Labour’s Online Bookstore

Woody Guthrie: A Life

Author Joe Klein is also author of the best-selling 'Primary Colors'.

It’s not every day that we get our book of the week recommended by Bruce Springsteen.

Here’s what The Boss has to say about this book :

“There is a book out right now. It’s called Woody Guthrie: A Life. It’s by this fellow Joe Klein… and it’s really, it’s really a great book.”

Woody Guthrie was one of the greatest folk singers America ever produced, a true friend of the trade union movement, who had he lived, would have turned 97 on July 14th this year.

This is considered to be the best biography of him, just now reissued in paperback, with a new afterword by the author.

To learn more or to order your copy, click here.

The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs

Eugene V. Debs

“While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Those are the words of Eugene V. Debs, who was perhaps the most outstanding labor leader America ever produced.

He was also its most successful socialist politician, leading the Socialist Party to its best-ever electoral results in 1912 and winning a million votes as its presidential candidate in 1920 — while still a federal prisoner.  This new edition of the classic biography (which Michael Harrington called “masterful”) is essential reading.

To learn more about this book and to order your copy, click here.

Great Labor Quotations

1,300 quotations - surely you'll find the one you need for your speech or article.

“I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half.”

- Railroad tycoon Jay Gould on why he wasn’t worried about a strike, 1886

This book, like last week’s selection, is that rare bird: a best selling book aimed at trade union activists.

A wonderful collection of quotations on work, labor and unionism, drawn almost entirely from the American labor movement. If you ever have to give a speech, write a paper, or just plain get inspiration, this book is for you. More than 1,300 quotations are divided into 17 chapters (such as, “This Working Life,” “Bread and Butter,” “Strife and Strike”), interspersed with cartoons, photos and brief biographies of labor greats. Includes quotes from some notorious bosses, too (see above).  Nicely indexed so you can find just what you’re looking for.

“Not only is this a terrific treasury of gems, but it’s just plain fun to read.” - Jim Hightower

To learn more or to order your copy, click here.

The Union Steward’s Complete Guide, 2nd edition - edited by David Prosten

The best selling union book of all time?

Books about and for trade unionists typically don’t sell very many copies.  Publishers are often happy if a thousand copies of a union book can be sold.  So what do you call a book that’s aimed at trade unionists which sells 60,000 copies?

This book is one of the best selling labour books of all time — and if you don’t own a copy, now is your chance to pick one up and find out why tens of thousands of your fellow union members have got their hands on one.

Fully illustrated and indexed, this second edition’s eleven chapters offer hands-on counsel on problems and concerns ranging from the basics of grievance handling to dealing with difficult supervisors or co-workers to ways of increasing membership involvement in the union. New material includes counsel on workplace concerns ranging from computer and privacy issues to a new chapter dealing with the changing workplace, including the growing number of workers from other nations and cultures.

To learn more, or to order your copy, click here.

Embedded with Organized Labor - by Steve Early

Embedded With Organized Labor describes how union members have organized successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past. The author has produced a provocative series of essays—an unusual exercise in “participatory labor journalism” useful to any reader concerned about social and economic justice. As workers struggle to survive and the labor movement tries to revive during the current economic crisis, this book provides ideas and inspiration for union activists and friends of labor alike.

To learn more or order you copy, click here.

Exclusive interview with Steve Early

In your book, you discuss at length the question of books for trade unionists and acknowledge that these often have very small press runs and poor sales.  Why do you think that is true and what can be done to improve the situation?
The failure to promote more book reading and discussion reflects the decline of labor education generally here. University-based programs are under budgetary attack or political siege. Major unions have scaled back their education departments, and the AFL-CIO closed its down. Much “leadership training” today is focused on grievance-handling, contract negotiations, and union administration, with sub-specialties being the mechanics of political action and organizing.
I note in the book that there’s an important larger context for trade union work. There are things you better know about the economy, industry, occupation or profession you’re operating in. Many useful studies have been published on the problems of immigration and globalization, “lean manufacturing,” and other forms of corporate and workplace restructuring. Some of these books describe current and past debates about union structures and strategies that might be more effective than the ones we’re using today.
Unfortunately, such work doesn’t reach a big enough audience. As a result, we don’t have the kind of on-going exchange between activists and intellectuals that would be benefit both. Unions could easily do more  LabourStart-type promotion of books and periodicals, using all the new on-line tools available. Union educators should, wherever possible, incorporate books on strikes, organizing, labor history, political economy, and social policy into membership education. And we need to revive other vehicles for doing this as well, like local book clubs or workplace study circles. “Reading, writing, and union-building” should not be limited to the small number of “adult learners” able to participate in degree-granting labor studies programs.
You also discuss the question of union democracy which you see as being central to the growth of trade unions and their effectiveness.  Do you see unions in the US today as growing more democratic or less so?  Is there a fight taking place as there was in the 1970s and 1980s which you describe in the book, that might lead to greater democracy in some unions?
My own initial union work in the 1970s involved miners, steelworkers, and teamsters.  The UMW, USWA, and IBT bureaucracies of that era were all dangerously calcified. The union officialdom was inaccessible and unresponsive, often incompetent, and, in the case of the Mine Workers and Teamsters, prone to corruption, violence, and intimidation. Workers paid a heavy price for this organizational decay. Often, it was the members, not management, who got muscled by their own union leaders and staff. Job conditions and contracts began to deteriorate due to this lack of democratic accountability.
Today, I’m sorry to report, we’re seeing similar problems again, in one very high-profile union, the Service Employees International Union. SEIU has  a reputation, here and abroad, for being “progressive.” But, in California, the vast majority of its 600,000 members are now in huge, mega-locals run by International union trustees and other appointees, who operate in very high-handed fashion. Many rank-and-filers are not happy about this, because day-to-day representation is suffering. Some are fighting back by organizing a rival union, in the health care industry. Others are using the approach [used by] industrial union dissidents in the ‘70s. They’re building a reform network, running candidates in union elections, and hoping to change SEIU from within.
Your coverage of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) is very positive, but in the end, the TDU was kicked out of power.  What do you think went wrong?
TDU continues to be a model and an inspiration—among SEIU reformers, for example—because of its sheer durability. No other opposition caucus that started in the mid-70s, on a national basis, is still alive and kicking.

TDU-backed candidates continue to get 35 to 40% of the vote in referendum elections for the top leadership. The group still fosters effective local reform caucuses and organizes activist networks that put pressure on Teamster negotiators and benefit fund trustees.  The existence of a de facto “two party” system—in what was previously labor’s most formidable “one-party state”– keeps incumbents on their toes and reflects a changed political culture.
TDU, of course, wielded its greatest influence during the six years that the late Ron Carey was IBT president. One monument to the success of its bottom up approach was the Teamster strike victory at UPS in 1997. The union election fundraising scandal that led to Carey’s removal (but not his conviction on any criminal charges) was a terrible post-strike setback. But TDU has never been focused solely on capturing union office for its members or allies. It really is committed to promoting “rank-and-file power” as an alternative to business union practices. The Carey Administration involved an alliance between radicals, reformers, and more conservative elements.  Partners in any ruling coalition who are, like TDU, smaller, more principled players have to figure out how to function effectively, both inside and outside the corridors of power. It’s a difficult political role to play, in national governments and unions.
Do you expect the Change to Win unions to merge back in to the AFL-CIO?  Would this be a good thing?
The attempted reconfiguration or unification of the AFL-CIO, Change To Win, and the previously unaffiliated National Education Association is an on-going process. It’s complicated because the large unions involved are trying to develop a new structure for financing and coordinating legislative/political activity and other joint functions as well. Other interested parties—including smaller unions and the AFL officialdom—are more preoccupied with maintaining existing bureaucratic structures and determining who succeeds John Sweeney as AFL president, when he finally retires in September.
As an unrepentant left syndicalist, I tend to be a little subdued in my enthusiasm for top-down restructuring schemes. The hype (and hysteria) surrounding the Change To Win split four years ago got way overblown, just as the unveiling of any new “federation of feds” will probably be the subject of much “irrational exuberance” later this year too. Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”–ie in workplaces and local union halls–workers face a give-back trend that’s almost as bad as it was in the 1980s. Encouraging grassroots resistance to contract concessions doesn’t seem to be a big focus of inside-the-Beltway labor re-unifiers. So, if what they come up with, in the end, doesn’t help workers mobilize and win future contract fights and strikes, the appeal of unionization will continue to dim. Short term, some kind of organizational repackaging may enable labor to deal with Obama and the Democrats in less fragmented fashion. But, if union members are divided, demoralized, and beaten down by a series of workplace defeats in the
meantime, where’s the big stick behind the new united front?
You wrote favorably about Tony Mazzocchi and the launch of the U.S. Labor Party back in the mid-1990s, but you admit that nothing much ever came of it.  Do you think there will ever be an independent labor party in the U.S.?
I was among those Tony fans who thought the Labor Party needed to find a way to relate to electoral politics, sooner rather than later, and not just function as a discussion group, as important as that was. Three years ago, here in Massachusetts, a union coalition made an unsuccessful attempt
to re-legalize fusion voting, or cross-endorsement of candidates. We tried to
start a Working Families Party that might have been able to use this election law change to gain greater leverage over local Democrats by encouraging
union member voting on a WFP ballot line—for endorsed Democrats worthy of support, for the WFP’s own candidates, or a cross-endorsed WFP/Green candidate.

Despite the defeat of our “ballot freedom” initiative (and the local languishing of WFP ever since), I still think fusion is one way to promote greater labor voter independence, while minimizing the problem of perpetual third party marginalization, under our two-party dominated system. Anyway, it’s one place to start. Outside of Vermont with its Progressive Party, we don’t have many state and local examples today of pure third party candidates actually getting elected mayor , city council member, or state legislator, much less to any federal office. Union activists are not going to break with the Democrats until they start seeing those kind of victories and a more reliable, pro-labor stance by third-party office holders.

To learn more or order you copy of Embedded with Organized Labor, click here.

Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters

In this lavishly-illustrated book, Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher share their vast knowledge about the rich graphic tradition of labor posters. The book features full-color reproductions of more than 250 of the best posters that have emerged from the American labor movement on topics ranging from core issues such as wages and working conditions to discrimination to international solidarity. The presentation of the posters is thematic, with a brief history of activist graphic media followed by chapters on Dignity and Exploitation; Health and Safety; Women; Race and Civil Rights; War, Peace and Internationalism; Solidarity and Organizing; Strikes and Boycotts; Democracy, Voting, and Patriotism; History, Heroes, and Martyrs; and Culture. 216 pages paperback. Price: $24.95.

To learn more or to order your copy, click here.

Why Unions Matter - by Michael D. Yates

In this new (2009) edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Click here to learn more or to order your copy.

Exclusive interview with Michael D. Yates

1. How important do you think the passage of EFCA will be to revitalize the trade union movement in the US?

First off, the EFCA is in serious trouble in Congress.  Employers have been inundating Congress with lobbying, letters, phone calls, and whatever else they can do to defeat, including extraordinarily dishonest media advertising,   Labor, meanwhile, is engaging in its usual lobbying, thinking that this, along with massive campaign contributions to the Democrats, will win the day.

Labor support groups are circulating petitions in many states, and this may help.  But an aroused rank-and-file, writing letters to newspapers, organizing in workplaces, meeting en masse, in DC and their localities with their representatives and senators, massively demonstrating in the streets and in front of businesses, especially those who probably have used government bailout money to fight the EFCA, and so forth, is nowhere to be seen.

If EFCA is passed, it will help unions gain members, and this will be good.  However, if the union doesn’t conduct a rank-and-file-based organizing campaign to get the cards signed, then in the long run, it won’t matter much.  If the unions don’t educate their new members, in a radical way, it won’t do much good.  Plus, if the bargaining breaks down, the EFCA provides for an arbitrator to set the terms of the first collective bargaining agreement.  This could be a good thing, since the first contract is now so hard to win, given the pathetic weakness of the labor law in the United States.  But, what bout the second contract?  In the need, labor needs a lot more than the EFCA, as I try to show in the book.

2. Your book repeatedly talks about the need for unions to preserve their political independence (especially from the Democrats) but isn’t it true that in recent years, especially since 2000, unions have gotten much closer to the Democrats?  Haven’t the union experiences with the Labor Party and the Nader campaign in 2000 convinced many that there is no alternative to working with the Democrats?

Yes unions have gotten close to the Democrats.  Pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into election campaigns.  But as Dr. Phil says on his U.S. television show, “How’s that been going for you?”  As Kim Moody shows in his book, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition, there is an inverse correlation between spending money in elections and the number of organizing campaigns unions conduct.  Sure. Unions get some crumbs from the table. Ok if you’re a beggar but pretty sad if you are a labor movement.

Working with Democrats is not the same as being subservient to them, to the point that you have no independent principles.  When the president of the United Steel Workers says that workers here don’t have to take to the streets like their counterparts in Europe because here they have union lobbyists in Washington, well what more needs to be said about the bankruptcy of the thinking of most of the labor movement?

3. One of the differences between the first and second editions of your book is the actual experience of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of the Sweeney team.  Given the high hopes many had in the ‘New Voices’ leadership in the mid-1990s, what do you think went wrong?

Well, Sweeney came out of the same “pragmatic,” overly bureaucratic, old (literally), white, overpaid, fearful of the rank-and-file leadership his team replaced.  So while they did some good things, as I say in the book, they were incapable of breaking the old mold.  Lots of talk, lots of new committees, not much real action.  Hope springs eternal, and most of us were thinking that anything was better than the old guard.  But I have said for many years that once the left was thrown to the wolves by the unions during the Cold War, the die was cast.

4. You don’t seem convinced that the Change to Win split produced any positive results.  Do you expect the CTW unions to merge back into the AFL-CIO before your third edition comes out?

The facts speak for themselves.  What has CTW done to build a new labor movement?  Nothing substantial comes to mind.  The SEIU has done some awful things as it has built its membership.  Turmoil abounds in CTW today, as is well-known.  I think that most of the unions will reach an accord with the AFL-CIO, but even if they do, what will have changed?

5. One of the biggest changes that’s happened to the trade union movement (and not only the trade union movement) in the last decade has been the growth of the Internet.  But you don’t mention this in your book.  Why not?

I do have lots of internet resources listed at the end of the book.  I probably should have included something on the uses of the internet for labor.  So. I admit to an oversight.  However, the internet is just a tool, not the savior some seem to believe it is.  Much has been made of the internet in the Obama election.  But what has this done to make for an aroused public?  What did it do to push labor’ agenda forward?  The financial elite are still in charge.   And will the internet organize workers?  I don’t see how.  Face-to-face contacts are always necessary.

Click here to learn more or to order your copy of Why Unions Matter.

May Day: A Short History of the International Workers Holiday - by Philip S. Foner

This is the story of May Day, a day born out of Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre in 1866, and marked ever since as a workers’ holiday the world over.

In this short history, noted labor scholar Philip Foner writes of the dramatic origins of the day and recounts highlights of May Day celebrations through the years and around the globe.

This is a story filled with heroes and heroines who protest the injustice of their time as they unite to demand shorter hours of labor and an end to the most dehumanizing effects of capitalism.

Illustrated, indexed. 184 pages paperback.

Only $10.00!

Click here to learn more or order your copy.

Discuss this book on UnionBook, the social networking site for trade unionists.

Staley: The Fight for a New American Labor Movement - by Steven K. Ashby and C.J. Hawking

In 1993 the A.E. Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois locked out 762 unionized workers and demanded the right to contract out every job and implement rotating 12-hour shifts. The workers rebelled, and this book does a fine job of chronicling one of the most hard-fought struggles in recent labor history. Allied Industrial Workers Local 837 responded to the company’s full-scale assault by educating and mobilizing its members, organizing strong support from the religious and African American communities, building a nationwide solidarity movement, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the plant gates.

Drawing on seventy-five interviews, videotapes of every union meeting, and their own active involvement organizing with the Staley workers, Steven K. Ashby and C. J. Hawking bring the workers’ voices to the fore and reveal their innovative tactics, such as work-to-rule and solidarity committees, that inform and strengthen today’s labor movement.

Click here to learn more or to order your copy.

I Knew I Could Do This: Promoting Women as Union Leaders - by Amy Caizza

Although nearly half of union members in the United States are female, little more than one leadership position in five is held by a woman.
This report is designed to promote women’s activism and leadership within unions across the country at the local, state, regional, and national levels.

Based on interviews with union organizers and activists throughout the country, the report explores three main questions:

What are the main obstacles that discourage women’s union activism and leadership? How can unions help overcome them? How can women’s movement organizing better support union women? The report outlines seven strategies that unions can use to encourage women’s increased participation in a workforce that is increasingly female.

Only $10.00.

Click here to learn more or order your copy.