This is the story of one of the most important strikes in labour history revealing the significance and truth of what actually happened. In July 1888, fourteen hundred women and girls employed by the matchmakers Bryant and May walked out of their East End factory and into the history books. Louise Raw gives us a challenging new interpretation of events proving that the women themselves, not celebrity socialists like Annie Besant, began it. She provides unequivocal evidence to show that the matchwomen greatly influenced the Dock Strike of 1889, which until now was thought to be the key event of new unionism, and repositions them as the mothers of the modern labour movement. Returning to the stories of the women themselves, and by interviewing their relatives today, Raw is able to construct a new history which challenges existing accounts of the strike itself and radically alters the accepted history of the labour movement in Britain.

In September 1965, Filipino and Mexican American farm workers went on strike against grape growers in and around Delano, California. More than a labor dispute, the strike became a movement for social justice that helped redefine Latino and American politics. The strike also catapulted its leader, Cesar Chavez, into prominence as one of the most celebrated American political figures of the twentieth century. More than forty years after its original publication, "Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, "based on compelling first-hand reportage and interviews, retains both its freshness and its urgency in illuminating a moment of unusually significant social ferment.

"We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead-NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!" With these words echoing throughout the city, on February 6, 1919, 65,000 Seattle workers began one of the most important general strikes in US history. For six tense yet nonviolent days, the Central Labor Council negotiated with federal and local authorities on behalf of the shipyard workers whose grievances initiated the citywide walkout. Meanwhile, strikers organized to provide essential services such as delivering supplies to hospitals and markets, as well as feeding thousands at union-run dining facilities. Robert L. Friedheim's classic account of the dramatic events of 1919, first published in 1964 and now enhanced with a new introduction, afterword, and photo essay by James N. Gregory, vividly details what happened and why. Overturning conventional understandings of the American Federation of Labor as a conservative labor organization devoted to pure and simple unionism, Friedheim shows the influence of socialists and the IWW in the city's labor movement. While Seattle's strike ended in disappointment, it led to massive strikes across the country that determined the direction of labor, capital, and government for decades. The Seattle General Strike is an exciting portrait of a Seattle long gone and of events that shaped the city's reputation for left-leaning activism into the twenty-first century.

Informal Workers and Collective Action features nine cases of collective action to improve the status and working conditions of informal workers. Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman, and Martha A. Chen set the stage by defining informal work and describing the types of organizations that represent the interests of informal workers and the lessons that may be learned from the examples presented in the book. Cases from a diverse set of countries-Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Liberia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uruguay-focus on two broad types of informal workers: "waged" workers, including port workers, beer promoters, hospitality and retail workers, domestic workers, low-skilled public sector workers, and construction workers; and self-employed workers, including street vendors, waste recyclers, and minibus drivers.These cases demonstrate that workers and labor organizations around the world are rediscovering the lessons of early labor organizers on how to aggregate individuals' sense of injustice into forms of collective action that achieve a level of power that can yield important changes in their work and lives. Informal Workers and Collective Action makes a strong argument that informal workers, their organizations, and their campaigns represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century.Contributors Gocha Aleksandria, Georgian Trade Union Confederation Martha A. Chen, Harvard University and WIEGO Sonia Maria Dias, WIEGO and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Adrienne E. Eaton, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Mary Evans, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Janice Fine, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Mary Goldsmith, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco Daniel Hawkins, National Trade Union School of Colombia Elza Jgerenaia, Labor and Employment Policy Department for the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs, Republic of Georgia Stephen J. King, Georgetown University Allison J. Petrozziello, UN Women and the Center for Migration Observation and Social Development Pewee Reed, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Republic of Liberia Sahra Ryklief, International Federation of Workers' Education Associations Susan J. Schurman, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Vera Alice Cardoso Silva, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Milton Weeks, Devin Corporation

In reaction to the changes imposed on public schools across the country in the name of "education reform," the Chicago Teachers Union redefined its traditional role and waged a multidimensional fight that produced a community-wide school strike and transformed the scope of collective bargaining into arenas that few labor relations experts thought possible. Using interviews, first-person accounts, participant observation, union documents, and media reports, Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno tell the story of the 2012 strike that shut down the Chicago school system for seven days.A Fight for the Soul of Public Education takes into account two overlapping, parallel, and equally important stories. One is a grassroots story of worker activism told from the perspective of rank-and-file union members and their community supporters. Ashby and Bruno provide a detailed account of how the strike became an international cause when other teachers unions had largely surrendered to corporate-driven education reform. The second story describes the role of state and national politics in imposing educational governance changes on public schools and draconian limitations on union bargaining rights. It includes a detailed account of the actual bargaining process revealing the mundane and the transcendental strategies of both school board and union representatives.

In May 1937, seventy thousand workers walked off their jobs at four large steel companies known collectively as "Little Steel." The strikers sought to make the companies retreat from decades of antiunion repression, abide by the newly enacted federal labor law, and recognize their union. For two months a grinding struggle unfolded, punctuated by bloody clashes in which police, company agents, and National Guardsmen ruthlessly beat and shot unionists. At least sixteen died and hundreds more were injured before the strike ended in failure. The violence and brutality of the Little Steel Strike became legendary. In many ways it was the last great strike in modern America. Traditionally the Little Steel Strike has been understood as a modest setback for steel workers, one that actually confirmed the potency of New Deal reforms and did little to impede the progress of the labor movement. However, The Last Great Strike tells a different story about the conflict and its significance for unions and labor rights. More than any other strike, it laid bare the contradictions of the industrial labor movement, the resilience of corporate power, and the limits of New Deal liberalism at a crucial time in American history.

A Choice Magazine "Outstanding Academic Book for 1995" "Jonathan D. Rosenblum's history of this one strike reveals to us, in chapter and verse, the barbaric use of power by the corporate big boys. It is a stunning metaphor for labor's trouble today."-Studs Terkel (from a review of the first edition) "Rosenblum writes with the verve of a good journalist and the empirical precision of a fine scholar. He is as deft at sketching brief portraits of key executives, union officials, and rank-and-file strikers as he is at untangling the legal skein in which the miners got fatally ensnared."-Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review (from a review of the first edition) In this new edition, Jonathan D. Rosenblum describes the resurgence in 1996 and 1997 of union activism at Local 890 in Silver City, New Mexico, the famous "Salt of the Earth" union. Phelps Dodge obliterated all the unions at its Arizona properties in the devastating 1983 campaign of permanent replacement documented in Copper Crucible. The company later acquired the Chino mine in western New Mexico; with the copper ore came the elements of union rebirth. When Phelps Dodge officials argued that "while unions may have had a purpose in the past, that time is gone," they rekindled the union's fighting spirit, according to Rosenblum. Local 890 beat back Phelps Dodge's 1996 decertification campaign, handing the company its first major setback against unions in fifteen years.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, worker resistance in China increased rapidly despite the fact that certain segments of the state began moving in a pro-labor direction. In explaining this, Eli Friedman argues that the Chinese state has become hemmed in by an insurgency trap of its own devising and is thus unable to tame expansive worker unrest. Labor conflict in the process of capitalist industrialization is certainly not unique to China and indeed has appeared in a wide array of countries around the world. What is distinct in China, however, is the combination of postsocialist politics with rapid capitalist development.

Other countries undergoing capitalist industrialization have incorporated relatively independent unions to tame labor conflict and channel insurgent workers into legal and rationalized modes of contention. In contrast, the Chinese state only allows for one union federation, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, over which it maintains tight control. Official unions have been unable to win recognition from workers, and wildcat strikes and other forms of disruption continue to be the most effective means for addressing workplace grievances. In support of this argument, Friedman offers evidence from Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces, where unions are experimenting with new initiatives, leadership models, and organizational forms."

In addition to being the most bitter industrial dispute the coalminers' strike of 1984/5 was the longest national strike in British history. For a year over 100,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers, their families and supporters, in hundreds of communities, battled to prevent the decimation of the coal industry on which their livelihoods and communities depended. Margaret Thatcher's government aimed to smash the most militant section of the British working class. She wanted to usher in a new era of greater management control at work and pave the way for a radical refashioning of society in favour of neo-liberal objectives that three decades later have crippled the world economy. Victory required draconian restrictions on picketing and the development of a militarised national police force that made widespread arrests as part of its criminalisation policy. The attacks on the miners also involved the use of the courts and anti-trade union laws, restrictions on welfare benefits, the secret financing by industrialists of working miners and the involvement of the security services. All of which was supported by a compliant mass media but resisted by the collective courage of miners and mining communities in which the role of Women against Pit Closures in combating poverty and starvation was heroic. Thus inspired by the struggle for jobs and communities an unparalleled movement of support groups right across Britain and in other parts of the world was born and helped bring about a situation where the miners long struggle came close on occasions to winning. At the heart of the conflict was the Yorkshire region, where even at the end in March 1985, 83 per cent of 56,000 miners were still out on strike. The official Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) area photographer in 1984-85 was the late Martin Jenkinson and this book of his photographs - some never previously seen before - serves as a unique social document on the dispute that changed the face of Britain.

If the American labor movement is to rise again, it will not be as a result of electing different politicians, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt--the kind employed up until the 1960s.

In "Reviving the Strike," labor lawyer Joe Burns draws on economics, history and current analysis in arguing that the labor movement must redevelop an effective strike based on the now outlawed traditional labor tactics of stopping production and workplace-based solidarity. The book challenges the prevailing view that tactics such as organizing workers or amending labor law can save trade unionism in this country. Instead, "Reviving the Strike" offers a fundamentally different solution to the current labor crisis, showing how collective bargaining backed by a strike capable of inflicting economic harm upon an employer is the only way for workers to break free of the repressive system of labor control that has been imposed upon them by corporations and the government for the past seventy-five years.

In 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners- outraged over years of brutality and exploitation- picked up their Winchesters and marched against their tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For ten days the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of deputies, state police, and makeshift militia. Only the intervention of a Federal expeditionary force ended this undeclared war. In The Battle of Blair Mountain , Robert Shogan shows this long-neglected slice of American history to be a saga of the conflicting political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped the power structure of twentieth-century America.

Athens, Ohio--Robert Smith uncovered the sordid practices and the extent of a uniquely American industry by reading the subpoenaed documents of strikebound companies and their mercenary strikebreakers, by digging through newspaper archives for articles on long-forgotten strikes, and by studying the testimony of executives and strikebreakers who appeared before private, state, and federal governmental inquiries. Smith describes incidents, often bloody, involving strikebreakers in industrial, transportation, and mining disputes across the nation--including infamous or revealing strikes in California, Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and West Virginia. While the activities of such hired guns are occasionally touched upon in broader studies, or in accounts of specific strikes, the lack of primary evidence has made a thorough examination of this industry difficult. Many of the earliest anti-union entrepreneurs carried their offices in their hats, and their secretive nature and the business community's efforts to disassociate itself from these often-unsavory characters left little for historians to record. As the United States became an industrial power after the Civil War, much of the business community steadfastly resisted labor's efforts to bargain collectively. The judicial system, police and other militia forces, as well as government authorities, historically have helped anti-union employers cow workers and maintain their dominance. The role played by anti-union entrepreneurs, however, was obscured until the 1950s. Workers first challenged this heirarchy in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877--an uprising thatspurred creation of the National Guard--and industrial violence did not significantly abate until the federal government sanctioned collective bargaining with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. In response, unionbusters became increasingly more sophisticated and more subtle. Pinkerton hired-guns gave way to professional strikebreakers who many regarded as defenders of American economic liberty. Wary of antagonizing the public, these armies of hired muscle were superseded in turn by undercover men--who were eventually replaced by experts in the nuances of national labor law. Emboldened by President Reagan's busting in 1981 of the air traffic controllers and the pro-business milieu of the post-Reagan years, professional union-busting came full circle. Smith says the newest breed of anti-union entrepreneurs rely upon thugs who differ little from the brutal men who filled the armies marshaled by the Pinkertons, the notorious Baldwin Felts Agency, or even the "King of the Strikebreakers," Pearl Bergoff, nearly a century ago. Since the mid-1980s, hundreds of firms--including the Detroit News, Caterpillar and Pittston Coal--when facing angry workers have contracted with agencies that promise to solve their labor troubles. While some supply their clients with replacement workers, others (like the Asset Protection Team or Special Response Corporation, which promise to provide frightened employers "A Private Army When you Need it Most") specialize in security services. Reproductions of such advertisements, and photographs, some shocking, of strikebreakers and their tactics are an important dimension of Smith's book. "In no other country has the struggle between management and its employeesengendered a contingent of mercenaries who specialized in breaking strikes," observes Smith. Surprisingly, students of the American labor story have paid little attention to strikebreaking and unionbusting agencies. FROM BLACKJACKS TO BRIEFCASES breaks important new ground in fully documenting companies' long reliance upon anti-labor specialists--an important factor in the puzzle of the failure of the American labor movement. This revealing study challenges journalists, scholars, and labor historians to look further into how the business community in the United States has relied upon mercenaries for a century and a half.

Three renowned historians present stirring tales of labor: Howard Zinn tells the grim tale of the Ludlow Massacre, a drama of beleaguered immigrant workers, Mother Jones, and the politics of corporate power in the age of the robber barons. Dana Frank brings to light the little-known story of a successful sit-in conducted by the "counter girls" at the Detroit Woolworth's during the Great Depression. Robin D. G. Kelley's story of a movie theater musicians' strike in New York asks what defines work in times of changing technology.

"Three Strikes brings to life the heroic men and women who put their jobs, bodies, and lives on the line to win a better life for all working Americans. Zinn, Frank, and Kelley show us that while the country and the union movement have changed greatly in the last hundred years, our struggle to close the divide between rich and poor remains the same." --John Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO

"Provocative analysis of still relevant issues, as the passionate, sometimes violent demonstrations at international meetings of the global economy demonstrate." --Mary Carroll, Booklist

"Highly readable, well-researched narratives of dramatic action" --Leon Fink, Chicago Tribune

Howard Zinn is a teacher, historian, and social activist, and the author of many books, including the best-selling A People's History of the United States and You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He lives near Boston. Dana Frank, professor of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is author of the award winning Buy American. Robin D. G. Kelley, professor of history at New York University, is author of Race Rebels, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! and Freedom Dreams.

This is the first systematic study of strikebreaking, intimidation, and anti-unionism in the United States, subjects essential to a full understanding of labor's fortunes in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the country that pioneered the expansion of civil liberties allowed corporations to assemble private armies to disrupt union organizing, spy on workers, and break strikes. Using a social-historical approach, Stephen Norwood focuses on the mercenaries the corporations enlisted in their anti-union efforts - particularly college students, African American men, the unemployed, and men associated with organized crime. Norwood also considers the paramilitary methods unions developed to counter mercenary violence. The book covers a wide range of industries across much of the country. Norwood explores how the early twentieth-century crisis of masculinity shaped strikebreaking's appeal to elite youth and the media's romanticization of the strikebreaker as a new soldier of fortune. He examines how mining communities' perception of mercenaries as agents of a ribald, sexually unrestrained, new urban culture intensified labor conflict. The book traces the ways in which economic restructuring, as well as shifting attitudes toward masculinity and anger, transformed corporate anti-unionism from World War II to the present.

Over the past two decades, Americans have seen their workplaces downsized and streamlined, their jobs out-sourced, sped up, and, all too often, eliminated. Unions have seemed powerless to defend their members, with big defeats in the strikes at PATCO, Eastern Airlines, International Paper, and Hormel. Ravenswood recounts how the United Steelworkers of America, in a battle waged over an aluminum plant in West Virginia, proved that organized labor can still win even against a company controlled by one of the world's richest and most powerful men. Fast paced and compellingly written, the book provides an insider's look at the new tactics that many hope will revitalize the struggle for workers' rights in America.On November 1, 1990, just as its contract with the United Steelworkers of America was about to expire, Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation locked out its seventeen hundred employees and hired permanent replacements. Despite deteriorating conditions that had led to five deaths in the previous year, the company had refused to discuss safety and health issues. The locked-out workers faced an industry in turmoil, a plant manager with a grudge against the union, and a business controlled by a billionaire fugitive from justice. Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner describe how victory was achieved through the commitment of the workers and their families coupled with one of the most innovative contract campaigns ever waged by an American union."

Having come of age during a period of vibrant union-centered activism, Jack Metzgar begins this book wondering how his father, a U.S> Steel shop steward in the 1950s and '60s, and so many contemporary historians could forget what this country owes to the union movement. Combining personal memoir and historical narrative, Striking Steel argues for reassessment of unionism in American life during the second half of the twentieth century and a recasting of \u0022official memory.\u0022 As he traces the history of union steelworkers after World War II, Metzgar draws on his father's powerful stories about the publishing work in the mills, stories in which time is divided between \u0022before the union\u0022 and since. His father, Johnny Metzgar, fought ardently for workplace rules as a means of giving \u0022the men\u0022 some control over their working conditions and protection from venal foremen. He pursued grievances until he eroded management's authority, and he badgered foremen until he established shop-floor practices that would become part of the next negotiated contract. As a passionate advocate of solidarity, he urged coworkers to stick together so that the rules were upheld and everyone could earn a decent wage. Striking Steel's pivotal event is the four-month nationwide steel strike of 1959, a landmark union victory that has been all but erased from public memory. With remarkable tenacity, union members held out for the shop-floor rules that gave them dignity in the workplace and raised their standard of living. Their victory underscored the value of sticking together and reinforced their sense that they were contributing to a general improvement in American working and living conditions. The Metzgar family's story vividly illustrates the larger narrative of how unionism lifted the fortunes and prospects of working-class families. It also offers an account of how the broad social changes of the period helped to shift the balance of power in a conflict-ridden, patriarchal household. Even if the optimism of his generation faded in the upheavals of the 1960s, Johnny Metzgar's commitment to his union and the strike itself stands as an honorable example of what a collective action can and did achieve. Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel is a stirring call to remember and renew the struggle.

International Paper, the richest paper company and largest landowner in the United States, enjoyed record profits and gave large bonuses to executives in 1987, that same year the company demanded that employees take a substantial paycut, sacrifice hundreds of jobs, and forego their Christmas holiday. At the Adroscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine, twelve hundred workers responded by going on strike from June 1987 to October 1988. Local union members mobilized an army of volunteers but International Paper brought in permanent replacement workers and the strike was ultimately lost. Julius G. Getman tells the story of that strike and its implications a story of a community changing under pressure; of surprising leaders, strategists, and orators emerging; of lifelong friendships destroyed and new bonds forged. At a time when the role of organized labor is in transition, Getman suggests, this strike has particular significance. He documents the early negotiations, the battle for public opinion, the heroic efforts to maintain solidarity, and the local union's sense of betrayal by its national leadership. With exceptional richness in perspective, Getman includes the memories and informed speculations of union stalwarts, managers, and workers, including those who crossed the picket line, and shows the damage years later to the individuals, the community, and the mill. He demonstrates the law's bias, the company's undervaluing of employees, and the international union's excessive concern with internal politics."

Ravenswood recounts how the United Steelworkers of America, in a battle waged over an aluminum plant in West Virginia, proved that organized labor can still win - even against a company controlled by one of the world's richest and most powerful men. The book provides an insider's look at the new tactics that many in the labor movement hope will revitalize the struggle for workers' rights in America. On November 1, 1990, just as its contract with the United Steelworkers of America was about to expire, Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation locked out its seventeen hundred employees and hired permanent replacements. Despite deteriorating working conditions that had led to five deaths in the previous year, the company had refused to discuss safety and health issues at the bargaining table. Drawing on interviews with key participants, Tom Juravich and Kate Bronfenbrenner describe how victory was achieved through the tremendous commitment and solidarity of the workers and their families coupled with one of the most innovative and sophisticated contract campaigns ever waged by an American union.

Although International Paper, the richest paper company and largest landowner in the United States, enjoyed record profits and gave large bonuses to executives in 1987, that same year the company demanded that employees take a substantial paycut, sacrifice hundreds of jobs, and forego their Christmas holiday. At the Adroscoggin Mill in Jay, Maine, twelve hundred workers responded by going on strike from June 1987 to October 1988. Local union members mobilized an army of volunteers but International Paper brought in permanent replacement workers and the strike was ultimately lost. Julius Getman tells the story of that strike and its implications -- a story of a community changing under pressure; of surprising leaders, strategists, and orators emerging; of lifelong friendships destroyed and new bonds forged.

At a time when the role of organized labor is in transition, Getman suggests, this strike has particular significance. He documents the early negotiations, the battle for public opinion, the heroic efforts to maintain solidarity, and the local union's sense of betrayal by its national leadership. With exceptional richness in perspective, Getman includes the memories and informed speculations of union stalwarts, managers, and workers, including those who crossed the picket line, and shows the damage years later to the individuals, the community, and the mill. He demonstrates the law's bias, the company's undervaluing of employees, and the international union's excessive concern with internal politics.

When contrasted with the miners' dramatic strike victories in 1972 and 1974, the shattering industrial defeat suffered by British miners in 1985 has been seen as evidence of the further weakening of working-class solidarity. Undertaken with complete unity, the strikes of 1972 and 1974 brought the miners substantial material gains, contributed to the downfall of a government, and reinforced the National Union of Mineworkers' position at the core of the British labour movement. In contrast, the strike in Britain in 1984/85 was marked by internal division and by the miners' attempt to resist the pit closure programme of the Thatcher government, and it ended in bitter defeat.

This book explicitly addresses racism in the paid workplace, showing how racism, and by corollary sexism, are systemic to society. Based on extensive research on workers in both the Health Care sector and in the Garment Manufacturing sector, the author succeeds in capturing the daily lived realities in the workplace.

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today. Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike-the largest in United States history-for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.

Before the film, César Chavez, Chavez's life was depicted in photographs by his confidant, Jon Lewis. In the winter of 1966, twenty-eight-year-old ex-marine Jon Lewis visited Delano, California, the center of the California grape strike. He thought he might stay awhile, then resume studying photography at San Francisco State University. He stayed for two years, becoming the United Farm Workers Union’s semiofficial photographer and a close confidant of farmworker leader César Chávez. Surviving on a picket’s wage of five dollars a week, Lewis photographed twenty-four hours a day and created an insider’s view of the historic and sometimes violent confrontations, mass marches, fasts, picket lines, and boycotts that forced the table-grape industry to sign the first contracts with a farm workers union. Though some of his images were published contemporaneously, most remained unseen. Historian and photographer Richard Steven Street rescues Lewis from obscurity, allowing us for the first time to see a pivotal moment in civil rights history through the lens of a passionate photographer. A masterpiece of social documentary, this work is at once the biography of a photographer, an exposé of poverty and injustice, and a celebration of the human spirit.