Brecher - Strike! , Revised, Expanded, and Updated Edition

Praise for Strike!

With this new edition of Strike! Jeremy Brecher has brought the story of U.S. labor up to date. From the Great Upheaval of 1877 to the Teamsters UPS strike of 1997, here is the story of mass working-class action and organization. For a new generation that is once again discovering the power of organized workers and a class-based social movement, Brecher presents an important and critical perspective on the labor movement and U.S. history. For anyone who wants to get behind the headlines on the resurgence of U.S. labor, Strike! is essential reading.

Elaine Bernard, executive director, Harvard University Trade Union Program

For the past twenty-five years, anyone getting turned on to American labor history has turned first to Strike! This new anniversary edition, which adds an in-depth examination of recent events and experiences, guarantees that this book will be the first source consulted by the next generation of workers and students who seek out the hidden history of the American working class.

Peter Rachleff, author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement

Strike! manifests the real roots of workers strugglebattles that moved from the streets of Minneapolis in 1934, to the mass confrontations of the 1960s against the Vietnam War, poverty, and racism, to the war zone of the 1990s in Decatur, Illinois. Jeremy Brechers underlying message is powerful: workers will be exploited and reviled unless we challenge those who appoint themselves as our masters.

Dan Lane, activist and locked-out Staley worker

Jeremy Brechers Strike! is one of the most important books on labor history published since World War II. It is a much-needed history of recent labor struggles. But what makes it indispensable is its point of view, its spirit, which is that of rank-and-file resistance to both corporate power and trade union bureaucracy. Its emphasis on worker-community solidarity, across all boundaries, is exactly what is needed in our time.

Howard Zinn, author of A Peoples History of the United States

Splendid clearly the best single-volume summary yet published of American general strikes.

Washington Post

Strike! is the single most important book about the history of the American labor movement published in our time. And now Jeremy Brecher has brought the history up to datejust in time to make a new generation ready for this new era of labor struggle.

Dick Flacks, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeremy Brechers Strike!, a labor and left-wing classic, has educated tens of thousands of readers over the decades and now comes back againbetter than ever.

Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left and Robin Hood: Peoples Outlaw and Forest Hero

When Strike! first appeared in 1972, it provided a healthy antidote to narcotic of standard labor history. Rather than merely being the victims or at times allegedly the beneficiaries of government or corporate largess, workers, as Brecher shows in exciting, exhilarating strokes, not only have the power to change the world for the betterment of all humanity, but at their best moments, are capable of doing so in democratic, participatory fashion.

Michael Goldfield, author of The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics

Jeremy Brecher views the past quarter-century as a time of retrenchment and disorganization between periods of mass strikes. In a new last chapter, he tells the stories of Pittston, Staley, and other prefigurative struggles. This chapter will serve future historians as a definitive introduction to the emerging era of wider solidarity and more militant tactics.

Staughton Lynd, coauthor of Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law and Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History

Brecher, a gifted young radical historian offers a graphic history of industrial strikes. His research is thorough, his presentation lucid and often absorbing draws its strength from a coherent view.

Publishers Weekly

An exciting history of American labor.

New York Times Book Review New and Recommended list

An objective, minimally tendentious study of the American experience a bracing draft of history brings to life the flashpoints of labor history.

Richard Lingeman, New York Times

A magnificent book. I hope it will take its place as the standard history of American labor.

Staughton Lynd, labor historian

The best book I have seen on American labor as a social movement. An important contribution to sociology as well as history. By focusing on mass actions of workers, Brecher sheds new light on the role of trade unions and radical organizations in the labor movement. Well-written, well-researched, and well-argued. I highly recommend it as a text for courses on social movements, political sociology, and American society.

William Kornhauser, University of California, Berkeley

An excellent and exciting book.

Fusion

A really impressive piece of work which deserves the widest possible circulation. It offers simultaneously a readable and largely accurate account of many of the major strikes of American workers since 1877 [and] an extremely useful and well-researched account of todays rank and file struggles.

David Montgomery, author of The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 18651925

Scholarly, genuinely stirring.

New York Times Book Review

Strike! Revised, Expanded, and Updated

Jeremy Brecher

Jeremy Brecher 2014

This edition PM Press 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Cover design by John Yates/stealworks.com

Layout by Jonathan Rowland

ISBN: 978-1-60486-428-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911529

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

www.thomsonshore.com

E VEN SO PERSONAL A PROJECT AS WRITING A BOOK IS ONLY MADE POS sible by the help of many other people. I would like to thank here those who have been of the most immediate help. Almost all have disagreed at one point or another; responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation remains completely my own.

Much of the initial work on this book was done at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. The Fellows, students, staff, and hangers-on of the Institute contributed much to my education in the years I was preparing to write Strike!. It was Marcus Raskin there who gave me the necessary encouragement to stop talking and start writing.

The collaborators who produced the magazine Root & Branch contributed much individually and together to my understanding of the matters dealt with herein.

Edward M. Brecher not only made available an ideal place to prepare the manuscript, but gave me the benefit of his writing experience by painstakingly blue-penciling the first draft.

Sharon Hammer, printer and artist, skillfully prepared the original manuscript.

A grant from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation helped finance my research.