Labor organizing has always been the stuff of high drama, replete with clandestine plots, heroic underdogs, and greedy villains. Strange, then, that there aren’t more dramatic cultural depictions of that high drama. One exception: Presente: A Dockworker Story, a new novel by the late union leader Herb Mills (1930–2018), which captures the action, intrigue, and passion of class struggle in a fictionalized account of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’s 1980 refusal to load military aid to the US-backed military dictatorship in El Salvador.

As Israel’s genocidal military campaign rages in Gaza, Mills’s brisk, dialogue-driven thriller is also an urgent reminder of the kind of militant international solidarity that the US labor movement desperately needs to recover.

By late 1980, El Salvador was in full-scale civil war, the country’s five leading political-military organizations united in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) against a brutal anti-communist military junta. After the March 24 assassination of renowned archbishop Óscar Romero and Ronald Reagan’s election in November, the ILWU “decided that when and if we learned of any further military aid being sent from any ports we worked, we would immediately announce our refusal to load it.”