What can the history of strikes teach us about our power in the present moment?
An Online Conversation with Jeremy Brecher on July 26.
Time is running out to prevent full-blown climate catastrophe. Intertwined crises of wealth inequality, poverty, racism, and corporate despotism are deepening.
When working people refuse to go to work — when we put a stick in society’s gears — we can make enormous changes quite rapidly. There are many historical examples of this, including, flawed though it was, the New Deal.
How can we join forces across movements today to use our power to create the world we want before it’s too late?
Labor organizer, climate activist, and historian Jeremy Brecher will speak and then answer questions. He is the author of Strike! and the co-founder and policy and research director of the Labor Network for Sustainability.
Click Here to Register
PM Press Releases 50th Anniversary Edition of Jeremy Brecher’s Strike!
Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! narrates the dramatic story of repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America. Involving nationwide general strikes, the seizure of vast industrial establishments, nonviolent direct action on a massive scale, and armed battles with artillery and tanks, this exciting hidden history is told from the point of view of the rank-and-file workers who lived it.
Encompassing the repeated repression of workers’ rebellions by company-sponsored violence, local police, state militias, and the U.S. Army and National Guard, it reveals a dimension of American history rarely found in the usual high school or college history course.
Since its original publication in 1972, no book has done as much as Strike! to bring U.S. labor history to a wide audience. Now this fiftieth anniversary edition brings the story up to date with chapters covering the “mini-revolts of the twenty-first century,” including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen.
The new edition contains over a hundred pages of new materials and concludes by examining a wide range of current struggles, ranging from #BlackLivesMatter, to the great wave of teachers’ strikes “for the soul of public education,” to the global “Student Strike for Climate” that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.
Jeremy Brecher has participated in movements for nuclear disarmament, civil rights, peace, international labor rights, global economic justice, accountability for war crimes, climate protection, and many others. He is the author of fifteen books on labor and social movements, including the national best seller Strike!. He has received five regional Emmy awards for his documentary film work. He is currently policy and research director for the Labor Network for Sustainability.