Alamosa Public Library

"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....

King Coal is a 1917 novel by Upton Sinclair that describes the poor working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910s, from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner. As in his earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair uses the novel to express his socialist viewpoint. The book is based on the 1914-1915 Colorado coal strikes. The sequel to King Coal was posthumously published under the title, The Coal...

An illustrated account of immigrant Clara Lemlich's pivotal role in the influential 1909 women laborer's strike describes how she worked grueling hours to acquire an education and support her family before organizing a massive walkout to protest the unfair working conditions in New York's garment district.

"We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation's landscape. Behind these trends lies a little-discussed problem: the decades-long decline in worker power. Award-winning journalist and author, Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential to understanding some of our nation's...

"Her rallying cry was famous: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Mother Jones (1837-1930) was a celebrated organizer and agitator, the very soul of protest movements in the early twentieth century. At coal strikes, steel strikes, railroad, textile, and brewery strikes, Mother Jones was always there, stirring the workers to action and enraging the powerful." "When Mary Jones began her career as a "hell-raiser," as she put it, she...

In A New New Deal, the labor movement leaders Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds offer a bold new plan to revitalize American labor activism and build a sense of common purpose between labor and community organizations. Dean and Reynolds demonstrate how alliances organized at the regional level are the most effective tool to build a voice for working people in the workplace, community, and halls of government. The authors draw on their own successes...

Relates the story of seventeen-year-old Annie Shapiro, who launched a months-long strike with her fellow clothing workers in 1910 Chicago. Includes a script for a reader's theatre based on this story, a glossary, and further reading sources.

"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...

Returning to his hometown of Eno, North Carolina, with his family after he is fired from his job in New York, newspaper cartoonist Pick Cantrell must face the ghosts of his past in the form of family matriarch Mama Lucy.