapp-Coudert Committee. By placing workers and their organizations convincingly within the context of their culture, this volume helps to demonstrate the ways the labor movement has remade this nation and how the nation has shaped the labor movement.

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) is regarded by many as American history's premier labor advocate. He was the leader of the Socialist party, five-time Socialist candidate for president, outspoken on the rights of all workers, and a persistent defender of America's democratic traditions.  Nick Salvatore's acclaimed biography offers a major reevaluation of Debs, the movements he launched, and his belief in American Socialism as an extension of the nation's democratic traditions. He also shows the relationship between Debs's public image and his private life as child, sibling, husband, and lover. Salvatore's Debs--weaknesses intact--emerges as a complex man, frustrated and angered by the glaring inequities of a new economic order, and willing to risk his freedom to preserve the essence of democratic society.

In this volume, leading union, management, and academic experts with diverse views examine the future of unions. The consensus of the contributors is that labor organizations are as important in modern economies as they were in mass production systems, but their viability depends on developing the appropriate structures and policies to represent workers’ interests under modern conditions. There is also agreement that democratic institutions and shared prosperity require the United States and other countries to reform their policies to better enable workers to organize to protect and promote their workplace as well as political and societal interests.

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle not only drew attention from the likes of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and the future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, it drew action. The novel's depiction of what takes place in a meat-processing plant pressed the U.S. government into taking steps to regulate the industry for the benefit of workers and consumers. Industrialization, immigration, corporate and government responsibility, the limits of capitalist power—all of these classic American issues and themes found in this seminal work are still debated today. This new edition of literary criticism features full-length essays examining Sinclair's work and includes a bibliography, a chronology of the author's life, and an index for quick reference.

"Pre-eminent among historians of labor history." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the "roaring twenties" looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression. Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s. "In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition. --From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven

For readers of Stamped and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People, Albert J. Mann's Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States is an accessible and comprehensive YA history of the way the labor movement has shaped America and how it intersects with many of the major issues facing modern teens. "Mann explores the often oppressive, abusive, and bloody history of labor conditions and the merciless rise of capitalism with wit, snark, and comprehensive context.... Riveting, enlightening, infuriating, and timely: compulsory reading." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Its edgy title may attract attention, but it's the compelling narrative and enlightening content that will keep readers engaged from cover to cover." --SLJ (starred review)  "In other hands, the snarky, conversational tone might feel like an adult's overreach, but Mann's simmering anger and clear passion for the working class will inspire readers just as much as the union leaders and organization efforts she covers." --BCCB (starred review) "Mann's introduction to the history of labor is full of sharp, galvanizing points that will keep readers engaged and help them look critically at some of our entrenched systems." --ALA Booklist "The narrative's laser focus on organizing heroes and essential employees, and the power of unions and striking workers to enact change, results in powerful storytelling." --Publishers Weekly You need to work to live. That's the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries. Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees. But workers have always found a way to fight back. Lokono tribespeople resisted Columbus and his colonizers. Enslaved people led walkouts and rebellions. Textile workers demanded a wage that would let them have fun, not just survive. Miners died for the right to unionize. From 30,000 young seamstresses striking in the early 1900s to Uber drivers organizing for change today, people have learned we're stronger when we are united. Shift Happens is a smart, funny, and engaging look at the history of the worker actions that brought us weekends, pay equality, desegregation, an end to child labor, and so much more.