Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

by Kim Kelly

Overview

A 2022 New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You’ll Love
A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year

“Kelly unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees—behind some of the labor movement’s biggest successes.” —The New York Times

A revelatory, inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly.

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that history and shows how the rights the American worker has today—the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job—were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon’s warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland’s Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s.

Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982171070
Publisher:	Atria/One Signal Publishers
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	1,059,649
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Kim Kelly is an independent journalist, author, and organizer. She has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baffler, The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Esquire, among many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. Previously, she was the heavy metal editor at “Noisey,” VICE’s music vertical, and was an original member of the VICE Union. A third-generation union member, she is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalists Union as well as a member and elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). She was born in the heart of the South Jersey Pine Barrens, and currently lives in Philadelphia with a hard-workin’ man, a couple of taxidermied bears, and way too many books.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Prologue xvii

1 The Trailblazers 1

The Mill Girls of Lowell, Massachusetts 6

"The Blood of Souls in Bondage" 10

The Freed Black Washerwomen of Jackson, Mississippi 12

A Showdown in Atlanta 17

2 The Garment Workers 21

The Fiery Jewish Girls (Farbrente Yidishe Meydlekh) of New York City 24

"Burning Death Before Our Eyes" 27

Frances Perkins: Labor Activist Turned Architect of the New Deal 31

"A Turning Point in My Life": Sue Lo Kee and the National Dollar Stores Factory Strike 34

Viva La Huelga: Rosa Flores and the San Antonio Farah Strike 35

3 The Mill Workers 43

Innovation and Bloodshed on the Picket Line 45

Ola Delight Smith and the Battle to Organize the South 48

Militancy in the Southern Mills: The 1934 Textile Strike 52

4 The Revolutionaries 57

Lucy Parsons and the Haymarket Eight 59

Ben Fletcher and the Rise of Racial Capitalism 65

The United States of America vs. the Wobblies 68

Dr. Marie Equi, Portland's "Queen of the Bolsheviks" 70

The Bloody Responses to Revolt 74

5 The Miners 79

Women Break Open the Mines of Appalachia 82

Black Labor and the Coal Creek War 85

They Called Her Mother Jones 89

The West Diversifies the Workforce 92

Indigenous and Latino Workers Hold the Line 94

A Half Century Later, Back Where We Began 98

The 2021 Warrior Met Coal Strike 102

6 The Harvesters 105

Hawaii's Masters and Servants 106

Sugar and Blood 109

Los Braceros, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Mexican-American Migration 113

"Crusader in Rubber Boots and a Big Skirt" 116

"Si, Se Puede!" 120

Nagi Daifuliah and the Largest Farmworker Strike in History 123

"We Want Dignity and Respect" 128

7 The Cleaners 131

Waiting to Work 133

"The Bronx Slave Market" 135

Building Power in the Power Laundries 137

Dorothy Lee Bolden and the World Ahead 141

"Ya Basta!" ("Enough Is Enough") 149

8 The Freedom Fighters 153

"Shoot to Kill Any Negro Who Refuse[s] to Surrender Immediately" 155

The Pullman Railway Porters 160

The Pullman Maids' Double Bind 163

"You're Supposed to Be Scared When You Come in Here" 167

"There Was No One More Able to Pull It Together Than Bayard Rustin" 169

9 The Movers 177

Brewing Up Trouble 181

"No Red-Baiting, No Race-Baiting, No Queen-Baiting!" 185

"We Put the 'Trans' Back in Transportation" 188

Reagan Declares War on Labor 192

Freedom to Fly 197

10 The Metalworkers 205

A Midwestern Revolution 207

Building Multiracial Alliances in the Michigan Auto Industry 212

Arab Solidarity in Dearborn, Michigan 214

Fighting Sexual Harassment on the Assembly Line 216

Steel Pride 219

11 The Disabled Workers 223

Circuses for Bread 227

"Handicapped Workers Must Live, Give Us Jobs" 234

Section 504, a Civil Rights Act for the Disabled 241

"They Know We're Desperate for Work": Taking on the Subminimum Wage 246

12 The Sex Workers 251

San Francisco's "Barbary Coast" 253

"All I Ask Is for a Living Wage and I'll Get Out of It Myself" 257

Ah Toy and the Chinese Immigrant Workers' Struggle 260

Margo St. James's COYOTEs and the HIV/AIDS Crisis 265

The Movement Takes Center Stage 270

Performers' Rights and Community Care 277

13 The Prisoners 285

The Rise of Prisoners' Labor Unions 292

Women's Prisons and Rebellion 295

The Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee 300

California's Incarcerated Firefighters 306

Epilogue 311

Endnotes 319

Bibliography 361

Acknowledgments 403

Index 407

Editorial Reviews

2022-02-09
A working-class view of American labor unions and their history in securing economic justice, however fleeting.

“As I write this,” writes journalist and labor activist Kelly, “eleven hundred coal miners in rural Alabama are still out on a strike that began on April 1, 2021.” Even as knowledge workers flee corporate life, spurred by the pandemic revelation that they can work anywhere, these coal miners are bound to geography and largely overlooked because coal is unpopular in a time of climate change. So it is with the larger history of labor unionism, Kelly suggests, at least in part because so many women and minority members were instrumental in it but are often written out of history. By way of one example, the author considers the case of a woman named Lucy Parsons, who grew up enslaved in the South and, with a husband who had fought for the Confederacy but later converted to anarchism, helped organize workers around the Haymarket riots of 1886. Sadly, Parsons refused to acknowledge her ethnicity and “focused her energies solely on behalf of white factory workers.” Nonetheless, Black activists were essential to working people’s efforts to secure better conditions, as Parsons was to gaining the eight-hour workday. Here Kelly examines the militancy of Mohawk ironworkers who helped build the skyscrapers of 1920s New York, “walking across two-inch-thick beams hundreds of feet in the air without so much as a tremble,” and of the multiethnic Coalition for Immokalee Workers, which exposed what amounted to slave labor on Southern farms in our own time. Injustices continue, from coal miners to immigrant workers bound to company stores and housing in Midwestern meatpacking plants. “Collective working class power was behind every stride forward this country has made,” Kelly writes in an urgent closing section, “grudgingly or otherwise, and will continue to be the animating force behind any true progress.”

A well-reasoned argument for restoring unions to their former role in the lives of American workers.

Kirkus Reviews

03/28/2022

Journalist and union organizer Kelly debuts with a rousing look at the contributions of marginalized groups to the U.S. labor movement. She begins by placing the “middle-aged Black warehouse workers” who tried to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Alabama in 2021 within a “long lineage of working class heroes,” including the 19th-century female mill workers who fought for a workday shorter than 16 hours. Kelly also recounts how an 1881 strike by Black laundresses in Atlanta brought the city’s laundry services to a halt on the eve of the International Cotton Exposition, and profiles U.S. labor secretary Frances Perkins, who helped enshrine workplace protections in New Deal legislation after having witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Elsewhere, Kelly examines how convict leasing helped prop up the South’s “faltering post-Confederate economy” and sketches the history of the 1891–1892 Coal Creek War in Tennessee, when “involuntary, incarcerated laborers” were brought in as strikebreakers but were freed repeatedly by the miners they were meant to replace. Shedding new light on key players and episodes within a diverse range of industries—from textile and trucking to sex work—this invigorating labor history is also a powerful call for today’s workers to fight for their rights. Agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

This history of American labor places today's resurgence of union activity in the context of past struggles... [Kelly] makes it possible to see resonances across history and locale.”
—The New Yorker

“Kelly unearths the stories of the people—farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees—behind some of the labor movement’s biggest successes.”
—The New York Times

Fight Like Hell is an electrifying, inspiring history of how countless American industries have exploited employees of marginalized backgrounds, and how these workers protected one another and fought back."
—Buzzfeed

“You’ll never look at American history the same way again.”
—Esquire

"The stories in Fight Like Hell remind us again and again that change is possible... if only we stick together."
—LitHub

“Kim Kelly's debut is a knockout... Catalyzed by a passionate voice and brisk pacing, Fight Like Hell will leave you with a renewed sense of readiness in your bones.”
—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times Bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing, Wandering in Strange Lands, and Caul Baby

“As Kim Kelly writes in her book, every story is a labor story. [Fight Like Hell] offers a fuller picture of the history of labor in America and shows how fights previously not considered labor fights were in fact battles for workers' rights, whether it was abolishing slavery, liberating women, ensuring those disabled by work got fair treatment and those born with disabilities had a chance at a fair wage.”
—Eric Garcia, author of We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

“In FIGHT LIKE HELL you'll find the true stories of people who have fought to win a better world for themselves and everyone else who has to work for a living.”
—Jeremy Brecher, author of National Bestseller Strike!

“Meticulously researched and beautifully told, [in FIGHT LIKE HELL] Kim Kelly has established herself as a true champion for the working class.”
—Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO President

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2022

Kelly's sweeping history of the American labor movement casts a wide swath from the trailblazing Pawtucket women weavers' mill turnout in 1824, to the 2020 effort to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, AL. Focusing on women and workers of color, invariably low-paid physical laborers, Kelly's episodic survey details workplace contributions of usually ignored but essential folk. She marches with fiery Jewish girls in New York's garment district, with women on the picket lines of southern mills, and with Black workers in Appalachian mines. She reaches across the country, covering disabled workers, sex workers, and prisoners' work, and the diversified labor of Asian, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Pacific Islander workers, particularly immigrants, in the fields and factories and on the rails and roads. S Kelly lauds revolutionaries and freedom fighters across class, gender, and race lines (Lucy Parsons; Mother Jones; Dr. Marie Equi; Cesar Chavez; Dorothy Lee Bolden) as vanguard workers who pushed for change in working conditions, psychology, and in society to redress capitalism's cruelties. VERDICT This accessible, inspiring, and instructive read belongs in school libraries, in university classrooms, and in general readers' hands for its lessons about workers' united power and the unfinished business of workplace justice.—Thomas J. Davis

Library Journal

Narrator Em Grosland keeps these riveting stories of labor organizing moving along at a consistent, somewhat rhythmic pace that nicely complements the writing. This sympathetic survey of the labor movement examines union drives in several occupational categories, including mill workers, garment workers, workers with disabilities, and prisoners. While the audiobook is pro union, it does not shy away from looking at the objectionable aspects of some labor organizations, which include racism, sexism, and homophobia. Grosland’s choice to keep the narration low-key works well. A fascinating listen. G.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

Narrator Em Grosland keeps these riveting stories of labor organizing moving along at a consistent, somewhat rhythmic pace that nicely complements the writing. This sympathetic survey of the labor movement examines union drives in several occupational categories, including mill workers, garment workers, workers with disabilities, and prisoners. While the audiobook is pro union, it does not shy away from looking at the objectionable aspects of some labor organizations, which include racism, sexism, and homophobia. Grosland’s choice to keep the narration low-key works well. A fascinating listen. G.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile