There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America

[RamboLiberal]

From Publishers Weekly
This stirring study situates one of the most subversive yet profoundly American of social movements at the heart of the nation's history. Historian Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown) follows organized labor from the struggles of early 19th-century female textile workers to the present-day retreat of organized labor following the failed 1981 air trafic controllers' strike. His episodic narrative, structured around major strikes, shows labor's heroic age as an era of naked class warfare: strikers died by the dozens in pitched battles with police, soldiers, and Pinkerton agents, and such charismatic organizers as Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn braved prison and worse. The post-WWII period, by contrast, is a story of union conservatism, corruption scandals, and one rout after another at the hands of union-busting corporations abetted by government indifference. Organized labor's legacy, the author argues, is as much political as economic; it challenges bedrock American values of self-reliance while championing civil liberties--IWW speakers faced mass arrest for their public square orating--and bringing rights to the workplace. Packed with vivid characters and dramatic scenes, Dray's fine recap of a neglected but vital tradition has much to say about labor's current straits.
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Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THERE IS POWER IN A UNION

"Philip Dray’s big and bold history of organized labor in America splendidly retells a story – or a multitude of stories – badly in need of retelling. The labor movement’s decline in recent decades has accompanied a great national amnesia about all that the movement achieved for the nation. That amnesia threatens those achievements, so Dray’s book is timely as well as gripping."
—Sean Wilentz, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University and author of Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class and the forthcoming Bob Dylan in America.

"The unending struggle between unions and big business has never been more vividly told. Philip Dray is a marvelous story teller who brings history memorably alive, and you will not soon forget the tales of murder and greed, commitment and sacrifice, that fill these pages. But this is more than history; the compelling saga of labor as a crucible for social change should prompt some honest and hard debate about what's happening to working men and women today."
—Bill Moyers

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