Capítulo 1
The Battle for Workers' Rights: A Struggle That Shaped America
In an era when "essential workers" became a household term yet remained among society's most vulnerable, Kim Kelly's "Fight Like Hell" couldn't be more timely. This meticulously researched labor history has become required reading for a new generation of organizers, with everyone from AOC to Sara Nelson praising its unflinching portrayal of America's working-class heroes. What sets this book apart is Kelly's focus on the overlooked stories-the women, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and disabled workers who formed the backbone of labor movements but were often erased from mainstream narratives. As a third-generation union member herself, Kelly brings both scholarly rigor and personal passion to these forgotten histories. The result is a work that has been called "the people's history of labor that we've been waiting for"-one that reminds us that the weekend, the eight-hour workday, and workplace safety regulations weren't gifts from benevolent employers, but hard-won victories secured through collective action, often at tremendous personal cost.
Capítulo 2
The Women Who Sparked a Revolution
When we picture labor organizers of the past, we typically envision burly men in hard hats. But as Kelly reveals, women were foundational to America's labor movement from its earliest days. In the 1830s, the young women working in Lowell's textile mills-America's first female industrial workforce-faced grueling fourteen-hour days in dangerous conditions, breathing cotton dust and risking dismemberment from unguarded machinery. Despite company-enforced moral codes and mandatory boardinghouse living, these "mill girls" created unprecedented spaces for female independence and intellectual growth. They established reading circles, published their own literary journal "The Lowell Offering," and formed mutual aid societies to support sick or injured workers.
Sarah Bagley emerged as their firebrand leader, founding the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to fight for a ten-hour workday. As editor of the Voice of Industry, she exposed the "slow and legal assassination" of the mill system, documenting how women developed tuberculosis, suffered miscarriages, and faced permanent health damage. Her detailed accounts described women as young as twelve working sixty-hour weeks, their fingers bleeding from the constant manipulation of cotton threads, and their lungs scarred by textile dust. Bagley fiercely rejected the notion that mill work was voluntary: "The whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity... Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery." Her writings influenced state investigations into working conditions and inspired similar reform movements across New England.
This pattern of women's leadership continued after the Civil War, when newly emancipated Black washerwomen in Jackson, Mississippi formed the South's first labor union in 1866. Tired of poverty wages for backbreaking work, they petitioned the mayor demanding uniform rates-$1.50 per day for washing, $15 monthly for family washing. Their organizing sparked a wave of Black worker activism throughout the Reconstruction South. These women developed sophisticated networks, using church meetings and social gatherings to coordinate their efforts while avoiding white surveillance and retaliation.
Perhaps most dramatically, in 1881 Atlanta, Black washerwomen seized a moment of civic pride during the International Cotton Exposition to flex their collective power. Starting with just twenty women meeting in a church basement, they formed the Washing Society and within weeks mobilized three thousand laundresses through relentless home visits and daily meetings. They developed a system of neighborhood captains who coordinated strike actions and maintained solidarity across the city. When authorities arrested six leaders and proposed crippling business license fees of $25 per washerwoman, the group boldly responded they'd pay-if granted control of the hand-laundering industry. Their strategic timing was masterful - they knew white Atlanta's reputation hinged on the success of the Cotton Exposition, where thousands of Northern visitors would need clean linens. Facing the prospect of a general strike during their showcase exposition, Atlanta's white power structure backed down. These Black women, though denied voting rights, had demonstrated their essential economic power and forced concessions from the white supremacist employer class, establishing a precedent for future civil rights organizing that combined economic and social justice demands.
Capítulo 3
From Triangle Fire to New Deal: Tragedy Sparks Transformation
The garment industry provides perhaps the most dramatic example of how tragedy can catalyze lasting change. In early 20th century New York, immigrant women toiled in dangerous sweatshops for poverty wages. The turning point came in 1909 when 23-year-old Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian immigrant and experienced strike leader, interrupted a male-dominated union meeting at Cooper Union. Rising to her feet, she declared "I am a working girl" and called for an immediate general strike. Her passionate appeal inspired 20,000-30,000 women garment workers to walk off their jobs in what became known as "the Uprising of the 20,000."
Despite securing contracts with most manufacturers, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory notably refused all demands. The consequences proved catastrophic on March 25, 1911, when fire engulfed the factory. With doors locked, inadequate exits, no sprinklers, and piles of flammable fabric, approximately 500 workers-mostly young immigrant women-were trapped. As fire engines arrived with ladders too short to reach the ninth floor, horrified onlookers watched women jump to their deaths. United Press reporter William Shepherd captured the tragedy: "I remembered their great strike of last year... These dead bodies were the answer."
The fire killed 146 workers and sparked national outrage. Yet factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris escaped justice-they were acquitted of manslaughter charges and actually profited from insurance payouts exceeding damages by $60,000, while settling with victims' families for just $6 per life lost.
One witness to this horror was Frances Perkins, who would later call it her "never-to-be-forgotten reminder" of why she dedicated her life to fighting workplace injustice. This Mount Holyoke graduate and suffragist became the chief investigator for the Factory Investigating Commission before advising Governor Al Smith on workplace safety reforms. Her talents earned President Franklin Roosevelt's trust, who appointed her as the first female cabinet member in U.S. history. As Labor Secretary, Perkins became instrumental in creating the New Deal, later saying it began the day she "smelled the smoke and saw the bodies of those young women workers burn." She championed the National Labor Relations Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, and created Social Security-fundamental protections that millions of Americans still rely on today.
Capítulo 4
Solidarity Across Divides: The Power of Unity
Throughout labor history, employers have attempted to exploit racial, ethnic, and gender divisions to prevent worker solidarity. Kelly shows how workers repeatedly overcame these divisions to build powerful movements.
In Detroit's auto plants, when companies hired Arab immigrants hoping they would be docile workers, they miscalculated badly. Instead of opposing Black workers, Arab workers found common ground with them as fellow exploited minorities. Both groups faced the lowest pay, harshest conditions, and limited advancement opportunities. This solidarity culminated in 1973 when the Arab Workers Caucus organized a massive wildcat strike after discovering their UAW Local 600 had used $300,000 of their dues to purchase Israeli bonds during the Arab-Israeli War. Twenty-five hundred Arab workers walked out, shutting down the Dodge Main plant and slowing production at others. By 1975, they had convinced the UAW to drop $48,000 of Israel-linked investments, marking a significant victory through collective action.
Similar cross-cultural solidarity emerged in Hawaii's sugar plantations, where companies deliberately recruited workers from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Portugal to create ethnic divisions. This strategy backfired spectacularly in 1946 when the ILWU united workers across ethnic lines for the Great Sugar Strike. Organizer Frank Thompson recalled how plantation owners "thought they could play one race against the other, but we brought them all together." The union established soup kitchens, medical care, and entertainment to sustain strikers through a 79-day work stoppage that transformed Hawaii's economic landscape.
Perhaps most surprising was the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS), which transformed from a whites-only organization into a beacon of interracial solidarity and LGBTQIA inclusion. Following the pivotal 1934 Great Waterfront Strike, leftist leaders pushed the MCS to integrate its membership across racial lines. The union explicitly included LGBTQIA workers-self-identified "queens" who formed a significant portion of the workforce-securing workplace protections for them decades before the gay liberation movement. The MCS adopted the slogan "It's anti-union to red-bait, race-bait, or queen-bait" and embraced queer culture, with members raising money through drag shows and decorating union halls with flowers and lace curtains.
Capítulo 5
The Invisible Workers: Domestic Labor and Care Work
Some of the most exploited workers in American history have been those performing society's "dirty work" of cleaning and caregiving. Often rendered invisible despite their essential labor, domestic workers have faced particular challenges in organizing due to their isolation in private homes.
During the Depression, Black domestic workers gathered on street corners in the Bronx, Harlem, and Brownsville, accepting below-market rates and abuse out of desperation. Civil rights icon Ella Baker and journalist Marvel Cooke investigated what they dubbed "the Bronx Slave Market." Cooke later went undercover, joining the "paper bag brigade" and earning just $3.40 for a day of strenuous labor. She published her findings in a five-part series titled "The Bronx Slave Market" and advocated for reform, emphasizing that true security for these workers could only come through "decent legislative safeguards, employer education and employee training, and, above all, unionization."
Dorothy Lee Bolden, who began domestic work at age nine, transformed into one of the most powerful domestic worker organizers in American history. After experiencing the benefits of unionization at National Linen Service (where her daily wage jumped from $3 to $23), she volunteered with SNCC in the early 1960s and organized against police brutality and school segregation. Living next door to Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, she sought his advice on organizing domestic workers. He told her, "You do it-and don't let nobody take it."
Bolden strategically used bus rides-often the only social time domestic workers had-to build community and discuss wages, hours, and working conditions. In 1968, she founded the National Domestic Workers Union, requiring just $1 and a voter registration form for membership. Within two years, Atlanta's domestic workers saw daily wages rise from under $5 to $13.50-$15. Membership grew to 13,000 across ten cities, and Bolden advised three presidents on social services and workers' rights.
Even today, domestic and care workers continue fighting for basic protections. The 2015 PBS documentary "Rape on the Night Shift" exposed the epidemic of sexual violence in the janitorial industry, where women workers-often immigrants with uncertain status-face extreme vulnerability working in isolation. SEIU-United Service Workers West responded with the Ya Basta ("Enough Is Enough") campaign, achieving significant legislative victories including California's 2017 Property Service Workers Protection Act and the 2019 Janitor Survivor Empowerment Act.
Capítulo 6
When Labor and Civil Rights Converge
For Black workers in America, labor struggles have always been inseparable from the fight for civil rights and human dignity. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded by A. Philip Randolph in 1925, exemplifies this connection.
Pullman porters performed countless duties-from making beds and shining shoes to providing childcare and medical assistance-all while being forbidden to eat with passengers or even sleep during overnight shifts. Despite the degrading conditions, the job offered steady pay and helped forge a nascent Black middle class. The company fought back viciously against unionization with spies, mass firings, and even violence, but within a year, more than half of eligible porters had joined.
Pullman maids faced even worse conditions, enduring sexual harassment from customers and gender discrimination from fellow porters. Despite their crucial role in establishing the union, the Brotherhood betrayed them in 1937, signing away maids' seniority rights and treating their welfare as an afterthought-even dropping "Maids" from the union name. Women like Frances Albrier organized despite resistance, while porters' wives like Rosina Tucker and Lucy Gilmore became powerful organizers themselves, founding the Colored Women's Economic Council.
The Brotherhood's organizing eventually expanded beyond workplace issues to broader civil rights concerns. When A. Philip Randolph met Bayard Rustin in 1941, they formed a partnership that would transform civil rights history. Rustin, a gay Black man who had accepted his identity from age fourteen without shame, became a key strategist for the civil rights movement despite facing discrimination for his sexuality. In March 1968, he joined the Memphis sanitation workers' strike after two workers were crushed to death in a garbage compactor. Addressing strikers rallying under "I Am a Man!" banners, Rustin declared, "If I were the mayor of this city, I would be ashamed... I wouldn't want these men to not be able to feed their families on the lousy pittance they are paid."
Dr. King also supported the strike, delivering his famous "Mountaintop" speech on April 3 before being assassinated the next day. The workers ultimately won their demands for dignity and fair wages, creating powerful symbolism that would inspire future generations of Black workers.
Capítulo 7
Disability Justice and Labor Rights
The struggle for disability justice represents one of labor history's most overlooked yet significant chapters. As activist Judith Heumann observed: "When other people see you as a victim, it's hard to see yourself as a leader." Yet disabled workers have consistently organized for their rights throughout American history.
In 1935, six young disabled New Yorkers formed the League of the Physically Handicapped to protest the Works Progress Administration's discriminatory hiring practices. After ERB director Oswald Knauth refused to meet with them, they staged a sit-in, declaring "We don't want charity. We want jobs!" After nine days of occupation and subsequent arrest, the League continued demonstrations and successfully forced the WPA to hire more than fifteen hundred disabled New Yorkers. As member Florence Haskell later recalled, the protests "not only gave us jobs, but gave us dignity, and a sense of, 'We are people too.'"
The historic 504 Sit-in of 1977 marked another pivotal moment when disabled activists occupied federal buildings for 28 days-the longest peaceful occupation of a federal building in U.S. history. With crucial support from the Black Panthers through Brad Lomax and Chuck Jackson, who coordinated meals, and the International Association of Machinists union providing transportation and communication resources, the protesters demanded implementation of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibited discrimination against disabled people in federally funded programs.
After 25 days, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano finally signed the regulations, ending the occupation and laying groundwork for the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA's passage followed more protests, including a powerful demonstration where sixty disabled protesters, including eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, crawled up the Capitol steps to illustrate the need for accessibility.
Despite these victories, disabled workers still face significant challenges, including the subminimum wage provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act that allows employers to pay disabled workers pennies per hour. This provision, ironically supported by labor champion Frances Perkins, was originally meant to help injured war veterans find employment but expanded to include all disabled workers, creating "sheltered workshops" that function less as job training and more as exploitative environments.
Capítulo 8
The Ongoing Struggle for Worker Power
Kelly's narrative concludes by bringing labor history into the present day, highlighting how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed deep inequities for "essential workers" who were simultaneously the most vulnerable and least protected. As vaccines arrived and employers reverted to exploitation, workers responded with unprecedented resistance. Thousands quit low-paid, high-risk jobs in what some called "the Great Resignation" while others organized and struck against callous corporations.
The fall of 2021 saw so many labor actions that the term "Striketober" entered the public lexicon, with workers at Nabisco, Kellogg's, John Deere, and IATSE channeling pandemic-era "fury and outrage" into solidarity and collective action. Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama and Staten Island launched unionization efforts against one of the world's most powerful corporations. Columbia University graduate students struck over low wages, Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers threatened massive action against pay cuts, and NYC taxi drivers won debt relief through a hunger strike.
These contemporary struggles connect directly to the historical movements Kelly documents throughout her book. The Alabama coal miners who remained on strike for over eight months as the book went to press stand in a direct lineage with the miners Mother Jones organized a century earlier. The Amazon Labor Union organizers in Staten Island follow in the footsteps of Clara Lemlich and the garment workers who refused to accept dangerous conditions and poverty wages.
What emerges from this sweeping history is a profound understanding that labor rights have never been freely given-they have always been fought for and won through collective action, often at tremendous personal cost. The weekend, the eight-hour workday, workplace safety regulations, minimum wage laws, and protections against discrimination weren't gifts from benevolent employers or politicians, but hard-won victories secured through strikes, protests, and organizing.
As we face new challenges in today's rapidly changing economy-from gig work to automation to climate transition-Kelly's book reminds us that the tools for creating a more just workplace have always been the same: solidarity, collective action, and an unwavering belief that workers deserve dignity, fair compensation, and a voice in the conditions of their labor. The struggle continues, but as the United Farm Workers' slogan reminds us: "Si, se puede"-Yes, we can.
Capítulo 9
The Revolutionaries: Beyond Bread and Roses
The most radical elements of America's labor movement sought not just better wages and conditions, but a fundamental transformation of society itself. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or "Wobblies"), founded in 1905, welcomed workers of all genders, races, and creeds when other unions excluded them. Their vision of "One Big Union" challenged not just individual employers but the entire capitalist system.
Lucy Parsons, born enslaved in Virginia, became one of America's most feared radicals after her husband Albert was executed following the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Authorities called her "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" as she traveled the country advocating for anarchism and workers' revolution. Ben Fletcher, a Black IWW organizer, built Philadelphia's interracial longshoremen's union by arguing that "industrial unionism" was the only path to overcome racial divisions that benefited employers.
The government's response to these radicals was brutal. During World War I, 166 Wobblies were arrested in a massive sweep aimed at crushing the organization. As Philadelphia's district attorney plainly stated, the intention was "very largely to put the IWW out of business." After a four-month trial, Fletcher was sentenced to ten years in federal prison and fined $30,000 (about $541,356 in 2021).
Dr. Marie Equi, a lesbian physician who provided healthcare to poor women and performed abortions, joined the IWW after witnessing police brutality against striking women cannery workers. Her antiwar stance during World War I led to imprisonment under the Espionage Act, though she continued supporting labor causes until her death in 1952.
The most brutal response came against Frank Little, an IWW organizer of mixed European and Indigenous heritage. In August 1917, while organizing copper miners in Butte, Montana, six armed men dragged him from his bed, tied him to their car, and eventually hanged him. His gravestone reads: "SLAIN BY CAPITALIST INTERESTS FOR ORGANIZING AND INSPIRING HIS FELLOW MEN."
Despite this violent suppression, the revolutionary spirit these organizers embodied continues to inspire labor activists today who see their work as part of a broader struggle for social and economic justice. Their vision reminds us that labor organizing has always been about more than just workplace conditions-it's about imagining and fighting for a more equitable world.
Capítulo 10
The Forgotten Workers: Sex Workers and Prisoners
Kelly's book breaks new ground by including chapters on workers often excluded from labor histories: sex workers and incarcerated laborers. Both groups have organized despite overwhelming obstacles and legal barriers to collective action.
Sex workers have a long history of resistance, from the 1917 protest led by San Francisco madams Reggie Gamble and Maude Spencer against anti-vice campaigns, to Margo St. James founding Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) in 1973-the first sex workers' rights organization in U.S. history. In 1996, San Francisco's Lusty Lady made history as America's first unionized strip club, securing sick days, anti-discrimination policies, wage increases, and grievance procedures.
Trans women of color who were sex workers-Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy-were at the forefront of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement, using their earnings to fund activism and shelter homeless queer youth through organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).
Incarcerated workers face perhaps the most severe exploitation, laboring under conditions that echo America's history of forced labor. The U.S. prison labor system generates approximately $1 billion annually while paying workers pennies per hour-if anything at all. Despite these conditions, prisoners have repeatedly organized for their rights.
The 1970s marked a high point for prisoner labor organizing, with unions forming across the country. At Walpole Prison in Massachusetts, inmates temporarily ran the facility themselves when guards went on strike, maintaining order through a volunteer system and impressing outside observers with their effective management.
More recently, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) has coordinated nationwide prison strikes demanding better conditions, fair pay, and an end to what many call "modern slavery." Their 2016 action involved 24,000 workers across 46 facilities in 24 states participating through work stoppages, hunger strikes, and commissary boycotts.
By including these often-overlooked workers in her labor history, Kelly reminds us that the struggle for worker dignity extends to everyone who labors, regardless of the nature of their work or their legal status. Their organizing efforts, despite overwhelming obstacles, represent some of the most creative and determined chapters in American labor history.
