Welcome to another episode of The Vast Majority. I'm Jackman Deputy Editor Micah Eutricht.

One of the best books I have read on the Labor Movement recently is knocking on labor's door, union

organizing in the 1970s and the roots of a new economic divide by Lane Windham.

It is great on a number of fronts. I mean, first of all, if you don't really have a sense of like what unions are and do, I mean if you're like, okay, unions are good, I I know that but beyond that you're not really

Sure much about the details of unions and why they're important I would recommend this book highly for the portrait that it paints of all of that and not just on the sort of

theoretical level but also explains all of it through case studies. The book focuses on

the 1970s which is often talked about as this era in which the working

class of America moved to the right that set the stage for Ronald Reagan,

that in some ways is the world that we're still living with today.

But Wyndham argues that the picture of that period

is actually a bit more complicated and talks about how there was not a kind of like as we discuss in our conversation today a

Culturalist shift by workers right word that somehow had them decide that they didn't need unions

there anymore in fact it was a period in which enormous numbers of new workers

especially black workers, female workers, were entering the workplace

for the first time and just like the white workers of several decades previous decided that they needed a union in order

to gain access to the meager social welfare state that we have in the United States through

those unions and they often fought really noble and heroic battles in order to

try to win unions on the job.

They did so in enormous numbers, as Wyndham notes in this book,

but what stopped them was not any kind of lack of a desire for getting unions but in fact the

employer pushback that really began in that era. Lane Windham is Associate Director of Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz

Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Lane, welcome to the vast majority. I'm thrilled to be here with you. So why don't you just start with the basic premise of your book knocking on Labor's door, the time period it covers, what the ground, total ground that it covers,

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