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"A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors' assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin--Paul Ryan's hometown--and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills--but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long...
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No one who works hard in America should be poor, says journalist and author Shipler, but he found many of them all across the country, and delves as deeply into the cause and effect of their condition as they would allow. Some he has followed for years now. One finding is that the rise and fall of the nation's official economy has almost no impact on them; another is that they have no time for rage.
68) Them
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Chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums.
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This book looks at the remarkable men and women whose low-profile accomplishments contribute to the running of the nation, from coal miners and oil rig workers to migrant laborers and air traffic controllers. Five hundred feet underground, the author asked a coal miner named Smitty, "Do you think it's weird that people know so little about you?" He replied, "I don't think people know too much about the way the whole damn country works." This book...
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"Her rallying cry was famous: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Mother Jones (1837-1930) was a celebrated organizer and agitator, the very soul of protest movements in the early twentieth century. At coal strikes, steel strikes, railroad, textile, and brewery strikes, Mother Jones was always there, stirring the workers to action and enraging the powerful." "When Mary Jones began her career as a "hell-raiser," as she put it, she...
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The unattainable quest for middle-class stability is hauntingly captured in this biting portrayal of forgotten America Weaving the brackish humor of Chuck Palahniuk with the empathy of Barbara Ehrenreich, JR Helton brings to life an obscured underside of the American psyche in this unflinching account of life inside the working class of Texas in the 1980s. We first meet Helton as a struggling writer succumbing to the bleak reality of what it means...
73) Empire Falls
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A powerful portrait of blue-collar America, a timeless tribute to the inherent decency and good humor that sustains working-class people in everyday life.
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'We're Still Here' provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics. Drawing on years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain and politics that will endure long after Trump and the elections of 2016.
76) Last orders
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Winner of the Booker Prize. Four men gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive towards the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men's voices, and that of Jack's widow, into a choir of sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Swift...
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In A New New Deal, the labor movement leaders Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds offer a bold new plan to revitalize American labor activism and build a sense of common purpose between labor and community organizations. Dean and Reynolds demonstrate how alliances organized at the regional level are the most effective tool to build a voice for working people in the workplace, community, and halls of government. The authors draw on their own successes...
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"Across a bend of Ontario's Attawan River lies the Island, a small, working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers." "The family's troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town and Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends at the mill and advancement up the company...
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Overview: Among the most stirring pieces of labor history ever written, this autobiography chronicles the life of a woman who was considered a saint by many, and by others as "the most dangerous woman in America. " Widowed at the age of 30, Jones spoke tirelessly for the rights of workers and unionists.