This interwoven collection of stories 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, and candidly transports readers into a world of crime, hardship, danger, and drug addiction, populated with colorful, intriguing, sometimes frightening characters. The author vividly describes a harrowing year driving illegal gypsy cabs in New York’s most dangerous neighborhoods. In its wake, he finds himself buried under an avalanche of arrest warrants and seeks refuge in a cheap hotel, barely scraping by with odd jobs not requiring background checks. In a surprise move, the owners offer him the position of managing their establishment, 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 prologue bridging the period between the author’s early experiences and being hired as a lead organizer by a major trade union, 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

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“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

 

 

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.