In a clean and well timed reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how alternate unionism has waxed and waned within the nation's political and ethical mind's eye, between either committed partisans and intransigent foes. From the metal foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from dwelling house to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves jointly a compelling matrix of principles, tales, moves, legislation, and folks in a streamlined narrative of labor and hard work within the 20th century.

The "labor query" turned a burning factor in the course of the revolutionary period simply because its answer appeared necessary to the survival of yank democracy itself. starting there, Lichtenstein takes us all of the approach to the organizing fever of up to date la, the place the exertions circulate stands on the middle of the hassle to remodel thousands of recent immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He deals an expansive survey of labor's upsurge throughout the Thirties, whilst the recent Deal placed a white, male model of business democracy on the middle of U.S. political tradition. He debunks the parable of a postwar "management-labor accord" through displaying that there has been (at such a lot) a constrained, risky truce.

Lichtenstein argues that the guidelines that had as soon as sustained harmony and citizenship on the earth of labor underwent a thorough transformation while the rights-centered social events of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies captured the nation's ethical mind's eye. The hard work stream was once accordingly tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: even though technological swap and a brand new period of world economics battered the unions, their actual failure was once one in every of rules and political will. all through, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most vital functionality, in conception if now not constantly in perform, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at paintings and within the better society. To the level that the unions fuse their objective with that impulse, they could once more develop into vital to the destiny of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive background that tells the tale of 1 of America's defining aspirations.

This version encompasses a new preface during which Lichtenstein engages with a lot of those that have provided observation on State of the Union and evaluates the ancient literature that has emerged within the decade because the book's preliminary ebook. He additionally brings his narrative into the present second with a last bankruptcy, "Obama's the United States: Liberalism with out Unions.?