Introduction

In Knocking on Labor’s Door, Lane Windham challenges the narrative that the 1970s was a decade defined by backlash and defeat for the American working class. Rather, she argues, millions of American workers, particularly young workers and many of them people of color, participated in union organizing drives in the private sector economy with energy, creativity, and also some success. Windham refocuses the lens on the decade and away from total union membership numbers, which point to a movement in decline, and instead zeroes in on the five million workers in the private sector who participated in union elections. These numbers show the “magnitude and breadth of organizing efforts that a transformed working class waged in the crucial years of the 1970s” (3). They point to levels of union organizing that mirror those of the 1950s and 1960s and, as Windham argues, to a continued persistence of American working-class...