Synopses & Reviews
Labor's story, still untold and largely missing from text-book and conventional history, is more than an account of strikes, spies, and frame-ups, of organizing and building unions, of men and women dying for better lives in a better America. The chief quality of the book, aside from its one volume completeness, is that it is not presented as a narrow, parochial account but as the heart of the story of the American people. In a sense this book is not a history of labor at all but a history of the American people from labor's viewpoint. It is the story not only of labor but of American monopoly, showing how the trade union movement developed as a part of the American people's struggle against corporate tyranny. Labor's great leap forward into industrial unionism was an answering action to the development of trusts and the monopolized control of great industrial empires. Labor grew as monopoly grew, born of the conflict between them.
This is the third edition of a work recently called "a modern masterpiece of labor history." It has been widely translated and widely read abroad.