For the past two decades, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how to rebuild working-class power. Plenty of ink and oxygen has been used in the debate over the way forward for the working class. Finally, in 2018, just as the working class and the organizations it built — unions — seemed to be gasping their last breath, education workers in West Virginia walked off the job in an all-out, 100 percent strike. They won.

The strike was so impressive, so dynamic, that suddenly workers in other states got the idea that they, too, could strike, reinforcing our understanding that workers learn to strike by watching other workers strike and win. Surely part of the reason that corporations have devoted so much effort to smashing previous high-strike periods is precisely because the employer class knows the threat posed by a good example.

While all six major walkouts in the spring of 2018 — including those in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado, Arizona, and North Carolina — were exciting and important, the victories, those tangible and less tangible, were uneven. This has to do with conditions in various states, history, and other factors that are not the subject of this book review.