Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today

Seventy years of reporting capture the ebb and flow of American labor power in this robust collection of articles from Dissent, a socialist magazine founded in 1954. Ordered chronologically, the selections track organized labor from its peak in the ’50s—when one third of workers were unionized—through the setbacks wrought by NAFTA in the ’90s and today’s more promising upswings among, for example, grad students and Starbucks employees. Novelist and autoworker Harvey Swados’s 1963 article “The UAW: Over the Top of Over the Hill” seems to presage labor’s late-20th-century decline by questioning whether the “typically American” United Auto Workers are still the “vanguards” they once were. Dissent cofounder Irving Howe’s “Images for Labor,” from 1981, has an almost elegiac feel as it considers how organized labor fits into America’s cultural myths. In later sections, there is a broadening of scope beyond the book’s earlier focus on the white male factory worker, reflecting changing values as well as the decline of American manufacturing. For example, journalist E. Tammy Kim’s entry from 2015, “Organizing the Unorganizable,” is a powerful account of how vulnerable, nonunionized laborers such as nannies and taxi drivers form grassroots support groups, and 2012’s “Frontline Caregivers: Still Struggling” by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein considers how the Great Recession has impacted low-wage home care workers. The result is an impressive retrospective with a forward-looking feel. (Feb.)