The scale of poverty among the poorest Americans, according to the United Nation's 2005 Human Development Report, is comparable to that in parts of the Third World. The U.S. infant mortality rate matches that of Malaysia. African Americans living in Washington, D.C., have a higher infant mortality rate than residents of the Indian state of Kerala. Across the United States, Black mothers are twice as likely as whites to bear low-birth-weight babies, and Black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday.

Child poverty rates in the United States have been rising steadily since 2000, following 20 years of decline, and, mirroring Mexico, surged past 20 percent in 2005. On average, a male child born into the wealthiest 5 percent of the U.S. population will live 25 percent longer than a male child born into the poorest 5 percent.

From its earliest years, U.S. capitalism has relied upon massive social and class inequality, despite all rhetoric to the contrary. Even during periods of economic boom and rising median incomes, a significant portion of the working class has consistently lived in extreme poverty.

This cold fact was easier to hide during the economic boom that followed the Second World War, when the wages of unionized manufacturing workers in the United States were the highest in the world.

When the postwar boom came to a halt in the mid-1970s, however, U.S. employers united to launch a sustained attack intended to shift the balance of class forces decisively in favor of capital, by forcing down working-class living standards and destroying union organization.

Class inequality has increased almost without interruption ever since, through boom and slump alike, and has now returned to the record levels of the 1920s, the decade before the Great Depression.

In 1970, the average real compensation for the CEOs of the top 100 U.S. corporations was 39 nine times the pay of the average worker. By 2002, they earned more than 1,000 times the average worker's wage. As Warren Buffett, the world's fourth-richest man, commented in his 2004 annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."

Shifting the balance of class forces is the urgent challenge facing the working-class movement today. The working class is facing a profound social crisis in the 21st century. Yet this crisis rarely merits a mention in the nightly news or on the floor of Congress.

Tracing the roots of this crisis requires a historical perspective--but one aimed at pointing the way forward.

Union organization is, of course, crucial to the success of the labor movement. Yet labor unions have never represented a majority of U.S. workers. Union membership peaked at 35.5 percent of the workforce at the end of the Second World War. Since the 1980s, union membership and strength has been in a downward spiral. In 2004, just 12.5 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate for workers in the private sector dropped to 7.9 percent in 2004--roughly half of what it was in 1983.

In the interests of building a stronger union movement in the future, this book examines why union membership has remained comparatively low and why it has declined so much in recent decades.

The strikes and struggles that led to permanent organization represent labor's biggest victories. But some important battles that were lost nevertheless impacted the balance of class forces. To understand the dynamics of class struggle in the United States, it is important to look at both the victories and defeats of the U.S. labor movement.

Likewise, some relatively short-lived labor organizations have been as important to shaping the character of the working-class movement as those that survived and prospered.

The Knights of Labor, the most powerful union organization in the 1880s, vanished as a significant force by the late 1890s. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) peaked in influence in the first two decades of the 20th century, but faded as a major force well before the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s.

Yet both the Knights of Labor and the IWW played a crucial role during key periods of class struggle, advancing the cause of industrial unionism and training activists who played a role in organizing the next generation of workers.

The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), an organization of Black autoworkers that grew out of a wildcat strike at General Motors' Dodge Main plant in 1968, lasted just a few short years. But during its brief existence, DRUM showed the potential for African American workers to wage a powerful fight against racism, while winning solidarity from a sizeable layer of white unionists.

In addition, because race and class are so closely intertwined in this historically segregated society, movements against racism have often profoundly impacted the direction of the class struggle, even when they have taken place outside the arena of organized labor.

The battle for Reconstruction after the Civil War shaped the character of the labor movement for generations to follow. The urban rebellions that rocked U.S. cities in the 1960s were struggles against racism and poverty, and helped to transform the political landscape alongside the powerful civil rights and Black Power movements.

The 1992 Los Angeles rebellion erupted in response to the acquittal of four white police officers captured on videotape beating Black motorist Rodney King. That outpouring of rage lasted four days--put down only by thousands of National Guard and federal troops occupying the city--forced the issues of racism and police brutality into mainstream discourse.

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THE WORKING class is often caricatured as white, male and blue collar. In reality, the working class includes skilled and unskilled workers in factories, laundries, restaurants, schools, offices and sweatshops; sharecroppers, tenant farmers and migrant workers laboring in fields; women workers and the non-working wives of male workers; and those who have jobs and the currently unemployed.

White males, in fact, hold a minority--just 46 percent--of working-class jobs, according to economist Michael Zweig. He estimates that women make up 47.4 percent of those in working-class occupations.

Zweig also finds that "[B]lacks and Hispanics are over-represented in the working class." African Americans make up 10.7 percent of the labor force, but 12.6 percent of those in working-class jobs. Latinos made up 9.2 percent of those employed, but 11.3 percent of those in working-class occupations.

Zweig estimates that the working class makes up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population, a clear majority. But Zweig probably underestimates the proportion of workers in the population.

Zweig correctly regards those who have a degree of "independence and authority" at work to be middle-class professionals. This category includes most lawyers, doctors, and computer scientists.

But Zweig also includes public schoolteachers and university professors in the "middle class" category, although teachers have been well represented in the union movement for decades. Like registered nurses and many social workers, teachers have experienced the progressive deskilling of their once-professional occupations in recent decades, with their work process increasingly dictated by authority from above. The growing number of doctors employed by profit-making managed care corporations likewise have little "independence and authority" over their professional medical decisions.

Zweig acknowledges, "By the way, the Department of Labor comes up with an even larger number for what might be considered the working class than I do. The Department notes that 82 percent of the 100 million non-farm, private-sector employees in the United States in 1996 were 'non-supervisory' employees."

Since the Department of Labor statistics include accountants, doctors, lawyers and other professionals in private practice, the actual proportion of Americans in working-class jobs probably measures somewhat less. The real figure is likely to fall somewhere between Zweig's estimate and the Department of Labor's--numbering more than 70 percent of the U.S. population, a large majority.

Working-class struggle has advanced only through building solidarity, uniting workers in a class-wide movement. The examples of such solidarity are hidden from mainstream historical texts, and their importance is often downplayed or ignored even in recent labor history.

This study devotes considerable space to the high points of class unity because understanding how workers have overcome divisions in the past is crucial to charting a course for future solidarity.

Viewing working-class history in all its complexity also challenges the existing myths about the gender and racial composition of the labor movement and the American working class as a whole.

White, male, skilled workers were well represented within the ranks of the skilled crafts that dominated the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But the Knights of Labor, the IWW, and other labor and political organizations drew unskilled Black, immigrant and women workers into some of the most important class battles in history well before the CIO in the 1930s broke through the exclusivity of craft unionism.

Too often, labor historians have downplayed or ignored the role of working-class women in the class struggle.

To be sure, many unions made no effort to organize in female-dominated occupations until the 1960s. But those who assume that women have been passive bystanders to the labor movement will be surprised to learn the heroic role women have often played in important strikes. During the highest points of class struggle, strikes have traditionally drawn entire families into battle, on and off picket lines.

In the case of mining, for example, women were rarely employed as coal miners, but fought in solidarity with husbands, brothers and sons, in some of history's most bitter and violent confrontations between labor and capital.

It is no accident that Mother Jones, the charismatic woman who traveled the country in support of striking miners a century ago, is one of the most legendary figures in working-class history.

Typically, mining companies evicted miners and their families from company housing as soon as a strike began, forcing entire communities into homelessness for the weeks or months of the strike. Striking families would set up tent colonies, often near the mine entrance, and entire families would band together to block the roads from strikebreakers.

In the infamous Ludlow, Colo., strike in 1913, women did not merely organize the tent communities to feed and give shelter to the ten thousand miners and their families--they also joined the men on pickets and organized international solidarity.

Women workers, when given the opportunity, have often been willing to fight inside the union movement for their rights as women. Although such examples are often anecdotal, they offer a powerful challenge to gender stereotypes.

In just one example, women were "especially prominent" among the delegates to the Washington state convention of union boilermakers in June 1919, "and when they heard a proposal to denounce the employment of married women, in the words of one reporter, they 'beat it to a frazzle.'"

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