Here are some suggestions for your Summer Book Bingo NW 2023 category: Workers' Rights. Book Bingo is our annual adult summer reading program presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. (Created May 2023)
Work Won't Love You Back
As many of us rethink the power dynamics that shape our jobs and workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jaffe’s passionate call to reimagine our relationships with work and one another, and imagine new possibilities, is indispensable reading. (Library Journal)
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View Work Won't Love You BackBlack Folk
Spanning two hundred years – from Kelley’s earliest known ancestor, an enslaved blacksmith to the essential workers of the COVID pandemic – her narrative focuses on the laundresses, Pullman porters, and domestic maids who established the Black working class as a political force. (Publisher)
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View Black FolkFight Like Hell
Journalist and union organizer Kelly debuts with a rousing look at the contributions of marginalized groups to the U.S. labor movement. (Publishers Weekly)
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View Fight Like HellThe Factory Witches of Lowell
A riveting historical fantasy... Faced with abominable working conditions, unsympathetic owners, and hard-hearted managers, the mill girls of Lowell have had enough. They’re going on strike, and they have a secret weapon on their side: a little witchcraft to ensure no one leaves the picket line. (Publisher)
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View The Factory Witches of LowellGilded Mountain
In the early 1900s, Sylvie Pelletier leaves her family’s Colorado mountain cabin to start work at a wealthy mine-owner's manor house and is fascinated by the luxury around her until she discovers the family’s philosophy is at odds with the unfair labor practices that built their fortune. (Publisher)
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View Gilded MountainThe Sleeping Car Porter
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
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View The Sleeping Car PorterA Collective Bargain
[McAlevey] offers a useful primer on how labor organizing works, and effectively refutes common assumptions about unions, including that they discriminate against women and are inherently corrupt. Well-run unions, she contends, can achieve better schools, stronger environmental protections, and increased racial and gender equality. McAlevey’s caustic humor... and contagious confidence in the efficacy of organized labor give this succinct volume an outsized impact. (Publishers Weekly)
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View A Collective BargainEssential
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But “Essential” reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over. (Publisher)
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View EssentialEverything for Everyone
In this collection of speculative fictitious interviews, author O’Brien imagines the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune – “a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse... Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people’s efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.” (Publisher)
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Availability: All copies in use
View Everything for EveryoneOn the Line
On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. (Publisher)
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Availability: Available
View On the Line