Here are 85 books that Domestic Workers of the World Unite! fans have personally recommended if you like
Domestic Workers of the World Unite!.
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I’ve been fascinated by how ordinary people can change the course of their own lives since I was a child. However, I had no idea until later in life that there were entire fields of study devoted to understanding how this process works historically. When I discovered “new labor history” many years ago, I knew I wanted to be part of it. It was the privilege of a lifetime to study under some of the best labor historians in the world at the University of Chicago. And I can’t describe how I felt when my dissertation won the Herbert Gutman Prize in Labor History. I hope these books spark your interest!
I’ve always been a sucker for a good labor strike.
But a labor strike of Black women in the South—only a decade removed from slavery—demanding dignity, equality, and a living wage so they could simply “enjoy their freedom” in a region where a rich, white, slaveholding regime was just recently toppled? That’s next-level stuff.
Hunter tells the story of this Black female majority who worked in domestic labor in the years following the Civil War. Can you imagine going to work as a wage-earning domestic laborer in the home of your former owner? And then collectively organizing to demand that “freedom” actually means something in this godforsaken region?
Come for the organized labor protests. Stay for the moment these women pack their bags and move to the North seeking the joy and pleasure they deserve.
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization.
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
You think academics don’t have guts? You haven’t met Dana Frank.
She left her perfect little Santa Cruz campus behind to travel into the violent world of labor organizing in Central America. The fearless women she follows never give up as they take on American global corporations, corrupt politicians, ruthless landowners and bosses, and male chauvinism at home, on the job, and in the union.
Against great odds, the banana women forge a region-wide union of men and women committed to gender justice, economic fairness, and political democracy. Thank you Dana Frank for knowing this story had to be told – and for telling it with such flair and wisdom.
Women banana workers in Latin America have organised themselves and gained increasing control over their unions, their workplaces and their lives. Highly accessible and narrative in style, Bananeras recounts the history and growth of this vital movement and shows how Latin American women workers are shaping and broadly reimagining the possibilities of international labour solidarity.
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
I learned about the power of railroad unions and women’s labor auxiliaries from my parents and grandparents.
When I discovered Melinda Chateauvert’s gem of a book, I was thrilled. Chateauvert gives us the proud history of Black women’s railway auxiliaries and tells the dramatic story of how African-American women and men risked their lives and livelihoods to create the most powerful and influential Black-led union in the twentieth century.
The Sleeping Car Porters led the civil rights movement and the fight for a racially-integrated, egalitarian labor movement. There’s no better introduction to how notions of race and sex shaped twentieth-century working-class movements in America.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union. Yet the union's Ladies' Auxiliary played an essential role in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice.
Melinda Chateauvert explores the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary and the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters who made up its membership and used the union to claim respectability and citizenship. As she shows, the Auxiliary actively…
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
John Hoerr captures the fun-loving, irreverent, and unorthodox union culture Harvard secretaries and “support” staff built in the 1970s and 1980s and reveals how they organized and won what no one thought possible.
After Harvard admitted defeat in 1988 and recognized the union, workers doubled their salary, gained job security and flexibility, and remade a workplace culture steeped in elitism and sexism. “We wanted dignity, democracy, and a dental plan,” the union’s lead organizer, Kris Rondeau, once quipped. And they got it.
Read this book to laugh, read this book to believe once again in how creative and transformative unions can be.
This story explodes the popular belief that women white-collar workers tend to reject unionization and accept a passive role in the workplace. On the contrary, the women workers of Harvard University created a powerful and unique union--one that emphasizes their own values and priorities as working women and rejects unwanted aspects of traditional unionism. The workers involved comprise Harvard's 3,600-member "support staff," which includes secretaries, library and laboratory assistants, dental hygienists, accounting clerks, and a myriad of other office workers who keep a great university functioning. Even at prestigious private universities like Harvard and Yale, these workers--mostly women--have had to…
I spent nearly two decades as a highly successful corporate attorney. Or, perhaps I should say, a successful attorney with a crude mouth and a love for all things spandex. And my unabashed personality was a differentiator in my career—it allowed me to cut through the corporate nonsense and personally connect with my opposition. But my career imploded when I became the subject of overt sexual harassment in my workplace and my employer worked harder at a coverup than resolution. Rather than sell back my story through litigation, I decided to write openly about sexual empowerment in the face of systemic slut-shaming.
I agree, a non-fiction recommendation is a bit of a curve ball from a romance author! But Sex Workers Unite is well worth the mention because it has been such an overwhelming inspiration for my own writing.
This book is a gut-wrenching description of both the dehumanization of sex workers and the social ills we all suffer as a result. It is not just a call for social justice—it is a warning message for those willing to turn a blind eye to the marginalization of a disenfranchised group.
A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom
Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of…
Women’s rights in the workplace have been my passion for thirty years. As a sociologist who does fieldwork and oral histories, I am interested in understanding work through workers’ perspectives. The most important thing I’ve learned is that employers can be notoriously reluctant to enact change and that the most effective route to workplace justice is through collective action. I keep writing because I want more of us to imagine workplaces that value workers by compensating everyone fairly and giving workers greater control over their office’s rhythm and structure.
Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?
Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.
Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.
Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing.
In this groundbreaking history of African American domestic-worker organizing, scholar and activist Premilla Nadasen shatters countless myths and misconceptions about an historically misunderstood workforce. Resurrecting a little-known history of domestic-worker activism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Nadasen shows how these women were a far cry from the stereotyped passive and powerless victims; they were innovative labor organizers who tirelessly organized on buses and streets across the United…
My passion for Central American politics and history derived quite directly from the conflicts in the region from the late 1970s onwards. Previously I had worked in Bolivia, where I had studied as a doctoral student, and although many people still view Latin American countries as pretty homogenous, I quickly discovered that they are very far from being so. I had to unlearn quite a bit and acquire new skills, although luckily, indigenous languages are really only dominant in Guatemala. Now we can be rather less partisan although many injustices remain.
Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.
Miguel Mármol is the testimony of a revolutionary, as recorded by Salvadoran writer, Roque Dalton, which documents the historical and political events of El Salvador through the first decades of the 20th century. This Latin American classic describes the growth and development of the workers' movement and the communist party in El Salvador and Guatemala, and contains Mármol's impressions of post-revolutionary Russia in the twenties, describing in vivid detail the brutality and repression of the Martínez dictatorship and the reemergence of the workers' movement after Martínez was ousted. It also gives a broad and clear picture of the lives of…
I am drawn to stories of women who display a fighting spirit, faith in themselves, and the drive to help others. Perhaps this is due to growing up during the women’s rights movement. So many women paved the way for me. Perhaps it was my upbringing. I was raised with six siblings - three brothers and three sisters – and my parents never thought that my sisters and I couldn’t do something just because we were girls. Combine these experiences with the fact that I love history and you can see why I love these stories. Now I get to write and share stories like these with young readers. Lucky me!
I have long been a fan of stories about courageous women and I love it when I discover a book for young readers that brings to life an inspiring story of someone they may not know well (or at all). That’s exactly what Warren does in this book about Delores Huerta. The text works well for even the youngest readers. It promotes empathy by describing the poor living conditions of migrant children and their parents. Its themes are as relevant today as they were in Delores’ time. We need to care, we need to stand up for others, we need to be fair. It’s beautifully illustrated, too.
A Jane Addam's Children's Book Award Honor Book for Younger Children
Dolores is a teacher, a mother, and a friend. She wants to know why her students are too hungry to listen, why they don't have shoes to wear to school. Dolores is a warrior, an organizer, and a peacemaker. When she finds out that the farm workers in her community are poorly paid and working under dangerous conditions, she stands up for their rights.
This is the story of Dolores Huerta and the extraordinary battle she waged to ensure fair and safe work places for migrant workers. The powerful…
I’m a historian of Modern Europe based in Berlin. For the last twenty years or so, I’ve worked on different forms of protesting and street politics in twentieth-century Europe, always with an eye to how these histories might speak to the present. Having taught at the British University of Warwick, I’m now teaching high school students in Berlin, a career change that raised a simple but fundamental question once again: Why should we bother with history? What can we learn from history today? My passion for histories of protesting provides the answer to this question: These are histories that inspire dreaming, struggling, experimenting—and continuing to do so despite failures.
Workers ignoring the authority of foremen, organizing disruptive checker-board strikes—only those whose names started with a certain letter put down tools, but enough to bring work to a halt—forming alliances with rebellious students and battling the police in the streets: that’s the story of Italy around 1968, the place of some of the most radical and imaginative protests in the post-war era.
What workers demanded was as simple as it was radical: we want everything. Nanni Balestrini’s novel by the same title memorializes these struggles. It achieves what few sober historical accounts can: vividly capturing the dull monotony of labor suffocating young workers and the thrill of agitation on the shop floor and rebellion in the streets.
It was the Autumn of 1969, and Italy exploded. Across the north of the country, factory workers stormed out on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. The slogan "We Want Everything" rang through the streets. Italy's "Hot Autumn" had begun.
In Nanni Balestrini's fictionalized account of the uprising, a young worker from Italy's impoverished south arrives at Fiat's Mirafiori factory in Torino, where he barely scrapes by with fourteen hour days of backbreaking work. His frustration is palpable, and soon he is agitating again his bosses for fun and giving himself minor injuries to win sick leave. Soon enough,…
I am a novelist with my debut, The One, out in April 2023. I’m interested in stories about the role of gender, technology, and privacy in our contemporary culture.We spend so many hours at work, yet often the literature we read spends so little time discussing what that experience is actually like. As I wrote my own novel with a narrator flailing so aimlessly through her early post-grad years that she ends up on a reality dating show, I craved other books that tackled what it was like to have to earn a living at the forefront of the text, rather than a nebulous character detail in the background.
To close off the list, I picked a novel where the main character ends up becoming energized by her work.
At an otherwise soul-sucking job at a PR firm, Ellinor becomes involved with, and motivated by, a political movement about supporting postal workers in Norway.
For a novel that could have been bogged down by the inner workings of the EU and the Norwegian Postal Service, Hjorth’s writing style is crisp and perfect. She could choose any subject matter and it would be interesting.
Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.
This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written…
