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BOOKS
 | America Works: Critical Thoughts on the Exceptional U.S. Labor Market
If you work for a living—or are looking for a job—the U.S. labor market is a big force in your life. To understand what it's all about, Harvard economist Richard Freeman's book is the perfect place to start. He asks the right questions: How does the U.S. labor market really compare with the labor markets of Europe and Japan? What things work well here, and what are the disasters? Freeman offers some provocative answers. For example, he says America's economy lately has done a terrible job of distributing the fruits of productivity to workers and the middle class. A big reason is—you guessed it—the decline in union membership. Available from |
 | Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It
Never underestimate the greed of some employers. As Kim Bobo, the director of Interfaith Worker Justice, reports, there is a "crisis of wage theft" in this country. Literally tens of billions of dollars are stolen by employers who "are stealing money from workers by cheating them of wages owed or not paying them at all." The guilty employers range from unmonitored Los Angeles garment factories to New Orleans restaurants and nursing homes everywhere. The good news, according to Bobo, is that obvious and effective remedies exist: strengthening and enforcing federal laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, expanding the existing network of front-line workers' centers, and reviving workers' freedom to form their own unions. Available from .™. |
 | The Point of Pittsburgh
The Point of Pittsburgh is the story of a turbulent, magnificent American city and Charlie McCollester tells it all with a clear vantage point. He focuses on the struggles of Pittsburgh's women, immigrants and people of color—and workers in steel mills and mines and offices and the unions they created. This is people's history at its best. McCollester certainly has all the right credentials. Not only is he a respected professor of industrial and labor relations; he's also a former shop steward in a factory. It shows. Available from . |
CD
 | Talking Union & Other Union Songs
No one ever accused the Almanac Singers of being glamorous. The scruffy and passionate group played at union rallies and fundraisers for farm workers, performed in street clothes (unheard of in the 1940s), and they were together for little more than a year. But they changed American folk music forever. Their most famous living alumnus, Pete Seeger, who was blacklisted and harassed for years, sang "This Land Is Your Land" with Bruce Springsteen at President Obama's pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial. "Talking Union"—with its mix of "hillbilly music" as it was then called, blues and folk music—became the Almanac Singers' most popular album. It includes "Casey Jones," a funny ballad with lyrics you haven't heard before about a scab train engineer who ends up in hell, and a chorus of "Solidarity Forever" you can believe in. There's never been a better album of American labor songs than this. Available from . |
FILM
 | Milk
This biopic about the charismatic San Francisco supervisor who was the first openly gay elected official in America has already won a stack of awards and been nominated for plenty more. It deserves each of them. One of the stories in this powerful film is about the coalition Harvey Milk built between the San Francisco gay community and the socially conservative Teamsters. The union was seeking support for a boycott of an anti-union Coors beer distributor. Milk mobilized the gay community behind the boycott—and in exchange, the Teamsters agreed to give gays good union jobs driving beer trucks. The audacious deal surprised just about everyone but Milk, but for Teamsters and gays, it was a win-win. As Milk says in the film, "We had a neighborhood. We had the unions. And for the first time, we had a little bit of power." Amen. Check your local movie listings. |
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