Red Emma’s

Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential—or allow it to be squandered—will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.

In chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers the actual places where labor and politics meld. He highlights how organized labor can and does wield power effectively: a union that dominates Las Vegas and is trying to scale nationally; a successful decades-long campaign to organize California's child care workers; the human face of a surprising strike of factory workers trying to preserve their pathway to the middle class. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the fiery and charismatic head of the flight attendants’ union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader, to try to fix what is broken. THE HAMMER draws the line from forgotten workplaces in rural West Virginia to Washington’s halls of power, and shows how labor solidarity can utterly transform American politics—if it can first transform itself.

A labor journalist for more than a decade, Nolan helped unionize his own industry. THE HAMMER is a urgent on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement.

Hamilton Nolan is a longtime labor journalist. He has written about labor, politics, and class war for Gawker, In These Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2015, he helped unionize Gawker Media, which became the first online media company to unionize. His book, THE HAMMER, about how the labor movement can save America, become a USA Today bestseller this year. His own publication, HOW THINGS WORK, can be found at HamiltonNolan.com. He lives in Brooklyn.

Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief of The Real News Network and the host of Working People, “a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” Prior to joining The Real News, he was an Associate Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and graduated with a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, In These Times, Boston Review, Truthout, and The Baffler. He has a book of interviews with OR Books titled THE WORK OF LIVING: WORKING PEOPLE TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES AND THE YEAR THE WORLD BROKE.