Labor Pains: Inside America's New Union MovementLabor Pains

From the publisher:

Labor Pains is an insider's account of the struggle to rebuild a vibrant and powerful trade union movement in the United States. It takes as its starting point the daily experience of a union organizer, and brings that experience to life. It enables us to grasp how the conflicting demands of race, class, and gender are lived in the new union movement.

"I love it! It's about time somebody wrote about union organizing as the adventure it truly is! I hope this is the beginning of a whole new era in labor writing, which has historically been all too dry. Labor Pains is a great read."
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

"As a new generation of campus activists move into the labor movement, Labor Pains captures the complex hard love that working within today's labor movement entails. Through Suzan Erem's very readable stories we get a sometimes troubling, sometimes heartening, and mostly very real sense of the day to day struggles of a union trying to do right by its members and its vision, in an ever more challenging environment for workers and unions. It is a very personal story, framed by Erem's unique background and experience, but still tells a universal story about sticking with the union, even when the going gets rough."
-- Kate Bronfenbrenner, Director, NYS School of Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell University

"This is the painful story of a person who loves the labor movement; a straight from the shoulder, honest recounting of the persons she met and the joys and disappointments which were hers through the years of organizing. Suzan Erem's questioning of leadership tactics was the outcome of her deep respect for the people she organized. A series of honest encounters are told in a most readable fashion."
-- Msbr. John J. Egan, De Paul University