The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor Highlight

The fact of the matter—which can be seen as either grim or inspiring, depending on your attitude—is that the monumental task of a nationwide strike was necessary just for the BCTGM to maintain most of what it already had. These Nabisco factory workers, who do classic blue-collar jobs day and night but earn, in return, a minimally decent middle-class life, are an endangered species in the United States of America. They are a throwback to the golden postwar decades when such things were normal. That is no longer the case. Today, Local 364 and their Nabisco counterparts across the country are the inhabitants of a rare and shrinking walled garden of those who can still, with much sweat and sacrifice, enjoy what was once carelessly called the American dream.