Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war.Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

In The Future We Need, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta bring a novel perspective to building worker power and what labor organizing could look like in the future, suggesting ways to evolve collective bargaining to match the needs of modern people--not only changing their wages and working conditions, but being able to govern over more aspects of their lives.

Weaving together stories of real working people, Smiley and Gupta position the struggle to build collective bargaining power as a central element in the effort to build a healthy democracy and explore both existing levers of power and new ones we must build for workers to have the ability to negotiate in today and tomorrow's contexts. The Future We Need illustrates the necessity of centralizing the fight against white supremacy and gender discrimination, while offering paths forward to harness the power of collective bargaining in every area for a new era.

When people cannot find good work, can they still find good lives? By investigating this question in the context of South Africa, where only 43 percent of adults are employed, Christine Jeske invites readers to examine their own assumptions about how work and the good life do or do not coincide. The Laziness Myth challenges the widespread premise that hard work determines success by tracing the titular laziness myth, a persistent narrative that disguises the systems and structures that produce inequalities while blaming unemployment and other social ills on the so-called laziness of particular class, racial, and ethnic groups.

Jeske offers evidence of the laziness myth's harsh consequences, as well as insights into how to challenge it with other South African narratives of a good life. In contexts as diverse as rapping in a library, manufacturing leather shoes, weed-whacking neighbors' yards, negotiating marriage plans, and sharing water taps, the people described in this book will stimulate discussion on creative possibilities for seeking the good life in and out of employment, in South Africa and elsewhere.

In Twenty-Two Cents an Hour, Doug Crandell uncovers the harsh reality of people with disabilities in the United States who are forced to work in unethical conditions for subminimum wages with little or no opportunity to advocate for themselves, while wealthy CEOs grow even wealthier as a direct result.

As recently as 2016, the United States Congress enacted bipartisan legislation which continued to allow workers with disabilities to legally be paid far lower than the federal minimum wage. Drawing on ongoing federal Department of Justice lawsuits, the horrifying story of Henry's Turkey Farm in Iowa, and more, Crandell shows the history of the policies that have led to these unjust outcomes, examines who benefits from this legislation, and asks important questions about the rise of a disability industrial complex. Exposing this complex--which is rooted in profit, lobbying, and playing on the emotions of workers' parents and families, as well as the public--Crandell challenges readers to reexamine how we treat some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. Twenty-Two Cents an Hour forces the reader to face the reality of this exploitation, and builds the framework needed for reform.

From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? Shredding Paper unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry.

Michael G. Hillard deconstructs the paper industry's unusual technological and economic histories. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests.

Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, Hillard highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. Shredding Paper truthfully and transparently tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a folk version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, Hillard offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.

What Work Means goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as obsessive workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing.

Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.

In More Than Medicine, LaTonya J. Trotter chronicles the everyday work of a group of nurse practitioners (NPs) working on the front lines of the American health care crisis as they cared for four hundred African American older adults living with poor health and limited means. Trotter describes how these NPs practiced an inclusive form of care work that addressed medical, social, and organizational problems that often accompany poverty. In solving this expanded terrain of problems from inside the clinic, these NPs were not only solving a broader set of concerns for their patients; they became a professional solution for managing difficult people for both their employer and the state. Through More Than Medicine, we discover that the problems found in the NP's exam room are as much a product of our nation's disinvestment in social problems as of physician scarcity or rising costs.

Unionizing the Ivory Tower chronicles how a thousand low-paid custodians, cooks, and gardeners succeeded in organizing a union at Cornell University. Al Davidoff, the Cornell student leader who became a custodian and the union's first president, tells the extraordinary story of these ordinary workers with passion, sensitivity, and wit.

His memoir reveals how they took on the dominant power in the community, built a strong organization, and waged multiple strikes and campaigns for livable wages and their dignity. Their strategies and tactics were creative and feisty, founded on worker participation and ownership.

The union's commitment to fairness, equity, and economic justice also engaged these workers--mostly rural, white, and conservative--at the intersections of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Davidoff's story demonstrates how a fighting union can activate today's working class to oppose antidemocratic and white supremacist forces.

Lessons from Eviction Court goes behind the disturbing statistics of evictions and homelessness to provide the first-hand experience of a lawyer who is in eviction court each week, standing alongside people who are losing their homes.

Fran Quigley provides a clear and emphatic prescription for how we can end evictions and homelessness in the United States, with the stories of struggling clients serving as the introduction for discussions of the reforms needed. Homelessness does not need to happen, nor do widespread evictions. They do not occur in other nations like in ours, and they did not used to not be the norm here in the US. Lessons from Eviction Court explains how we can end this national crisis.

In Re-Union, David Madland explores how labor unions are essential to all workers. Yet, union systems are badly flawed and in need of rapid changes for reform. Madland's multilayered analysis presents a solution--a model to replace the existing firm-based collective bargaining with a larger, industry-scale bargaining method coupled with powerful incentives for union membership.

These changes would represent a remarkable shift from the norm, but would be based on lessons from other countries, US history and current policy in several cities and states. In outlining the shift, Madland details how these proposals might mend the broken economic and political systems in the United States. He also uses three examples from Britain, Canada, and Australia to explore what there is yet to learn about this new system in other developed nations.

Madland's practical advice in Re-Union extends to a proposal for how to implement the changes necessary to shift the current paradigm. This powerful call to action speaks directly to the workers affected by these policies--the very people seeking to have their voices recognized in a system that attempts to silence them.

Class Lives is an anthology of narratives dramatizing the lived experience of class in America. It includes forty original essays from authors who represent a range of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and occupations across the United States. Born into poverty, working class, the middle class, and the owning class--and every place in between--the contributors describe their class journeys in narrative form, recounting one or two key stories that illustrate their growing awareness of class and their place, changing or stable, within the class system.The stories in Class Lives are both gripping and moving. One contributor grows up in hunger and as an adult becomes an advocate for the poor and homeless. Another acknowledges the truth that her working-class father's achievements afforded her and the rest of the family access to people with power. A gifted child from a working-class home soon understands that intelligence is a commodity but finds his background incompatible with his aspirations and so attempts to divide his life into separate worlds.Together, these essays form a powerful narrative about the experience of class and the importance of learning about classism, class cultures, and the intersections of class, race, and gender. Class Lives will be a helpful resource for students, teachers, sociologists, diversity trainers, activists, and a general audience. It will leave readers with an appreciation of the poignancy and power of class and the journeys that Americans grapple with on a daily basis.

Matilda Rabinowitz's illustrated memoir challenges assumptions about the lives of early twentieth-century women. In Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. Rabinowitz devoted her labor and commitment to the notion that women should feel entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy.

Rabinowitz (1887-1963) immigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of thirteen. Radicalized by her experience in sweatshops, she became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918. Big Bill Haywood once wrote, a book could be written about Matilda, but her memoir was intended as a private story for her grandchildren, Robbin Légère Henderson among them. Henderson's black-and white-scratchboard drawings illustrate Rabinowitz's life in the Pale of Settlement, the journey to America, political awakening and work as an organizer for the IWW, a turbulent romance, and her struggle to support herself and her child.

In this collection of beautiful and raw essays, Amy S. F. Lutz writes openly about her experience--the positive and the negative--as a mother of a now twenty-one-year-old son with severe autism. Lutz's human emotion drives through each page and challenges commonly held ideas that define autism either as a disease or as neurodiversity. We Walk is inspired by her own questions: What is the place of intellectually and developmentally disabled people in society? What responsibilities do we, as citizens and human beings, have to one another? Who should decide for those who cannot decide for themselves? What is the meaning of religion to someone with no abstract language? Exploring these questions, We Walk directly--and humanly--examines social issues such as inclusion, religion, therapeutics, and friendship through the lens of severe autism.

In a world where public perception of autism is largely shaped by the quirky geniuses featured on television shows like The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor, We Walk demands that we center our debates about this disorder on those who are most affected by its impacts.

Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions and offers strategies to build a working-class movement.

While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the Left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response.

Essays in the volume examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

Contributors: Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest; Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided; Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Sarah Jaffe, co-host of Dissent Magazine's Belabored podcast; Cedric Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago; Jennifer Klein, Yale University; Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center; Jose La Luz, labor activist and public intellectual; Nancy MacLean, Duke University; MaryBe McMillan, President of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO; Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Lara Skinner, The Worker Institute at Cornell University; Kyla Walters, Sonoma State University

This comprehensive textbook provides an introduction to collective bargaining and labor relations with a focus on developments in the United States. It is appropriate for students, policy analysts, and labor relations professionals including unionists, managers, and neutrals. A three-tiered strategic choice framework unifies the text, and the authors' thorough grounding in labor history and labor law assists students in learning the basics. In addition to traditional labor relations, the authors address emerging forms of collective representation and movements that address income inequality in novel ways.

Harry C. Katz, Thomas A. Kochan, and Alexander J. S. Colvin provide numerous contemporary illustrations of business and union strategies. They consider the processes of contract negotiation and contract administration with frequent comparisons to nonunion practices and developments, and a full chapter is devoted to special aspects of the public sector. An Introduction to U.S. Collective Bargaining and Labor Relations has an international scope, covering labor rights issues associated with the global supply chain as well as the growing influence of NGOs and cross-national unionism. The authors also compare how labor relations systems in Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa compare to practices in the United States.

The textbook is supplemented by a website (ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/research/introduction-us-collective-bargaining-and-labor-relations) that features an extensive Instructor's Manual with a test bank, PowerPoint chapter outlines, mock bargaining exercises, organizing cases, grievance cases, and classroom-ready current events materials.

The Hard Work of Hope takes you into the heady days of 1960s and 1970s activism, chronicling the hopes and strategies of the young people who created the movements that rocked the country.

Michael Ansara was on the front lines. In this fascinating memoir, he traces an arc of discovery: from the hope and moral clarity of the Civil Rights Movement to the ten-year struggle to end the war in Vietnam, with its sit-ins, marches, confrontations, and antiwar riots.

Ansara takes the reader into the minds of the activists detailing their successes as well as their mistakes. The Hard Work of Hope shows how he learned to become a more effective organizer and build the Massachusetts Fair Share organization. The book explores issues that remain urgent. How does a movement build support when large parts of the country are opposed to its goals? How do you connect with people who disagree with you? How do you build organizations that unite across racial lines? How can we make progress on the unfinished business of the hard work of hope?

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.

This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

More than fifty years after the civil rights movement, there are still glaring racial inequities all across the United States. In Rich Thanks to Racism, Jim Freeman, one of the country's leading civil rights lawyers, explains why as he reveals the hidden strategy behind systemic racism. He details how the driving force behind the public policies that continue to devastate communities of color across the United States is a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals who profit mightily from racial inequality.

In this groundbreaking examination of strategic racism, Freeman carefully dissects the cruel and deeply harmful policies within the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems to discover their origins and why they persist. He uncovers billions of dollars in aligned investments by Bill Gates, Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, and a handful of other billionaires that are dismantling public school systems across the United States. He exposes how the greed of prominent US corporations and Wall Street banks was instrumental in creating the world's largest prison population and our most extreme anti-immigrant policies. Freeman also demonstrates how these racism profiteers prevent flagrant injustices from being addressed by pitting white communities against communities of color, obscuring the fact that the struggles faced by white people are deeply connected with those faced by people of color.

Rich Thanks to Racism is an invaluable road map for all those who recognize that the key to unlocking the United States' full potential is for more people of all races and ethnicities to prioritize racial justice.

Winner of the 2023 John K. Fairbank Prize and the 2023 James B. Palais Prize.

Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades.

Hwasook Nam asks why women workers in South Korea have been relegated to the periphery in activist and mainstream narratives despite a century of persistent militant struggle and indisputable contributions to the labor movement and successful democracy movement. Women in the Sky opens and closes with stories of high-altitude sit-ins--a phenomenon unique to South Korea--beginning with the rubber shoe worker Kang Churyong's sit-in in 1931 and ending with numerous others in today's South Korean labor movement, including that of Kim Jin-Sook.

In Women in the Sky, Nam seeks to understand and rectify the vast gap between the crucial roles women industrial workers played in the process of Korea's modernization and their relative invisibility as key players in social and historical narratives. By using gender and class as analytical categories, Nam presents a comprehensive study and rethinking of the twentieth-century nation-building history of Korea through the lens of female industrial worker activism.