Knocking on Labor's Door

I lived through some of the events that Lane Windham describes in her super-readable and super-informative account of how new types of workers challenged both their employers and the American labor movement to listen to them and improve their work lives.

Shipyard workers, department store workers, office workers – these groups figured out new ways to raise their voices and “knock on the door” to make themselves heard. The result was big changes in their own lives, in the workplace, and in America’s unions.

Today, we’re seeing a surge of labor organizing just as groundbreaking as the initiatives Lane Windham… show more.

Labor unions played a key role in lifting millions of Americans—mostly white male industrial workers—into the middle class in the mid-twentieth century. The passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s opened access to unionized manufacturing jobs and led to new waves of labor activism by women and people of color, but these were undermined by political and economic shifts that eliminated millions of jobs in the late twentieth century. Windham shows how anti-union policies and practices made it more difficult for workers to organize and force employers to the negotiating table, which explains the persistence of racial and economic… show more.