Description: "Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor's relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law. In this well-researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates our history and shows how the rights the American worker has today-the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job-were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears. Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight to Win shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved"--
Brief description: Kim Kelly is a labor reporter for In These Times magazine and has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018. Her writing on labor, class, disability, and culture has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV.Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, was published in 2022. A third-generation union member, she was born in the heart of the South Jersey Pine Barrens and currently lives in Philadelphia.
Review Quotes: Rousing tales of courageous workers who dared to fight for better, safer jobs.
In this young readers' version of Fight Like Hell (2022), Kelly leaves out the chapter on activist sex workers and recasts the rest into individual profiles of 22 organizers and advocates. Giants in the great struggle, like Frances Perkins, Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs (who ran for president from prison in 1920), and Judy Heumann have entries, and she also includes more recent, lesser-known heroes. The subjects are diverse, including people of color, immigrants, and other people from marginalized groups. Kelly chronicles their triumphs and tragedies and their relentless battles with largely faceless, uniformly hostile bosses. Her rhetoric often takes a fiery turn: "I could feel the heat roll off her words," she writes about an interview with Jennifer Bates, one of the leaders in a bitter, ongoing struggle against "Jeff Bezos's goons" to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Still, she reminds readers that her most iconic subjects were complex, fallible humans, acknowledging Bayard Rustin's support for the war in Vietnam, for example, or how César Chávez and Dolores Huerta froze their longtime co-worker Maria Moreno out of the United Farm Workers. A passionate read that would pair well with J. Albert Mann's Shift Happens (2024), Kelly's central message shines through. "Collective working-class power is behind every step forward this country has made." Fiercely partisan, rich in role models. (source notes) (Nonfiction. 12-16)--Kirkus "4/1/25"