Labor’s Overlooked Past

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The American labor movement has been in decline for decades. By the end of 2021, the number of unionized workers had fallen to just around 10 percent.

But that number doesn’t tell the whole story: As the coronavirus pandemic claimed lives and eroded communities, last year also witnessed a dramatic upsurge in large-scale labor actions, with more than 140,000 workers at companies such as Kellogg’s and Nabisco logging a collective total of more than 3.2 million strike days.

Perhaps surprisingly, the backbone of this new wave of labor activism is made up of workers previously seen as “unorganizable.” They include Starbucks baristas, who are currently pushing for union representation in more than 100 stores across twenty-five states; McDonald’s line cooks, who walked out against sexual harrassment and for a $15 minimum wage; and Amazon warehouse employees in Staten Island, New York, who successfully organized the company's first union.

Most of these workers, writes veteran labor journalist Kim Kelly in Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, do not fit the mold of the white, cisgender factory-working males that form the “classic avatar of the American working class.” Writing against this stereotype, Kelly’s book is both a broad strokes history of the labor movement—featuring a familiar cast of characters such as Frances Perkins, Mother Jones, and Joe Hill—as well as a reminder that the most vulnerable and exploited workers are often the most bold in resisting their exploitation.

The history of workers, Kelly argues, has always involved “multiracial, multigender, and queer labor conflicts, campaigns—and sometimes even victories.” But these struggles have often been sidelined or dismissed—and not only by bosses but sometimes by the unions themselves.

While most of us have heard of United Farm Workers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, for example, few can name Maria Moreno, the first farmworker hired as an organizer, or Bert Corona, who advocated for the rights of the undocumented, despite both being instrumental to unionizing the fields.

Fight Like Hell is essentially a compendium of profiles of lesser-known activists who, because of their identities, have been relegated to the footnotes of standard labor history (see Lucy Parsons, Larry Itliong, or Marie Equi). Kelly also covers jobs and workplaces, like strip clubs, prisons, and airline attendants, that have an overlooked history of organizing; in 1973, Kelly explains, a group of people incarcerated in Walpole, Massachusetts, took over their facility while its guards were on strike, and managed to run the place better—and far less violently—than before.

As a reporter for Teen Vogue, The Nation, and elsewhere, Kelly expertly weaves together her vast experience on the labor beat—she was one of the first to report on the ongoing Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama, a major thread in Fight Like Hell—with the histories she documents.

Some of these connections to the past reveal how little has changed. Reflecting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the 1911 industrial disaster in New York City that led to the deaths of 146 garment workers, Kelly highlights her interview with Virginia Vasquez, a Guatemalan clothing trimmer in Los Angeles who makes 10 to 12 cents per garment, and around $280 per week. “Her counterparts on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s would have recognized the conditions Vasquez and her coworkers face,” she writes, “as they sweat in a windowless room, where rats and roaches crawl over piles of merchandise and the women are consumed with worry for their health and well-being.”

Despite or because of this lack of change, more than two-thirds of Americans now agree that unions are generally a good thing—the labor movement’s highest approval rating since 1965. Fight Like Hell, then, is a book for the moment, and a sort of field guide for anyone seeking power in their workplace. In Kelly’s words, “There is always another struggle to join, and another picket line to walk.”

Editor's note: This review has been updated to reflect the successful union drive of Amazon employees in Staten Island, New York.