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pilesandpiles's review
4.0
Cross-posted from BookWyrm, a decentralized social network for readers with no corporate funding.
Pretty good intro to organized labor in the US. Bill Fletcher Jr. challenges myths that range from "unions are all racist" and "unions either ignore immigrants or the rest of us" to "unions and corporations are both too big and don't really care about the worker" by reframing the myth/question, scrutinizing how terms are defined, stressing the power imbalance between workers and corporations/the employer class, examining the roles of public policy and corporate funding, and providing examples from US labor history. Fletcher does not shy away from times that unions have been problematic, but also, since this book is short and introductory, it doesn't go deep into nuanced arguments. It would be great to see an updated edition since this book came out in 2012, so it doesn't cover how the landscape around independent contracting/misclassification has changed, or the ways that anti-union propaganda has evolved in response to the boom in organizing by young people over the past couple of years.
Pretty good intro to organized labor in the US. Bill Fletcher Jr. challenges myths that range from "unions are all racist" and "unions either ignore immigrants or the rest of us" to "unions and corporations are both too big and don't really care about the worker" by reframing the myth/question, scrutinizing how terms are defined, stressing the power imbalance between workers and corporations/the employer class, examining the roles of public policy and corporate funding, and providing examples from US labor history. Fletcher does not shy away from times that unions have been problematic, but also, since this book is short and introductory, it doesn't go deep into nuanced arguments. It would be great to see an updated edition since this book came out in 2012, so it doesn't cover how the landscape around independent contracting/misclassification has changed, or the ways that anti-union propaganda has evolved in response to the boom in organizing by young people over the past couple of years.
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