Fightin' for the Union.

• Date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Gunn, Erik
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Gunn, Erik

Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War By Jon Melrod PM Press 320 pages Publication date: September 27,2022

Amid the slow-motion horrors of these times--an inexorable and seemingly intractable pandemic and equally persistent coup efforts that began long before the U.S. Capitol attack--there are occasions for guarded optimism. One is the resurgence of American unionism, reflected in the rolling victories of Starbucks workers and an emboldened workforce willing to strike in industries ranging from health care to food processing.

All of that makes Jon Melrod's Fighting Times a timely bit of history from a half-century ago. Melrod, a veteran of one of the United Auto Workers unions most militant locals who went on to become a human rights lawyer, offers up an activist memoir that reflects all the particularity of the time and place it chronicles: the 1970s and 1980s in...