You ever flip a light switch, take a weekend, or clock out after eight hours and think, “Huh, sure is nice livin’ in a civilized society”? Well, buckle up. None of that was handed down from on high—it was won, strike by strike, march by march, over the broken backs and blistered hands of folks who stood up and said, “Enough.” This episode walks you through what labor really built—and how easy it is to lose it if we forget where it came from.Further Reading :
Books & Academic Sources:
Dray, Philip. There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. Anchor Books, 2011.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial, 2003.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. Hard Work: The Making of Labor History. University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Loomis, Erik. A History of America in Ten Strikes. The New Press, 2018.
Freeman, Joshua B. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. The New Press, 2000.
Organizations & Digital Archives:
AFL-CIO Labor History Timeline: https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events
Labor History Project, Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects: https://depts.washington.edu/labhist/
Library of Congress: “American Labor and Working-Class History” Collections
Economic Policy Institute: https://www.epi.org
National Archives – Records of the National Labor Relations Board
Multimedia & Documentaries:
The Fight in the Fields: César Chávez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle (PBS, 1997)
10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America: The Homestead Strike (History Channel)
A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom (PBS)
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (for connections between labor, housing, and urban decline)
