The Death and Life of American Labor

“Stanley Aronowitz is the most important scholar on the past and present US working class.”
—Cornel West, author (with Tavis Smiley) of The Rich and the Rest of Us

“Four decades after False Promises, his classic study of class consciousness, Stanley Aronowitz stirringly returns to questions of work, power, and inequality in this exciting study. Steeped in historical knowledge, theoretical insight, and movement experience, The Death and Life of American Labor sustains a remarkable combination of sober reflection and grounded hope for a new workers’ movement, one without unions always at its center. It shows how the exhaustion of liberalism and the perils of climate change, temporary work, and new technologies both necessitate and foster fresh approaches.”
—David Roediger, author of Seizing Freedom

“Nothing less than a brilliantly argued demand for the labor movement to shed its ill-conceived twentieth-century ‘partnership’ garb with Capital and the Democratic Party and reinvent itself in the twenty-first century … Where others see an inevitable demise, Aronowitz finds hope for a rebirth that includes collective bargaining but goes well beyond it.”
—Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director, National Nurses United

“For over a generation, Stanley Aronowitz has been one of the left’s most prolific, passionate and provocative academic-writer-activists. His special focus has been on the long-running crisis in the trade union movement. Writing for both an academic and lay readership, this latest work addresses concretely the question of union renewal and once again offers his trademark combination of trenchant historical overview, accessible analysis, and application of the radical imagination.”
—Sam Gindin, author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism

“Aronowitz calls for a revival of a radical vision … Should be read by all those who worry about labor’s future.”
—Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas