Book Reviews

As the folk singer Ani DiFranco sings, “you gotta have the right tools for every job.” If the job is building a bolder, more militant labor and working-class movement, the May Day Strong coalition (of which UE is a part) has just produced an essential new tool. This Is How We Win: A Guide to Building Working-Class Uprisings is a slim collection of short essays, first-person accounts, and interviews which explore how working people can effectively use economic disruption to fight the billionaire class.

UE’s commitment to Palestinian rights is the exception, not the rule, in the U.S. labor movement. In his new book, No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine, historian Jeff Schuhrke explains that the U.S. labor movement has never been neutral when it comes to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and critiques those that claim unions should stay out of the worsening conflict. He explains in detail how U.S. unions have not only supported Israel, but helped build it.

Last summer, the University of Illinois Press published A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance, a collection of essays, some of them previously unpublished, by the late historian. Montgomery — a former UE member who addressed no less than four UE conventions — transformed the study of U.S. labor history in the 1960s and 70s. His work moved the focus of the discipline away from institutions and “great men” and to the way rank-and-file workers resisted dictatorial bosses and the insatiable demands of capital in their workplaces and communities.

In his new book Blue Collar Empire the labor historian, journalist, and union activist Jeff Schuhrke documents how many AFL and CIO leaders not only participated in witch hunts against UE and other militant unions in the U.S., but actively conspired with the U.S. government to undermine militant unions around the world. Indeed, they were not only willing participants in the government’s crusade against so-called “communist” unions, but in some cases were even more enthusiastic about that crusade than the government itself.

In his new book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, labor historian Shelton Stromquist describes how, following a “global strike wave” in the late nineteenth century, workers turned to municipal politics in an effort to improve their lives. Cities were the places where workers and their families worked, lived, and suffered from low wages and long hours, poor and crowded housing conditions, adulterated and expensive food, and other indignities. They were also the places where workers experienced social solidarity, and could imagine using their greater numbers to transform their lives by participating in the political process.

Veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer Joe Burns has issued a bracing challenge to the U.S. labor movement in his new book, Class Struggle Unionism, one that should be read by everyone in the labor movement, and everyone who is concerned about the power that the billionaire class exercises over our society.

International Solidarity in Action, a new e-book written by UE’s retired Director of International Affairs Robin Alexander and published by UE, provides an in-depth look at the decades-long relationship between the UE and the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), an independent Mexican labor federation.

“Homestead” is one of those place names in U.S. labor history – like Haymarket and Flint – that carries a lot of meaning. The courageous 1892 struggle by the workers of the Homestead mill and their community, against robber baron Andrew Carnegie, his union-busting lieutenant Henry Clay Frick, and the Pennsylvania National Guard, ended in defeat for the workers and killed the idea that craft unions could succeed at collective bargaining in mass production industries. But in Mike Stout’s memoir of his life as a worker and union leader in the Homestead mill’s final decade, he makes clear that something of the rebellious spirit of 1892 survived. “For me,” he writes, “1892 and 1982 are part of a whole, two points on the same pole of resistance and spirit of solidarity that sprang up, thrived, and was eventually suffocated at the great Homestead steel mill.”  

In a new book, The Long Deep Grudge, historian Toni Gilpin recounts the history of the Farm Equipment Workers union (FE). Like UE and the ILWU, the FE practiced a militant and democratic form of unionism that contested the boss’s power on the shop floor as much as in contract negotiations. Throughout the book, Gilpin makes a compelling case that the aggressive shop-floor struggle conducted by rank-and-file FE members, and the majority-white FE’s deep commitment to racial equality, was inextricably connected to the left-wing views of the union's leadership.