Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by one of the country's leading labor journalists, Hamilton Nolan.

He writes for In These Times and The Guardian, as well as other places, he is the author of the new book, The Hammer, Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, available now from Hachette Books.

Hamilton, Nolan, thank you so much for joining us in current affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

I love the energy that you're bringing to this book already.

Well, the book got me fired up.

It's a hopeful story.

It's a story of the potential that working people have to deploy their power, to seize it, which we're going to get into.

So you went across the country country and you talked to unionized

and unionizing workers all over the place. You talked to members of the Coloring Union in Las Vegas.

You talked to the Longshoreman in South Carolina and Charleston. You came here to New Orleans, hotel workers, convention center workers,

child care workers in California, Nabisco workers in Portland, a biscuit restaurant in West Virginia.

And everywhere you go in this book and all of the people you talk to there is a kind of common

theme that having a union does things for people.

And I want you to, maybe at the beginning here, because one of the themes in your book is that a lot

of working people don't know what having a union could do for them. Tell us, in your observations,

having spoken to all these people, having seen all these unions, what does having a union do for

working people? It's a great question and a question we should probably talk about more.

A union gives you power. That is fundamentally what a union does. You and I and everybody in the

world who works at a job, whether your job is at a media outlet,

or whether your job is at a Taco Bell restaurant, or whether your job is at a garage fixing

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