It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy Labor Day.

Hope you're enjoying the holiday weekend if you are off from work.

And if you are working to keep all those

vacationers well served, this first major section of the show today is for you. How? Well, now we

continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We are up to thing number 17. And for this

Labor Day, it's 100 years of unionization and deunionization.

We have a great guest for this.

It's Georgetown University professor Joseph McCarton, an expert on U.S. labor, social, and political history.

McCarton Scholarship focuses on the intersection of labor organization, politics, and public policy.

He is the current president of the Labor and Working Class History Association,

a member of the board of the Catholic Labor Network, a founding member of the board of the

interreligious network for worker solidarity and more.

And he is co-author of the book, Labor in America, a history, which must be a hit because

it is now in its ninth edition.

And it's kind of a cheat sheet just for transparency.

Many of my questions will be drawn from an article he wrote last year that kind of condenses

a lot of the history in the

textbook. The article is called U.S. labor and the struggle for democracy. Professor McCarton,

thanks so much for doing this with us. Happy Labor Day and welcome to WN.YC.

Happy Labor Day to you, Brian, and thank you for having me. So the frame is 100 years of 100 things, but let's do some prehistory first.

You've written that the first U.S. unions coincided almost precisely with the founding of the Republic.

And I read that and I thought, really, we mythologize those days as an agrarian era, agricultural,

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