Labor's Overlooked Past: 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.

• Author: Leanza, Emilio
• Position: BOOKS

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 Bessemer, Alabama, who held a union vote, once again, after the company was found to have violated National Labor Relations Board rules for spreading antiunion propaganda the first time.

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, multi-gender, 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...