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July, 1899: When Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst raise the distribution price one-tenth of a cent per paper, ten cents per hundred, the newsboys, poor enough already, are outraged. Inspired by the strike put on by the trolley workers, Jack "Cowboy" Kelly organizes a newsboys' strike. With David Jacobs as the brains of the new union, and Jack as the voice, the weak and oppressed found the strength to band together and challenge the powerful....

Wage stagnation, low-wage work, and blighted blue-collar communities have become an all-too-common part of modern-day America. Behind these trends is a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Greenhouse rebuts the often-stated view that labor unions are outmoded or harmful, by recounting some of labor's victories, and the efforts of several of today's most innovative and successful worker groups. He also proposes concrete,...

In the California apple country, nine hundred migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own-stronger than its individual members and more frightening. Led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike is founded on his tragic idealism-on the "courage never to submit or yield."

"Twenty-year-old Honora Beecher, married to Sexton in 1929 after a three-month courtship, comes to realize that her husband is not trustworthy and finds herself increasingly drawn to McDermott, a principled loom fixer at a nearby mill where Sexton has been forced to take employment after losing his job due to the stock market crash."

"In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She's spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries--and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man...

"The thesis is simple: Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix this problem. But the labor movement of today has failed to enable enough individuals to join unions. Thus, organized labor's powerful potential is being wielded incompetently. And what is happening inside of organized labor will-far more than most people realize-determine the economic and social course of American life...

This eye-opening and engaging history of the worker actions that brought us weekends, pay equality, desegregation, an end to child labor and more documents how the labor movement has shaped America and how it intersects with many of the major issues facing modern teens.

"A historical fiction novel in verse detailing the life of Clara Lemlich and her struggle for women's labor rights in the early 20th century in New York."-- Provided by publisher.