Bob Ostertag

Jane McAlevey

The famed labor and environmental justice activist presents a cautionary assessment of the American union movement that notes the current low membership of unionized private-sector workers while sharing the stories of her victories, revealing current conflicts in organized labor and making recommendations for how labor can be revived.

My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)

Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat is a deeply intimate look at the cataclysmic shifts between humans, technology, and the so-called natural world. Amid the breakneck pace of both technological advance and environmental collapse, Robert Ostertag explores how we ourselves are changing as fast as the world around us—from how we make music, to how we have sex, to what we do to survive, and who we imagine ourselves to be. And though the environmental crisis terrifies and technology overwhelms, Ostertag finds enough creativity, compassion, and humor in our evolving behavior to keep us laughing and inspired as the world we are building overtakes the world we found. A true polymath who covered the wars in Central America during the 1980s, recorded dozens of music projects, and published books on startlingly eclectic subjects, Ostertag fuses his travels as a touring musician with his journalist’s eye for detail and the long view of a historian. Wander both the physical and the intellectual world with him. Watch Buddhist monks take selfies while meditating and DJs who make millions of dollars pretend to turn knobs in front of crowds of thousands. Shiver with families huddling through the stinging Detroit winter without heat or electricity. Meet Spice Islanders who have never seen flushing toilets yet have gay hookup apps on their phones. Our best writers have struggled with how to address the catastrophes of our time without looking away. Ostertag succeeds where others have failed, with the moral acuity of Susan Sontag, the technological savvy of Lewis Mumford, and the biting humor of Jonathan Swift.

Technics and Civilization in the 21st Century

Facebooking the Anthropocene in Raja Ampat

In 1995, in the first contested election in the history ofthe AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency of the nation’s largest laborfederation, promising renewal and resurgence. Today, less than 7 percent ofAmerican private-sector workers belong to a union, the lowest percentage sincethe beginning of the twentieth century, and public employee collectivebargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Whathappened? Jane McAlevey is famous—and notorious—in the American labormovement as the hard-charging organizer who racked up a string of victories ata time when union leaders said winning wasn’t possible. Then she was bouncedfrom the movement, a victim of the high-level internecine warfare that has tornapart organized labor. In this engrossing and funny narrative—that reflects thepersonality of its charismatic, wisecracking author—McAlevey tells the story ofa number of dramatic organizing and contract victories, and the unconventionalstrategies that helped achieve them. Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell)argues that labor can be revived, but only if the movement acknowledges itsmistakes and fully commits to deep organizing, participatory education, militancy,and an approach to workers and their communities that more resembles the campaignsof the 1930s—in short, social movement unionism that involves raising workers’expectations (while raising hell).

Jeremy Adam Smith

An insightful analysis of five social justice movements and their relationship with the newspapers and journals produced by the activists traces the history of the alternative print media and their influence on the forces of abolition, women's suffrage, environmental awareness, gay liberation, and the Vietnam anti-war movement, as well as on public opinion as a whole.

Bob Ostertag

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