Labor Notes Books
Are there problems where you work? Maybe your pay is too low, conditions are unsafe, or your boss has it in for someone you work with... and you’re ready to do something about it.
This book will show you how to fight back where you work and win. You’ll learn how to identify the key issues in your workplace, build campaigns to tackle them, anticipate management’s tricks and traps, and inspire your co-workers to stand together despite their fears.
We've distilled generations of organizing know-how into 47 easily accessible secrets. Put them all together and you've got a step-by-step guide to building power on the job.
Also available: a Spanish edition and a companion trainer's guide to this book.
In less than two years, newly-elected leaders transformed the 27,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. Learn how they organized as rank-and-file members then ran for office to chart a new direction for their union.
This book details how the engaged thousands of members to tackle problems on the job and to build a stewards network that became the backbone of their 2012 citywide strike. Find out how they worked with their communities, trained new leaders, and ran a contract campaign that became a model for unions across the country.
This oversize manual is for workers who want to take control over their lives at work. In hundreds of first-person accounts, workers tell in their own words how they did just that.
The stories run from how to ridicule a pompous boss to a years-long campaign against a multinational corporation. The workplaces represented include factory and white collar, public and private, in the U.S. and Canada.
Each chapter ends with questions designed to get you thinking strategically about how to apply what you've read in your workplace.
Do you want to know how to run your local union more effectively or how to get more members involved? Democracy Is Power, by Mike Parker and Martha Gruelle, provides a blueprint for building a member-driven union. They demonstrate what member control really looks like, and why it is crucial to labor's future.
With a focus on union activity in the workplace, the authors describe democratic approaches to contracts, grievances, communications, and leaders’ relationship with members. They shine a revealing light on democratic union culture, yet also address the more obvious parts of democracy, like elections and bylaws.
A PDF of this book is also available for free. Download it here.
If the union movement is going to find its way back from the wilderness, it will depend on new leaders. Where will we find them? Shop floor activists are the raw material for labor's revival.
Our movement needs thousands more stewards with the skills, confidence, and authority to stand up.
The Steward's Toolbox, edited by Labor Notes editor Mischa Gaus, is a how-to resource guide that gives stewards, union activists, and leaders new and old the skills and orientation they need. Bringing together five years' worth of knowledge from the pages of Labor Notes magazine, the book offers eight chapters full of experience and advice on everything from how to defend past practices to how to build a successful coalition to defeat privatization. 235 pages.
Our popular book Secrets of a Successful Organizer, is now available in Spanish! (For the English version of the book, click here.)
Nuestro manual popular, Secretos de un organizador exitoso, ya está disponible en español.
¿Hay problemas en su lugar de trabajo? A lo mejor la paga es muy baja, las condiciones son inseguras o su jefe tiene a alguien con quien usted trabaja en la mira… y usted está listo para hacer algo al respecto.
This pamphlet looks at the network of ship hands, longshoremen, truck drivers, railroad operators, and warehouse workers that make the global marketplace possible.
If globalization has allowed modern corporations to use the world as their workshop, it's only possible because of the increasingly integrated network of people and machines that move things from one place to another. A joint project with the Longshore Workers’ Coalition and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.
This organizing manual highlights a range of tactics that unions and other workers can use to fight sexual harassment, including training sessions, contract language, job actions -- and more.
The shipping cost is included in the price of the book.
Strikes by unorganized workers led to the founding of unions. Strikes won the first union contracts. Strikes over the years won bigger paychecks, vacations, seniority rights, and the right to tell the foreman “that’s not my job.” Without strikes we would have no labor movement, no unions, no contracts, and a far worse working and living situation. In short, strikes are the strongest tool in workers’ toolbox—our power not just to ask, but to force our employers to concede something. This special expanded issue of Labor Notes is a manual on how to strike and win.
Order 50 copies ($50) or 100 copies ($100).
Strikes by unorganized workers led to the founding of unions. Strikes won the first union contracts. Strikes over the years won bigger paychecks, vacations, seniority rights, and the right to tell the foreman “that’s not my job.” Without strikes we would have no labor movement, no unions, no contracts, and a far worse working and living situation. In short, strikes are the strongest tool in workers’ toolbox—our power not just to ask, but to force our employers to concede something. This special expanded issue of Labor Notes is a manual on how to strike and win.
Order 50 copies ($50) or 100 copies ($100).
Bundle of 50 copies for $30, or 100 copies or $50. For this special expanded issue of Labor Notes (July 2018) we talked to workers who are building powerful unions despite a mandatory open shop—in schools, factories, buses, hospitals, oil refineries, grocery stores, post offices, and shipyards across the U.S.
This guide reveals the principles and practical steps behind their successes. Packed with info, exercises, and tips, it's a great tool to share with union stewards, board members, or rank-and-file activists.
Bundle of 50 copies for $30, or 100 copies or $50. For this special expanded issue of Labor Notes (July 2018) we talked to workers who are building powerful unions despite a mandatory open shop—in schools, factories, buses, hospitals, oil refineries, grocery stores, post offices, and shipyards across the U.S.
This guide reveals the principles and practical steps behind their successes. Packed with info, exercises, and tips, it's a great tool to share with union stewards, board members, or rank-and-file activists.
This guide shows how to put on a three-part training that teaches rank-and-file workers how to build power on the job, step by step. It's designed as a companion to the Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer.
The guide is available in a standard version and a special edition for K-12 teachers and school employees. Please check that you have added the correct version to your shopping cart before checking out.
This guide shows how to put on a three-part training that teaches rank-and-file workers how to build power on the job, step by step. It's designed as a companion to the Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer.
The guide is available in a standard version and a special edition for K-12 teachers and school employees. Please check that you have added the correct version to your shopping cart before checking out.