New York City, but the most recent event mentioned in most books is the Taft-
Hartley Act of sixty years ago. No book mentions any of the major strikes that
labor lost in the late twentieth century, such as the 1985 Hormel meatpackers’
strike in Austin, Minnesota, or the 1991 Caterpillar strike in Decatur, Illinois
—defeats that signify labor’s diminished power today.^5 Nor do most textbooks
describe any continuing issues facing labor, such as the growth of multinational
corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas. With such omissions,
textbook authors can construe labor history as something that happened long
ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago. It logically
follows that unions now appear anachronistic. The idea that they might be
necessary for workers to have a voice in the workplace goes unstated.
This photograph of a sweatshop in New York’s Chinatown, taken in the early
1990s, illustrates that the working class still works, in America, sometimes