Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Esquire
This revelatory and inclusive book "unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees-behind some of the labor movement's biggest successes" (The New York Times) from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly.
Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor's relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this definitive and assiduously researched "thought-provoking must-read" (Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president), Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that untold history and shows how the rights the American worker has today-the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job-were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.
Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon's warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland's Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s. Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell is "essential reading for anyone who believes that workers should control their fate" (Shane Burley, author of Why We Fight). Kim Kelly is a labor reporter for In These Times magazine and has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018. Her writing on labor, class, disability, and culture has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV.Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, was published in 2022. A third-generation union member, she was born in the heart of the South Jersey Pine Barrens and currently lives in Philadelphia. "Narrator Em Grosland keeps these riveting stories of labor organizing moving along at a consistent, somewhat rhythmic pace that nicely complements the writing."
