For the most abundant resources, join the LRAN community by becoming an active member on our list serve here. Already a member? Access the list serve by clicking here.

Below are some resources on a variety of labor topics. Please contact us if you have additional links to add.

Labor Studies Syllabus Materials

LRAN Member Books

• Laboring for Justice: The Fight Against Wage Theft in An American City - This book highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado. Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. This book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice. 
• Working 9 to 5 - In "Working 9 to 5," award-winning author Ellen Cassedy, a founder of the 9 to 5 organization, tells the story of how women office workers rose up to win rights and respect on the job starting in the 1970’s, built a nationwide effort uniting diverse races, classes, and ages, took on the corporate titans, formed a woman-led union, and helped make sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination illegal. They encountered ferocious opposition, but charted new directions for worker power.
• The Activist Spirit: Toward a Radical Solidarity - Labor and immigrant rights activist Victor Narro believes there is a spiritual core within social justice activism from which we can deepen our solidarity with each other. His book calls us to integrate that inner spiritual core into our work to make the struggle for justice more compassionate, caring, and sustainable. To be an activist for justice is to love humanity and all of creation.
• The Privatization of Everything - A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian.
• The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century - Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta position the struggle to build collective bargaining power as a central element in the effort to build a healthy democracy. Their book offers new approaches to how we build worker power, not only to change wages and working conditions, but to be able to govern over more aspects of our lives.
• From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging: How Public Employees Win and Lose the Right to Bargain - How do public employees win and lose their collective bargaining rights? And how can public sector labor unions protect those rights? These are the questions answered in From Collective Bargaining to Collective Begging. Dominic Wells takes a mixed-methods approach and uses more than five decades of state-level data to analyze the expansion and restriction of rights.
• Recoding Power: Tactics for Mobilizing Tech Workers - Sidney A. Rothstein outlines tactics for workers to build power even where it appears impossible. This book shows what it takes to resist precarity in twenty-first-century capitalism, and features in-depth case studies, relying on nearly 150 interviews.
• The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy - Edited by Angela B. Cornell, Cornell University, New York, Mark Barenberg, Columbia University, New York.
• Revolutionary Non-Violence: Organizing For Freedom - Rev. Lawson’s work as a theologian, pastor, and social-change activist has inspired hope and liberation for more than sixty years. To hear and see him speak is to experience the power of the prophetic tradition in the African American and social gospel. In Revolutionary Nonviolence, Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong reflect on Rev. Lawson's talks and dialogues, from his speeches at the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 to his lectures in the current UCLA curriculum. T
• Our Veterans - In Our Veterans, Suzanne Gordon, Steve Early, and Jasper Craven explore the physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological impact of military service and the problems that veterans face when they return to civilian life.
• Union Made is a romance about union organizing by Eric Lotke. It’s a novel so people will read and enjoy it – but it’s also a manual about how-to and why-to form a union. Union Made can inspire organizers and convert skeptics.
• The People's Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina - Katherine Sobering recounts the history of the Hotel Bauen, detailing its transformation from a privately owned business into a worker cooperative—one where decisions were made democratically, jobs were rotated, and all members were paid equally.
• Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Test State Power - The potential for a functional immigrant worker rights regime, advocates to imagine a portable, universal system of justice and human rights, while simultaneously leaning on the bureaucratic minutiae of local enforcement. Taking Mexico and the United States as entry points, Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleason analyze how an array of organizations put tactical pressure on government bureaucracies to holistically defend migrant rights.
• Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education - Part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen outline the four historical periods that led to major transitions in the worklives of faculty in this sector.
• "All We Do Is Talk Steel": Oral Histories of Sparrow's Point - Author Bill Barry's new collection of oral  history interviews with steelworkers from the Sparrows Point mill outside of Baltimore. These workers tell about their work, their lives and their union in vivid detail.
• Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities - Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock examine the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes, through case studies in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans.