Here are some suggestions for your Summer Book Bingo NW 2023 category: Workers' Rights. Book Bingo is our annual adult summer reading program presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures. (Created May 2023)
Stayed on Freedom
Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and global across organizations and generations. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Stayed on FreedomBlood Runs Coal
Former CIA officer Bradley delivers a page-turning study of the 1969 triple-murder of union leader Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter, and the crime’s impact on the United Mine Workers of American and organized labor in general. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Blood Runs CoalDefekt
Cipri returns to the IKEA stand-in LitenVärld (first visited in 2020’s Finna) to deliver a delightful middle finger to capitalism and conformity. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View DefektRadium Girls
A stunning graphic novel retelling of the shocking and inspiring true story of the Radium Girls, who fought for their lives and for workers’ rights after horrific management failures led to extreme cases of radiation poisoning in 1918. (Publisher)
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
View Radium GirlsThe World According to Fannie Davis
Excluded from legalized job markets by anti-Black racism, many Americans created their own economies to survive. In this poignant memoir, novelist Davis pays tribute to her mother’s ingenuity and business sense as a bookie for “the Numbers”, a “lucrative shadow economy” that was part of Black American life in the 1960s and 1970s.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The World According to Fannie DavisThis Has Always Been A War
A powerful, personal critique of capitalist patriarchy as seen through the eyes of a queer radical. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View This Has Always Been A WarFactory Girls
A darkly comic novel about three friends working in a shirt factory in Northern Ireland while they plot their escape from their provincial families and the simmering violence of the Troubles. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Factory GirlsThe Long Deep Grudge
Generously appointed with period illustrations and rare photos, the volume is a tour-de-force of labor history related through a personal lens of family commitment to labor organizing. (International Labor History Association Book of the Year, 2020)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View The Long Deep GrudgeMutualism
By 2030, most workers won’t be traditional employees but gig workers, low-wage service personnel, and white-collar freelancers. What about their safety net? MacArthur fellow/labor activist Horowitz recommends collaborative cooperation modeled on mutualist endeavors from our past, like food coops and the suffragette and civil rights movement. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View MutualismTroublemaking
There has been an explosion of organising among workers many assumed to be unorganisable, from delivery drivers in London to tech workers in Silicon Valley. The culmination of years of conversations on picket lines, in community centres, and in union offices... “Troublemaking” brings together lessons from around the world. (Publisher)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
View Troublemaking