In early 2018, the United States was hit by a strike wave for the first time in decades. Hundreds of thousands of educators in red states across the country walked off their jobs to demand better school funding and better pay. In the process, these strikers not only won historic gains for themselves and their students, but they’ve given hope to, and pointed the way forward for, the labor movement as a whole.

This historic upsurge constitutes a direct challenge to the longstanding reliance of union officials across the country on “partnering” with management and lobbying mainstream Democrats. It also cuts against the prevailing advice of most labor scholars, among whom surprisingly few have pointed to reviving the strike as key to organized labor’s revival.

In contrast, Joe Burns’s book Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today, which was first published in 2014 and is being reissued this next month in an updated edition, has been entirely vindicated by the “red state revolt.” Indeed, recent events have remarkably confirmed the political analysis and strategic prescriptions of Strike Back: the centrality of the strike, the need to break labor law, the importance of community support, and the urgency of defeating the right wing’s privatization offensive.