Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 traces the rise and fall of labor's power over the course of the twentieth century. It does so through provocative and engaging essays written by distinguished scholars of the modern labor movement. The essays focus on different times and places, from turn-of-the-century steel mills to the streets of 1930s Detroit to the halls of Congress in the 1990s.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources, the authors adopt a variety of approaches, from broad syntheses to careful case studies. Altogether, the essays tell a single story of workers struggling to find a voice for themselves and their unions within the nation they helped to build. It is a story of victories won and of defeats endured.