This interwoven collection of stories first portrays the author’s early years surviving poverty on the violent streets of New York, ultimately shaping his journey to becoming one of the most highly publicized union organizers in America. The book is divided into two parts:
The Street offers a snapshot of the author as he leaves home in at age sixteen, candidly transporting readers into a world of crime, hardship, and danger, populated with colorful, intriguing, sometimes frightening characters. Cohen vividly recounts a harrowing year driving illegal gypsy cabs in New York’s most dangerous neighborhoods, followed by managing a cheap hotel, where he ends up using his instincts to help impoverished residents deal with various aspects of the system, including hospitals, law enforcement, and welfare.
The Picket Line opens with a gripping transition as the author successfully fights corruption in his own union local, before being hired as a lead organizer by a major trade union and inserted into daunting situations other staff couldn’t handle. The stories continue to be written as action dramas with engaging character studies, thrusting readers into the whirlwind of vicious labor disputes while providing an audience-friendly understanding of labor law and asymmetric organizing tactics.
The riveting engagements include defeating union busters, leveraging good contracts with hostile employers, rectifying unjust terminations, exposing company schemes to withhold workers comp benefits, and breaking the Ku Klux Klan’s grip on a union local.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS
“Maximum Leverage’s significance to the current crop of labor organizers couldn’t be more apparent. This is a book to inspire, animate, and inform...Readers not only get the anatomy of labor battles broken down in forensic detail—including the strategies employed to win them—you get the blood, sweat, and tears, too...Whether you’re in a union or not, this is one helluva ride from start to finish, and one you don’t want to miss.”
-Joe Maniscalco, Work Bites magazine, New York Labor History Association
"What gives Cohen’s book a substance most “how to” or theoretical accounts lack, is that he is writing about his own experience, giving names and faces to vivid personalities with all their quirks and contradictions that is the living reality of a union. Thus readers see the range of experiences that embodies labor organization, in a way no textbook can provide."
-Kurt Stand, ZNet
"Riveting...I learned so much. Countless people have approached me to let me know how much they enjoyed the interview with Phil Cohen."
- Carolyn Fiala, News Director, WOJB
"Great Book! It should be made into a movie!"
- Rick Smith, host of The Rick Smith Show, KPFK, (syndicated)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Cohen spent thirty years in the field as a lead organizer for Workers United/SEIU and became one of the labor movement’s foremost experts at defeating professional union busters. His work is responsible for landmark decisions by the National Labor Relations Board and OSHA.