When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker threatened the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector employees in early 2011, the massive protests that erupted inresponse put the labor movement back on the nation's front pages. It was a fleeting reminder of a not-so-distant past when the "labor question"--and the power of organized labor--was part and parcel of a century-long struggle for justice and equality in America. Now, on the heels of the expansive Occupy Wall Street movement and midterm election outcomes that are encouraging for the labor movement, the lessons of history are a vital handhold for the thousands of activists and citizens everywhere who sense that something has gone terribly wrong. This pithy and accessible volume provides readers with an understanding of the history that is directly relevant to the economic and political crises working people face today, and points the way to a revitalized twenty-first-century labor movement. With original contributions from leading labor historians, social critics, and activists, Labor Rising makes crucial connections between the past and present, and then looks forward, asking how we might imagine a different future for all Americans.

The contributors to this volume offer both a measured reassessment of the experience of labour movements in the 1980s and a re-interpretation of their role in the new circumstances of the 1990s.

Publisher Description

This book argues that labor unions have proven to be the only consistently effective mechanism for enabling workers to express their concerns and exert significant influence in the workplace, and documents the extent to which unions have benefited not only members, but the workforce as a whole.

New York City boasts a higher rate of unionization than any other major U.S. city—roughly double the national average—but the city’s unions have suffered steady and relentless decline, especially in the private sector. With higher levels of income inequality than any other large city in the nation, New York today is home to a large and growing precariat—workers with little or no employment security who are often excluded from the basic legal protections that unions struggled for and won in the twentieth century. Community-based organizations and worker centers have developed the most promising approach to organizing the new precariat and to addressing the crisis facing the labor movement. Home to some of the nation’s very first worker centers, New York City today has the single largest concentration of these organizations in the United States, yet until now no one has documented their efforts. New Labor in New York includes thirteen fine-grained case studies of recent campaigns by worker centers and unions, each of which is based on original research and participant observation. Some of the campaigns documented here involve taxi drivers, street vendors, and domestic workers, as well as middle-strata freelancers—all of whom are excluded from basic employment laws. Other cases focus on supermarket, retail, and restaurant workers, who are nominally covered by such laws but who often experience wage theft and other legal violations; still other campaigns are not restricted to a single occupation or industry. This book offers a richly detailed portrait of the new labor movement in New York City, as well as several recent efforts to expand that movement from the local to the national scale.