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BOOKS
 | The Secret History of the War on Cancer
If you or someone you love has fallen victim to cancer because of job hazards, this well-written, exhaustively documented book by Devra Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Environmental Oncology, will infuriate you. One of the book's major premises is that the cancer establishment repeatedly has distorted, ignored and even hidden the risks of cancer in the workplace. One example: Major chemical companies and the University of Cincinnati's Kettering Laboratories studied the risks of lead in gasoline, rubber and coke manufacturing, and lots of industrial chemicals from 1929 until the late 1960s. Yet the results of the study have never been released. Available from . |
 | High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
High Wire is a frightening book. Peter Gosselin, the widely respected economic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, documents how and why "Americans, from the working poor to the reasonably rich, are in danger of taking steep financial falls from which they have a terrible time recovering." He tells about a top Virginia insurance agent who was stricken with illness and abandoned by a health insurer whose products she had sold; an Indiana steel company electrician who neared bankruptcy because of an industrial accident; and an immigrant dishwasher in California who faced a downward spiral when her workplace shifted from union to nonunion. Gosselin weaves a persuasive analysis of what it means for millions more of us to walk on a high wire by ourselves. Available from . |
 | Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
Immigration to the United States and anti-worker trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are intertwined, created by a globalized system that "creates illegality by displacing people and then denying them rights and equality as they do what they have to do to survive—move to find work," according to David Bacon, a sharp journalist and former union organizer. For instance, when NAFTA went into effect, Oaxacan corn farmers could no longer make ends meet after cheap corn from U.S. agribusiness flooded the Mexican markets and drove prices down. To survive, thousands of Mexican farmers migrate north every year to take some of the worst, most dangerous jobs in this country—and their reward is to be labeled "illegal" and treated like criminals for trying to support their families. Workers lose, farmers lose, multinational corporations win. Available from .™ |
WEBSITE
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The University of California is one of the crown jewels of American higher education with some of the finest scholars and researchers anywhere in the world and a multibillion-dollar endowment. But as this new website shows, UC also has a shameful underside. While its top officials bring in six-figure salaries and live free in university mansions, thousands of janitors, food service workers, groundskeepers and other service workers are paid so little that they qualify for food stamps, housing assistance and child care subsidies. Facingpovertyatuc.org, sponsored by AFSCME Local 3299, highlights stories of UC employees who have to work two extra jobs or scrounge for empty aluminum cans just to survive. At the site, you can send a message to UC higher-ups demanding that they start paying decent wages to their employees. |
FILM
 | Harlan County, U.S.A.
This sparse, low-budget documentary about a yearlong strike by eastern Kentucky coal miners in the 1970s may be the most powerful film about workers ever made in this country. Filmmaker Barbara Kopple captures the courage of the miners and the even greater courage of their wives; the hymn-singing on the picket line; the scabs waiting to cross the picket line who finally turn back; the retired coal miner who can hardly breathe because of black lung; the violence that takes the life of a young striker and the collapse of his mother at the funeral; and the final vote for a contract. "Harlan County, U.S.A." will haunt you, move you, remind you what the union movement is really about, and make you proud to be part of it. Available from . |
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