Seven Labor History Recommendations from Basic Books Group
“An indispensable guide to the broader dynamics of work in the contemporary moment.” —Nation
You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
In Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this “labor of love” myth—the idea that certain work is not really work and therefore should be done out of passion instead of for pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries, Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. Once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.
A “sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive” portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from “a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history” (Tiya Miles, National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried)
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality.
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths.
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this Pulitzer Prize–winning book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.
Most Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules. Work hours declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories, but they’ve increased significantly since the seventies. Worked Over traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to a new rhythm of work, and describes how we might gain a greater say over our labor time—and build a more just society in the process.
Popular discussions typically focus on overworked professionals. But as Jamie K. McCallum demonstrates, from Amazon warehouses to Rust Belt factories to California’s gig economy, it’s the hours of low-wage workers that are the most volatile and precarious—and the most subject to crises.
What’s needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle, and throughout Worked Over McCallum recounts the inspiring stories of those battling today’s capitalism to win back control of their time.
The revelatory story of a radical campaign to change the way we value work
“Illuminating, honest, nuanced, Wages for Housework is a must-read for anyone seeking to make a just and sustainable world for all.” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Shortlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize • A Guardian Best Book of the Year
Women do more than three-quarters of all the world’s unpaid care work, contributing over $9 trillion to the global economy each year. Dishes don’t clean themselves; dinner is not magically made; children must be cared for. But why is this work not compensated?
Wages for Housework is the fascinating international story of Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, whose movement demanded wages as a starting point for remaking the world as we know it. Drawing on their campaign’s roots in 1970s America, Italy, and the UK, with original archival research and interviews, historian Emily Callaci explores the revolutionary potential of paying women for their work in the home, and how Wages for Housework reimagined potential futures under capitalism—and beyond—in ways that continue to be relevant today.
David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America.
In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants-the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods-Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America.
In an Introduction to the 2018 edition, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.
How essential workers’ fight for better jobs during the pandemic revolutionized US labor politics
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers lashed out against low wages, long hours, and safety risks, attracting a level of support unseen in decades. This explosion of labor unrest seemed sudden to many. But Essential reveals that American workers had simmered in discontent long before their anger boiled over.
Decades of austerity, sociologist Jamie K. McCallum shows, have left frontline workers vulnerable to employer abuse, lacking government protections, and increasingly furious. Through firsthand research conducted as the pandemic unfolded, McCallum traces the evolution of workers’ militancy, showing how their struggles for safer workplaces, better pay and health care, and the right to unionize have benefitted all Americans and spurred a radical new phase of the labor movement. This is essential reading for understanding the past, present, and future of the working class.