Audiobooks on Labor History

A History of America in Ten Strikes

By: Erik Loomis
Narrated by: Brian Troxell
Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018Named one of the “5 Books About Famous Strikes That Demonstrated the Historical Importance of Civil Disobedience” by Bustle“Loomis refuses to romanticize this period or the labor movement it produced. . . . What Loomis’s book perhaps does best is remind us that the promise of the labor movement, despite its many... Read more

A Collective Bargain

Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy

By: Jane McAlevey
Narrated by: Jane McAlevey
Length: 9 hours 21 minutes

From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy.For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. Yet as McAlevey reminds us, there is one weapon whose effectiveness... Read more

A Different Mirror

A History of Multicultural America

By: Ronald Takaki
Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Length: 18 hours 35 minutes

Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States—Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans,... Read more

Working 9 to 5

A Women's Movement, a Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie

By: Ellen Cassedy
Narrated by: Hillary Huber
Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

9 to 5 wasn’t just a comic film—it was a movement built by Ellen Cassedy and her friends.Ten office workers in Boston started out sitting in a circle and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years, they had built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes, and ages.They took on the corporate... Read more

Esperanza Rising

By: Pam Muñoz Ryan
Narrated by: Trini Alvarado
Length: 4 hours 42 minutes

When Esperanza and Mama are forced to flee to the bountiful region of Aguascalientes, Mexico, to a Mexican farm labor camp in California, they must adjust to a life without fancy dresses and servants they were accustomed to on Rancho de las Rosas. Now they must confront the challenges of hard work, acceptance by their own people, and economic... Read more

Fight Like Hell

The Untold History of American Labor

By: Kim Kelly
Narrated by: Em Grosland
Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

“In Fight Like Hell, Kim Kelly celebrates the untold stories and unsung heroes of the American labor movement, taking great care to center voices that have historically been sidelined or silenced in mainstream conversations around workers' rights. The result is an inclusive, fascinating, and galvanizing retrospective that mines the depths of the... Read more

Sugar

By: Jewell Parker Rhodes
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 5 hours 22 minutes

For Sugar, life is anything but sweet.Ten-year-old Sugar lives on River Road Plantation along the banks of the Mississippi River. Slavery is over, but working in the sugarcane fields all day doesn’t make her feel very free. Thankfully, Sugar knows how to make her own fun, telling stories, climbing trees, and playing with forbidden friend Billy,... Read more

Death in the Haymarket

A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America

By: James Green
Narrated by: Joel Richards
Length: 12 hours 40 minutes

On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial, that culminated in four controversial executions, and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover.



Historian James... Read more

Our History Is the Future

Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

By: Nick Estes
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming "Water is life"



In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water... Read more

Beaten Down, Worked Up

The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

By: Steven Greenhouse
Narrated by: Fred Sanders
Length: 15 hours 34 minutes

“A page-turning book that spans a century of worker strikes.... Engrossing, character-driven, panoramic.” —The New York Times Book Review

We live in an era of soaring corporate profits and anemic wage gains, one in which low-paid jobs and blighted blue-collar communities have become a common feature of our nation’s landscape. Behind these trends... Read more

A Seed in the Sun

By: Aida Salazar
Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal & Aida Salazar
Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

A farm-working girl with big dreams meets activist Dolores Huerta and joins the 1965 protest for workers’ rights in this tender-hearted novel in verse, perfect for fans of Rita Williams-Garcia and Pam Muñoz Ryan.

Lula Viramontes aches to one day become someone whom no one can ignore: a daring ringleader in a Mexican traveling circus. But between... Read more

The Radium Girls

The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women

By: Kate Moore
Narrated by: Angela Brazil
Length: 15 hours 52 minutes

1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous—the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.


As the... Read more

One Fair Wage

Ending Subminimum Pay in America

By: Saru Jayaraman
Narrated by: Siiri Scott
Length: 5 hours 33 minutes

Before the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country, more than six million people earned their living as tipped workers in the service industry. They served us in cafes and restaurants, they delivered food to our homes, they drove us wherever we wanted to go, and they worked in nail salons for as little as $2.13 an hour—the federal tipped... Read more

Neon Girls

A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power

By: Jennifer Worley
Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

A riveting true story of a young woman’s days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms. 

When graduate student Jenny Worley needed a fast way to earn more money, she found herself at the door of the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, auditioning on a... Read more

Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop

The Sanitation Strike of 1968

By: Alice Faye Duncan
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 25 minutes

For nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson, the Sanitation Strike of 1968 hit close to home.Lorraine marched with her daddy and other sanitation workers through the streets of Memphis fighting for equal rights and safer working conditions. With her mother, she boycotted stores. Lorraine’s life was forever changed when she heard Dr. Martin Luther King... Read more

To Serve the People

My Life Organizing with Cesar Chavez and the Poor

By: LeRoy Chatfield
Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
Length: 8 hours 25 minutes

The long pilgrimage of LeRoy Chatfield weaves its way through multiple collective projects designed to better the condition of the marginalized and forgotten. From the cloisters of the Christian Brothers and the halls of secondary education to the fields of Central California and the streets of Sacramento, Chatfield's story reveals a fierce... Read more

Midnight in Vehicle City

General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class

By: Edward McClelland
Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Winner of the 2021 Midland Authors Book Award in History

In a time of great inequality and a gutted middle class, the dramatic story of “the strike heard around the world” is a testament to what workers can gain when they stand up for their rights.

The tumultuous Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 was the birth of the United Auto Workers, which... Read more