Through the longtime New York Times labor correspondent, an in-depth take a look at functioning men and women in America, the challenges they face, and how they can be re-empowered

Within an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, an incredible number of Americans are searching for methods to enhance their lives, and they’re often embracing labor unions and worker action, whether #RedforEd teachers’ strikes or the Battle for $15. Wage stagnation, low-wage work, and blighted blue-collar areas about Beaten Down, UPSET: The Past, Present, and Long term of American Labor have become an all-too-common section of modern-day America, and behind these styles is definitely a little-discussed issue: the decades-long drop in worker power.

Steven Greenhouse views this decline reflected in some of the most pressing problems facing our nation today, including income inequality, declining social mobility, the gender pay space, and the concentration of political power in the hands from the wealthy. He rebuts the often-stated look at that labor unions are outmoded–or even harmful–by recounting a few of labor’s victories, as well as the initiatives of several of today’s most innovative and successful worker groups. He displays us the present day labor scenery through the stories of dozens of American employees, from G.M. employees to Uber motorists, and we observe how unions historically have empowered–and lifted–the most marginalized, including young women garment employees in NY in 1909, dark sanitation employees in Memphis in 1968, and hotel housekeepers today. Greenhouse proposes concrete, feasible ways in which workers’ collective power can be–and is usually being–rekindled and reimagined in the twenty-first hundred years.