On this edition of Your Call's Media Roundtable, we're discussing coverage of May Day Strong / International Workers' Day and the 3,000 actions happening across the country today with labor reporter Hamilton Nolan, author of the new book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.
The book provides an in-depth look at the US labor movement, its critical place in society, and what it takes to build a strong, unionized workforce.
He writes that at the peak of organized labor’s power in the 1950s, one in three American workers was a union member. Today, that number is closer to one in ten. This decades-long decline in union membership mirrors the rise in inequality. Nolan argues that business interests understand the power unions create—and have spent decades working with politicians to carry out systematic legal and regulatory attacks that make it harder for workers to organize and for unions to survive. The political battle to reform what he describes as a broken, anti-worker labor law system is ongoing—and likely will be for years to come.
Guest:
Hamilton Nolan, labor journalist, and author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
Resources:
How Things Work: Claire Valdez Wants to Bring the Labor Movement Into Congress
CEPR: States of the Unions: The Shifting Geography of US Labor
The New York Times: ‘The Biggest Act of Union-Busting in U.S. History’: Trump’s War on Federal Workers
