Popular Reading & Cartoons

Reviving the Strike: How Working People can Regain Power and Transform America

If the American labor movement is to rise again, the author says, it will not be as a result of electing Democrats, the passage of legislation, or improved methods of union organizing. Rather, workers will need to rediscover the power of the strike. Not the ineffectual strike of today, where employees meekly sit on picket lines waiting for scabs to take their jobs, but the type of strike capable of grinding industries to a halt—the kind employed up until the 1960s. 206 pages paperback

Workplace Jokes: Only SOME of Them Will Get You Fired!

Did you hear the one about the supervisor and the new employee who bump into each other in a bar? Maybe, but maybe not. In either case, you can find it and a couple hundred other great workplace jokes in this new collection, the only one of its kind. 75 pages E-book in e-Pub format only (suitable for iBooks, Nook, or other ePub readers) Kindle coming soon!

Published by UCS, Inc.

A Bitter Pill: A Lenny Moss Mystery

Union steward Lenny Moss and his friends at James Madison Hospital are in the fight of their lives. The new hospital president, Robert “Third Reich” Reichart, has turned the hospital into a for-profit facility and launched a campaign to decertify the union. If successful, the decertification drive will destroy the union and compromise patient care. Staffing levels will be slashed, and half the departments will be outsourced to private companies. 252 pages paperback

Murder of a Post Office Manager

How far can you push a man before he explodes? Postal worker-union steward Paul Farley has battled his sadistic manager for years. Sometimes he wins a grievance; too often he loses. Paul watches as Manager James Newton uses his power to destroy the lives of workers at The Plant. So when Newton is brutally gunned down, it’s not a surprise when the police arrest the beleaguered union steward whose patience had worn out from losing so many battles with his cruel boss. 314 pages paperback

Unions for Beginners

It is a time when unions have returned to the front pages of newspapers and blogs and demonstrators are in the streets of America every day. It is a time when the right wing has tried to strike the final blow against what remains of the right to collective bargaining. It is a time when millions of members of the middle class are falling through the cracks in a downward economic trend that parallels the decline of unions. It is this time when people are turning again to the history of unions. Unions for Beginners provides an introduction to that essential history. 176 pages paperback

They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions

How familiar do these phrases ring? Unions are responsible for budget deficits; they’ve outlived their usefulness; their members are overpaid and enjoy cushy benefits. The only way to save the American economy, many say, is to weaken the labor movement, strip workers of collective bargaining rights, and champion private industry. In They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions, longtime labor activist and educator Bill Fletcher Jr. makes sense of this debate as he unpacks the 21 myths most often cited by anti-union propagandists. 204 pages paperback

Kings in Disguise: A Graphic Novel

This award-winning tale, set in the height of the Great Depression, received rave reviews long before graphic novels became the phenomenon they are today. Hailed as one of the top 100 comics of all time by The Comics Journal, Kings in Disguise now reemerges as a classic.

The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Workers' Movement or Death Throes of the Old?

Between 2008 and 2010, the progressive wing of the U.S. labor movement tore itself apart in a series of union-on-union struggles. More than 140 million dollars was expended, by all sides, on organizing conflicts that tarnished union reputations and undermined the campaign for real health care and labor law reform. Campus and community allies, along with many rank-and-file union members, were left angered and dismayed. It was ugly and destructive. 440 pages paperback

Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology

Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art, and lore. This new edition includes 40 pages of additional material from the 1998 Charles H. Kerr edition by Fred Thompson and Franklin Rosemont, and a new preface by Wobbly organizer Daniel Gross. 464 pages paperback

Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams

Rock stars, poets, filmmakers, activists, novelists, and historians lend their voices to this entertaining collection about the daily grind. From the folk anthems of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie to the poems of Walt Whitman and Amiri Baraka; from the stories of Willa Cather and Bret Lott to the rabble-rousing work of Michael Moore, and from the White Stripes’ “The Big Three Killed My Baby” to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” this great collection touches upon all aspects of working-class life. 550 pages paperback

Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street

Ripped from the headlines, Uprising provides a bracing snapshot of the union-led protest movement that captivated the nation and paved the path for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Author John Nichols recounts the gripping story of the more than 100,000 public employees, teachers, students, and their allies who descended on the capital in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 after Republican Gov. Scott Walker announced his plan to eliminate the right of public sector employees to unionize. The dramatic struggle (and the Democratic caucus’s secret escape across the border to Indiana in order to block a quorum) elicited extensive national media coverage and debate—as well as enormous grassroots support for protestors. 192 pages paperback

On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5

On the Global Waterfront tells the story of longshoremen in South Carolina who confronted attempts to wipe out their union, the state’s most powerful black organization, and rallied the nation and labor around the world in their successful fight. 224 pages paperback

Retire Happy: What To Do NOW To Guarantee A Great Retirement

Everyone who works for a living thinks at some point about retirement, but few actually consider what that really means, other than escaping the daily grind. For sure, most of us worry about having enough money, and this highly readable book provides a lot of information and advice on the subject: how much we’ll need, how to make the most of what we’ve accumulated, how to accumulate more (even as we get close to retirement) and how to make it last. For that advice alone, Retire Happy is worth the price. 248 pages paperback

Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin: Diary of a Chinese Garment Factory Girl on Saipan

We’ve all read newspaper and magazine reports about how miserable life is for garment workers in Third World sweatshops. But we’ve read very little in the workers’ own words, and that’s what this fascinating book offers. In Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin, 25-year-old Chun Yu Wang tells of her life as a Chinese emigrant to Saipan, searching for a better life 2,000 miles from her home. 180 pages paperback

Why Unions Matter

In this new (2009) edition of Why Unions Matter, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Unions mean better pay, benefits, and working conditions for their members; they force employers to treat employees with dignity and respect; and at their best, they provide a way for workers to make society both more democratic and more egalitarian. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. 200 pages paperback

Embedded with Organized Labor

This valuable collection describes how union members have organized successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past. 288 pages paperback

Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions

Sito tells the fascinating story of Hollywood animators, from the early days of Betty Boop and Popeye to today’s world of Pixar. He describes fighting for unionism during the era of virulent anti-Communism in Hollywood, in which if an artist stood up against management he or she was labeled a Red. 425 pages hardcover

Drawing My Times: A 30 Year Retrospective

The cartoons of Bulbul -- the pen name for California free lance cartoonist Genny Guracar -- have graced the pages of union newspapers and alternative publications for three decades. This great collection contains 312 of her best cartoons and 12 autobiographical essays. As well as labor issues, her focus here is on children, education, feminism, corporations, and much more. A woman of great talent, insight and sympathy for people who work for a living, her cartoons are syndicated in the labor press across the U.S. and Canada by UCS -- publishers of this book catalog. 188 pages paperback

Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films About Labor

This wonderful book is an encyclopedic guide to 350 labor films from around the world, ranging from those you’ve heard of—Salt of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Roger & Me—to those you’ve never heard of but will fall in love with once you see them. 434 pages paperback

The Killing of Karen Silkwood

This is an updated edition of the groundbreaking book about the death of union activist Karen Silkwood, an employee of a plutonium processing plant, who was killed in a mysterious car crash on her way to deliver important documents to a newspaper reporter in 1974. Silkwood’s death at age 28 was highly suspicious: she had been working on health and safety issues at the plant, and a lot of people stood to benefit by her death. 426 pages paperback