Book - Building Unions: Past, Present and Future

By Peter Kellman, illustrations by Matt Wuerker

If we want to organize and build union power, we must change the fundamental relationships in our society between labor and capital. That means fighting the propertied class for a redistribution of wealth and power. To win that fight, we need to understand how and why the laws that are hard-wired into the Constitution and into subsequent labor laws were crafted to suppress union organizing. We need to know our own history.

Peter Kellman is an organizer, writer/researcher and lecturer for the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD), a group of activists investigating and disseminating the history of democracy and corporate power. A member of the National Writers Union and the Labor Party, he has worked for the Maine AFL-CIO and the New Hampshire AFL-CIO as a political organizer, strike strategist and health and safety educator. He edited Pain On Their Faces, an award-winning book on the 1987-89 strike at International Paper Co., published by Apex Press. He has been a construction worker and project superintendent, an air conditioning technician, a painter and a rubber mill worker as well as a union shop steward, local union president and civil rights worker. He lives in North Berwick, Maine.

Matt Wuerker is a political cartoonist for and founding staff member of Politico and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He has been awarded the 2010 Herblock Prize by the Library of Congress. The National Press Foundation chose him for the 2010 Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award for editorial cartooning, one the field's most prestigious awards. Berryman Award by. Matt has published two collections of cartoons, Standing Tall in Deep Doo Doo, A Cartoon Chronicle of the Bush Quayle Years (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991) and Meanwhile in Other News... A Graphic Look at Politics in the Empire of Money, Sex and Scandal (Common Courage Press, 1998). He illustrated the book The Madness of King George (Common Courage Press, 2003) by Michael K. Smith

Ages 8-12. Softcover. 7.5 x 9.5”, 38 pp., reprinted 2025.

“An unflinching picture of workers fighting against overwhelming odds for justice in the workplace. As Peter Kellman tells it in these pages, workers even have to fight to keep the knowledge of their own struggles alive. This book is a milestone in preserving and sharing that knowledge.”

–Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States