LABOR DAY

The last living survivor of a 1911 sweatshop fire, 106-year-old Esther Gottesfeld passes away leaving numerous questions about the fire, which is investigated by her granddaughter Rebecca and a feminist historian with a personal agenda.

Morrie Morgan looks for a job in Butte, Montana while on the run from Chicago gangsters, and as he tries to get the attention of Grace Faraday, an attractive widow who runs the boardinghouse where he resides, he learns that the local mining company is trying to force her off her property through dubious methods.

Presents a narrative chronicle of American organized labor from the origins of the industrial age to the present, documenting the rise and fall of unions and the ongoing fight for workplace equality.

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first non-fiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

Hundreds

...

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were considered the luckiest alive--until they began to fall mysteriously...

"The story of two dedicated women, a labor organizer and an immigrant laundry worker, coming together to spearhead an audacious campaign to unionize one of the most dangerous industries in one of the most anti-union states--Arizona--and offering a nuanced look at the modern-day labor movement and the future of workers' rights"-- On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories...