This book shakes up what we thought we knew about the working class in the 1970s. Far from a decade of division and decline, it repaints this pivotal decade as a moment of working-class promise. Women and people of color gained new access to the core of the U.S. job market following the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Once they got those jobs, they then powered a previously unseen surge in private-sector union organizing efforts.

Traditional industrial relations theories of organizing, employment relations, and economic democracy are cloaked in the language of color-blindness, with conceptualizations of justice and class identity viewed through the lens of dominant social identity groups. This has led to theoretical distortions and incomplete notions of worker justice—consistent with systemic biases that reinforce and perpetuate discrimination.

In The Future We Need, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta bring a novel perspective to building worker power and what labor organizing could look like in the future, suggesting ways to evolve collective bargaining to match the needs of modern people—not only changing their wages and working conditions, but being able to govern over more aspects of their lives.