"Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States“ with J. Albert Mann

In this episode of Coming From Left Field we feature author J. Albert Mann discussing her nonfiction book, “Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States,” and why honest labor history for young people is both urgently needed and systematically suppressed. Mann explains that she wrote the book for middle- and high-school readers using accessible language, drawing heavily on left labor historians such as Philip Foner and on Labor’s Untold Story, to create an easily readable narrative that places working-class struggle at the center of U.S. history rather than at the margins.

She talks about the “pyramid of oppression” as a core concept: capitalism maintains power by dividing workers—by race, gender, nationality, citizenship status, and other “bricks in the wall”—so people fight each other instead of the capital–labor relationship that actually determines their conditions. Mann emphasizes that this strategy appears across history, from feudalism through the Gilded Age’s violent strike-breaking (including private armies like the Pinkertons, who at one point employed more armed men than the U.S. Army) to current right-wing media’s focus on scapegoats like welfare recipients and trans youth.

The conversation walks through major episodes from the book—indentured servitude, the first Gilded Age, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Palmer Raids and Red Scare, the destruction of the IWW, the New Deal and CIO era, wars and the rise of the military-industrial complex, and into today’s gig economy and AI—always stressing that labor history is “working-class history” and should be understood inside the broader political and economic context, not as isolated heroic tales. Mann criticizes how children’s literature usually presents labor as decontextualized, hero-centered vignettes (often returning to “safe” events like Triangle where adults can pretend the problem was solved) while largely erasing radical moments such as Haymarket and the deeper role of communists and left organizers.

She also recounts the book’s fraught publication: HarperCollins (owned by Rupert Murdoch) bought the manuscript, then, after legal review, fired her union-editor Stephanie Gordon and tried to kill the book, only relenting after contract pressure—one in-house lawyer reportedly said, “It’s labor. It’ll bury itself.” Mann argues that this reaction, and the near-total failure of contemporary unions to use books like hers as organizing tools for youth, underscores how threatening serious labor education remains to capital, and how essential it is for any future movement that hopes to confront gig work, privatization, and growing inequality

J. Albert Mann is an award winning author of fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults, with a focus on working class history, disability, and social justice. She has written six children’s books and has published short stories and poems in Highlights for Children, where she has received both the Highlights Fiction Award and the Highlights Editor’s Choice Award. Mann holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her work is shaped by her own experience with disability and by years of disability rights activism, including involvement in the “We Need Diverse Books” movement pushing for disabled protagonists and histories in youth publishing.

 

Resources:

Order the book: https://kingsbookstore.com/book/9780063273481

 

Webpage: https://jalbertmann.com/

 

Greg’s Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Pat’s Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/

 

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