It is interesting – and disappointing – to see how organized labor is losing ground in the United States. I say this, not as a political statement but as an historic observation. Like so many advancements we take for granted, many of the labor laws that restrict abuses against workers and provide life-enhancing benefits for society were achieved through the efforts and sacrifices of union organizers and members.

Organized labor has lost support in recent years, in part due to its own management, political manipulation, and Capitalist efforts to maximize profits for investors and owners. Almost certainly, time’s effect on memory along with the encroaching distractions of everyday life has pushed understanding of the forces behind worklife to the background for most workers. To forget or to ignore is to lose ground that was hard fought and won over the decades, jeopardizing the relatively new labor advancements we take for granted; these include limited work hours, safety regulations, child labor laws, environmental protections, a minimum wage and negotiated benefits through collective bargaining.

The history of labor through the decades and centuries has been the basis of some excellent non-fiction literature and the inspiration for classic fiction.

Among non-fiction books of note are:

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David von Drehle
Growing Up in Coal Country by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Free the Children: A Young Man Fights Against Child Labor and Proves that Children Can Change the World by Craig Kielburger and Kevin Major
Nickel and Dimed by Meredith Melnick
The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs by Sidney Lens
Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America by James Green

Classic fiction inspired by workers and labor unions include:

Ironweed by William Kennedy
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

On this Labor Day holiday, as you celebrate with family or friends in a leisurely way, you may want to check out one of many good books about workers and organized labor to read about how we arrived where we are. Let the books inspire you to work at making work better for everyone.

Most of us started reading with the help of picture books. Some of us moved on to comic books. Some of us moved on to graphic novels. All of us, it’s safe to say, have continued to read books that sometimes have pictures – photos or illustrations.

When we think of pictures in adult fiction, we tend to think of graphic novels with drawings. But fiction can also benefit from photos. An excellent example is Carol Shields’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Stone Diaries. Shields cleverly employs photos and even a faux family tree to convince us of the reality of her fictional autobiography. While her writing paints vivid time, place and characters in the mind’s eye, the addition of photos solidifies her view for us.

Jack Finney, in Time and Again and its sequel, From Time to Time successfully uses illustrations and photos to enhance his stories. The promotional blurb on Time and Again calls the book “the classic illustrated novel”.

The concept of photos dates back at least as far as 1892 and Bruges-la-Morte by Belgian writer George Rodenbach, the first known work of fiction illustrated with photos . Since then, other notable novels employing photos include Orlando by Virginia Woolf and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

As more authors incorporate pictures in their fictional works, scholars are suggesting these books have their own genre. Suggested names for the genre include “iconotexts”, “image-texts”, “pictorial fiction”, “visual fiction” and the tripping-off-the-tongue “photography-embedded fiction”. Don’t worry what to call it … just picture it!