Much of the labor and working-class history that has been written in the past forty years has relied on local case studies to reveal broad regional, national, and even international themes. Union Power: Solidarity and Struggle in Niagara by Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage does not buck that trend. It is a study of the Niagara Region on the northern side of the US-Canada border. This region is now primarily known for tourism; its rich industrial past is quickly receding from popular memory as massive deindustrialization has made Niagara heavily dependent on a service-based economy. Patrias and Savage appear to have intended this book for both academic and nonacademic audiences and seek to remind their readers of the struggles waged by the Niagara Region’s workers from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.
The importance of collective struggle is at the center of this book’s narrative. Patrias and Savage...
