Reviews and Comments

Pretty good intro to organized labor in the US. Bill Fletcher Jr. challenges myths that range from "unions are all racist" and "unions either ignore immigrants or the rest of us" to "unions and corporations are both too big and don't really care about the worker" by reframing the myth/question, scrutinizing how terms are defined, stressing the power imbalance between workers and corporations/the employer class, examining the roles of public policy and corporate funding, and providing examples from US labor history. Fletcher does not shy away from times that unions have been problematic, but also, since this book is short and introductory, it doesn't go deep into nuanced arguments. It would be great to see an updated edition since this book came out in 2012, so it doesn't cover how the landscape around independent contracting/misclassification has changed, or the ways that anti-union propaganda has evolved in response to the boom in organizing by young people over the past couple of years.

The Women of Brewster Place is a set of interconnected short stories about the lives of Black women on a single urban block in an unnamed city. Through these stories, Gloria Naylor also narrates the arc of racialized US urban development and decay from the 1910s through the late '70s/early '80s.

Normally I'm really into the style of women's social realist melodrama in which Naylor writes. There are some great sentences, dialogue, and imagery throughout these stories. The best parts are those in which Black women's love and care for each other shine through, as well as the moments where Naylor seems to be offering gentle critique from a loving position. But throughout the book, the overtones are of suffering and punishment, and sometimes Naylor seems to verge into moral condemnation. The stories are harsher on individual Black women (and sometimes men) than on the structures that proscribe their lives. It was hard for me to tell whom this book is for.