Jeremy Brecher

During his time at Reed College, Brecher began to discover the then little-studied history of American labor.[5] During the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote or co-wrote several books on working-class movements including Strike!, Common Sense for Hard Times, Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements, and Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggles in an American Industrial Region. This work was motivated by the hope that it might help social movements break out of their isolation from the working class and might help workers reconnect with their own traditions of solidarity and self-organization.[6]

Brecher’s first book, Strike!, told the story of “repeated, massive, and sometimes violent revolts by ordinary working people in America.”[7] It focused on the action of rank-and-file workers “thinking, planning, drawing lessons from their own experience, organizing themselves, and taking action in common,” sometimes using “unions and other established organizations” as their means to do so but in other cases having to “organize themselves and act outside institutional channels.”[8] It used Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of “mass strike” to analyze such peak periods of class conflict in terms of a “mass strike process” marked by three characteristics: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”[9] This process often emerged in “informal workgroups” that provided the “cell unit” of mass strikes.[10] The book argued that ordinary people can have power because “it is their activity that makes up society.”[11] If they refuse to work, withdraw their cooperation, or take control of their own activity “they have the power to reshape society.”[11] Such power is not “the power of some people to tell others what to do” but the power of “people directing their own activity cooperatively toward common purposes.”[11]  

Strike! was described by the Washington Post as “Splendid . . . Clearly the best single-volume summary yet published of American general strikes.” The New York Times called it “An exciting history of American labor” which “brings to life the flashpoints of labor history. Scholarly, Genuinely stirring”. The New York Times Book Review listed it as a “Noteworthy Title.”[12]

Strike! has been repeatedly updated. The 40^th anniversary edition published in 2014 included a new final chapter recounting the working class “mini-revolts” of the 21^st century, including the “Battle of Seattle[13];” the “out of the shadows” immigrant rights marches of 2006; the “Wisconsin Uprising”; Occupy Wall Street; the Chicago public education and teachers strike of 2012; and the low-wage workers’ strikes of 2013-14.[14] The American Library Association’s Booklist described the revised edition as “Brecher’s riveting primer on modern American labor history” which provides a “thoroughly researched, alternative history rarely mentioned in textbooks or popular media” which is “to be read alongside the books of Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky.[14] In 2012 Brecher wrote a critique of Strike! which found the book marred at points by reductionism but still providing a useful perspective whose flaws were corrected in his later work.[14]

The 50^th Anniversary edition of Strike!, published in 2020 not only provided updated chapters on “mini-revolts of the twenty-first century,” including Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for Fifteen as well as new material which examined current struggles, such as #BlackLivesMatter, the great wave of teachers' strikes “for the soul of public education,” and the global “Student Strike for Climate” that may be harbingers of mass strikes to come.[15]

In 1969, Brecher and other collaborators including Paul Mattick, Jr., Stanley Aronowitz, and Peter Rachleff began sporadically publishing a magazine and pamphlet series called Root & Branch drawing on the tradition of workers councils and adapting them to contemporary America.[16] In 1975 they published the collection Root & Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements.

Through Root & Branch Brecher met Tim Costello, a truck driver and union activist and began a forty-year collaboration.[17] In 1973 they spent a summer travelling across the US interviewing young workers.[17] The result was the book Common Sense for Hard Times, which combined the insights gleaned from more than 100 interviews with young workers with interpretation of the historical forces that shaped their lives.[18] Listing the book as “recommended for wide purchase,” Library Journal called it “A popularly written analysis of modern times,” a “primer on class consciousness, written in popular style but with ample guidance for further reading.”[18] Howard Zinn described it as “A book written in plain language about the central fact in people’s lives, the work people do, what makes it miserable and unfair, what could make it creative and good, how people are resisting the present work-system, and how change might conceivable come about.”[18]

Observing the proliferation of local coalitions among labor and other groups, in 1992 Brecher and Costello edited a collection called Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community.  The contributors described the growing role of community-labor alliances in strikes and other labor struggles; the emergence of community coalitions challenging deindustrialization and promoting alternative forms of economic development; new electoral coalitions; and labor-community issue campaigns ranging from economic conversion from military to peacetime production to the campaign to block the confirmation of Ronald Reagan’s prized conservative judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.  The book also included programmatic alternatives ranging from employee ownership to statewide economic development strategies to military conversion. The Nation called Building Bridges “massively inspiring,” a “splendid collection of essays” and “one of the best practical how-to organizing manuals around.”[19]

Brecher’s work on labor history left him with a desire to “find or invent some way to do it that included those who had lived the experiences I was studying.”[18] In collaboration with community organizer Jan Stackhouse and video documentarian Jerry Lombardi, in 1979 Brecher initiated the Brass Workers History Project in western Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley.[20] Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Connecticut Humanities Council, the project involved participation of more than 200 workers and community members who provided documents, participated in interviews, served on an advisory committee, and reviewed the project’s products.[20][21]

In 1982, Brecher and his collaborators published Brass Valley: The Story Of Working People’s Lives And Struggles In An American Industrial Region. It utilized interviews, photos, and memorabilia to provide a voice and cohesion for the brass worker community and a scholarship-based interpretation of its history. Ron Grele, director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, described its “genius”: “I can think of no work, except perhaps Passing the Time in Ballymenone, that brings to bear so carefully and intimately the concerns and interpretations of the historian on the locality as it is perceived by its people; that is so sympathetic to that history and so grounded in the people's vision itself." It is “by far the most ambitious, and in many senses, the most successful such effort."[20] George Rawick of the University of Missouri called it "Absolutely wonderful -- the best single book on working class history in the U.S. we now have."[20] Gary Gerstle in Technology and Culture described Brass Valley as “The most comprehensive social history of a city or region in 20th century American yet to appear” and “a great achievement in using oral history to explore work and community life in 20th-century America.”[20] Brass Valley was selected for inclusion in the “UAW’s Labor Bookshelf.”[20]

In 1984 the Brass Workers History Project produced the 90-minute Connecticut Public Television documentary Brass Valley for which Brecher served as writer and historian.[22]

In 1986, Brecher published History From Below: How To Uncover And Tell The Story Of Your Community, Association, Or Union, a guide to doing participatory history based on the experience of the Brass Workers History Project and other work. Studs Terkel described History from Below as “an exciting primer, enabling ‘ordinary’ people, non-academics, to recover their own personal and community’s pasts.” He added,  “Jeremy Brecher’s work is astonishing and refreshing; and, God knows, necessary.  In this work lies the way to help cure our national amnesia.”[23]

Brecher has continued to create community-based historical and cultural products in the Naugatuck Valley. From 1988 to 1996 the Waterbury Ethnic Music Project collected and recorded hundreds of songs and tunes in more than 20 ethnic groups and produced 13 public radio programs in the Brass City Music series and the public television documentary Brass City Music as well as six Brass Valley Music Festivals.[24][25][26] He served as project historian for the exhibit Brass Roots at Waterbury’s Mattatuck Museum, which received 900,000 visitors between 1986 and 2005.[27] He also served as project historian for the Mattatuck Museum’s new permanent exhibit, Coming Home, Building Community in a Changing World, which won the 2010 Wilbur Cross Award of the Connecticut Humanities Council for “Exemplary Public Programming.”[27] Between 1990 and 2006 he served as project historian for a series of oral history projects and community exhibits on neighborhoods and the African American, Jewish, and Puerto Rican communities in Waterbury.[26]

Brecher also served as historian for the Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP), a community coalition formed in 1986 to confront plant closings and deindustrialization that has continued for twenty-five years as a significant vehicle for community action in the Naugatuck Valley.[28] He recorded approximately one hundred audiotape interviews with NVP leaders, staff, and participants.[28][29] His Connecticut Public Television documentary Rust Valley told the story of the Naugatuck Valley’s deindustrialization and the early efforts of the Naugatuck Valley Project to address them. His 2010 book Banded Together: Economic Democratization in the Brass Valley presents the development of the Naugatuck Valley in the decades following the publication of Brass Valley and describes community-based efforts to respond to its deindustrialization.[30] Professor Robert Forrant of the University of Massachusetts Lowell wrote in the ILR Review, “Brecher employs his knowledge of labor history and a great capacity for listening to his interviewees to tell the story of the Naugatuck Valley Project’s (NVP) success in keeping open nearly a dozen industrial plants and eventually starting new employee-owned businesses.”[31]

In 1984, Brecher and associates formed Stone Soup, Inc. a non-profit educational and cultural organization based in Connecticut. Over the succeeding decades it produced dozens of videos, TV and radio programs, books, curricula, community programs, cultural festivals, and other educational products.

Cornwall in Pictures: A Visual Reminiscence, 1868-1941, published in 2001 in collaboration with a local community working group in Brecher’s home town of Cornwall, CT was favorably reviewed by the New York Times on its publication in 2001; and later received a 2003 Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History.[32]

Brecher’s “history from below” work has pioneered what historical theorist Michael Frisch has called “shared authority” between history professionals and the communities they study and address. According to historian James R. Green, the “exciting use of oral history” as a “record of how people told their stories and made their own historical interpretations” was “epitomized in the work of Jeremy Brecher and his colleagues.”[33]

From 1989 to 2001 Brecher served as Humanities Scholar-in-Residence at Connecticut Public Television and Radio, a position supported by the Connecticut Humanities Council.[34]  He wrote the scripts for the documentaries The Roots of Roe, Schools in Black and White, Rust Valley, The Amistad Revolt, Electronic Road Film, Brass City Music, and Dance on the Wind, the last two of which he co-produced.[35]

Brecher developed and supervised the CPTV series The Connecticut Experience which included more than twenty documentaries on Connecticut topics. In 1995 the Federation of State Humanities Councils Schwartz Prize citation called The Connecticut Experience “A superb example of Council-conducted initiative, joining the best talents of the council with those of the television profession to produce programs of prize-winning quality and broad appeal. In addition to the triumph in media-program administration, by using the humanities to illuminate specific, complex issues currently confronting the state, it produced the most comprehensive and effective contribution, by any council project we know of, to the self-definition of the state.”[36]

A list of many of the documentaries Brecher wrote and/or co-produced can be found listed under the "filmography" section.

Brecher, with collaborators, was producer, writer, and host of Connecticut Public Radio’s Remembering Connecticut, which broadcast more than 80 radio programs on a wide variety of Connecticut topics.[37] The Oral History Review called Remembering Connecticut “One of the most ambitious, and certainly the longest-running, radio history series in the United States. . . Historically grounded to a degree rare in programming of this sort. . . Accessible, engaging, and far ranging.” A list of over fifty episodes can be found below under the section "Radio Credits".[38]

In 2000 Brecher received the Connecticut Humanities Council Wilber Cross Award for Humanities Scholar of the Year.[39]

While working on the Brass Workers History Project, Brecher became aware that the deindustrialization he was seeing in the Naugatuck Valley was largely the result of what would soon be known as economic globalization.[40] Brecher became increasingly concerned with economic globalization and the movements that developed to counter it over the course of the 1980s.[41] He collaborated on three books on the subject: Global Visions, Global Village or Global Pillage, and Globalization from Below.

Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order, a 1993 “multifesto” edited by Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, aimed to “initiate a dialogue which will establish globalization-from-below as a new paradigm for understanding and reshaping the world order.”[42] Bruce Shapiro, contributing editor, The Nation, described it as “ the first book to make radical sense of the politics of the 1990s.  Its astoundingly diverse contributors, drawn from the full spectrum of social-change and democracy movements, cut through both defeatism and ideological nostalgia with an invigorating and accessible vision of globalization-from-below."[43]

Global Village or Global Pillage, written with Tim Costello, focused on economic globalization itself.  David Montgomery, President of the American Historical Association, wrote in The Nation of Global Village or Global Pillage: “Penetrating analysis . . . crisp and simple language . . . as penetrating as it is succinct . . . an effective antidote to the mood of resignation before the omnipotence of transnational business institutions which pervades the political discourse of our times . . . timely and important.”[44]

Brecher also wrote and produced the documentary Global Village or Global Pillage?[45] which received the Gold Special Jury Award at the Houston International Film Festival, the Best Documentary award at the FirstGlance 5 Philadelphia Film and Video Festival, and a 2001 Emmy Award Nomination from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Target Audience Program. It was shown at the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting and at the largest rally at the protests that shut down the World Trade Organization Millennial Summit in Seattle in 1999. The United Steel Workers union distributed a copy to every Steelworkers local in the U.S.

In 1998, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) read Global Village or Global Pillage and asked Brecher to work for him part-time on globalization issues. Together with Sanders staff member Brendan Smith, Brecher developed the Global Sustainable Development Resolution which provided a comprehensive program for transforming the global economy based on the programs of a wide range of public interest organizations and policy analysts.[46] Brecher resigned from Rep. Sanders staff on April 29, 1999 when Sanders voted to support a resolution authorizing air strikes against Serbia,[47] but Smith continued to organize around the bill. Sherrod Brown, Cynthia McKinney, and Dennis Kusinich served as original cosponsors.[48] Tom Barry of the Interhemespheric Resource Center called it “A fantastic effort to pull together a cohesive approach to global economy reform.” Trim Bissell of the Campaign for Labor Rights called it “A Magna Carta for the new millennium.”

Globalization from Below, written with Tim Costello and Brendan Smith in the aftermath of the Seattle WTO protests, recounted the emergence of transnational social movements embodying what they called “globalization from below.” Frances Fox Piven called Globalization from Below “lean, thoughtful, and incisive . . . A must-read.”[49]

In 2005, Tim Costello asked Brecher and Brendan Smith to collaborate in creating an organization called Global Labor Strategies (GLS) “to contribute to building global labor solidarity through research, analysis, strategic thinking, and network building around labor and employment issues.”[50] In 2006 GLS discovered a debate unfolding in China about a Labor Contract Law whose key provisions were being opposed by the American and European Chambers of Commerce. Global Labor Strategies organized an international protest against this corporate opposition in the aftermath of which  international union federations pressured their employers to reverse course; human rights organizations mobilized support for Chinese workers' rights; US members of Congress introduced legislation decrying the corporate intervention and apparent administration complicity; and China's official labor organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), took a strong stand against corporate pressure.[51][52][53] This innovative work was prematurely ended by Costello’s death in 2009.

Brecher first became aware of the threat of global warming in the early 1970s from the writings of social ecologist Murray Bookchin.[54][55] In Common Sense for Hard Times, Brecher and Costello, citing Barry Commoner, warned that environmental degradation could destroy the capability of the environment to support a reasonably civilized human society.[56][57] In 1988 Brecher wrote a widely reprinted op ed for the Chicago Tribune called “The Opening Shot of the Second Ecological Revolution.” In maintained that a movement responding to global warming and other results of global environmental connectedness will have to “impose its agenda on governments and businesses.” It will have to say that “preserving the conditions for human life is simply more important than increasing national power or private wealth.” And “it will have to act globally -- with international petition drives, worldwide demonstrations and boycotts, and direct action campaigns against polluting countries and corporations.”[58]

In Global Village or Global Pillage, Brecher and Costello warned that “Global warming, desertification, pollution, and resource exhaustion will make the earth uninhabitable long before every Chinese has a private car and every American a private boat or plane.”[59] They maintained that the solution lies in “converting the system of production and consumption to an ecologically sound basis.  The technology to do this exists or can be developed, from solar energy to public transportation and from reusable products to resource-minimizing production processes.”[60] The role of organized labor in climate issues was a central focus of Global Labor Strategies, which in 2007 issued Brecher’s discussion paper “Labor and Global Warming.”[61]

In 2009, Brecher, Costello, and Brendan Smith joined retired AFL-CIO leader Joe Uehlein to form the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), which aimed to help build the “strong, broad movement that is needed to advance strategies for a transition from a world with an economy, society, and climate in crisis to one that has a sustainable future.”[62] LNS, soon joined by Becky Glass, published scores of reports, articles, and commentaries by Brecher, including “If Not Now, When? A Labor Movement Plan to Address Climate Change” (with Ron Blackwell and Joe Uehlein)[63] and Jobs Beyond Coal: A Manual for Communities, Workers, and Environmentalists.[64] David Bonior, Chair of American Rights at Work and former Congressman (D-MI) said, “The Labor Network for Sustainability is helping build a vision for the labor movement that sees beyond the bargaining table. They understand that the lives and livelihoods of workers depend on addressing the climate crisis, and that now is our best -- and possibly last -- chance to build a more just and sustainable society.”[65]

Brecher’s 2015 book Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival presented a brief history of the failure of climate protection efforts “from above” and “from below,” and proposed a “global nonviolent constitutional insurgency” as a “plausible strategy” for climate protection.[66] Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice, Princeton University, described it as “An exceptionally valuable contribution to thought, feeling, and action on this greatest challenge that has ever confronted humanity as a whole. All in all, the most stimulating response to climate change that I have encountered. I think it is one of those books that could make a difference!”[66] Climate Solidarity: Workers vs. Warming , published in 2017, was created as an interactive web manual to serve as the companion piece to Climate Insurgency. In addition to the history of the organized labor and climate change movements it offers an action plan for response to the climate crisis through organized labor.[67]

Following the 2016 election Brecher published an expanded volume with a climate action plan, Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual. Against Doom argued that through mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge climate destruction and a strategy of how climate destruction can be halted and even reversed.[68]

As of 2020 Brecher has focused his writings on a podcast/blog through the Labor Network for Sustainability called "Strike!: Commentaries on Solidarity and Survival."[69]

Starting in the early 1970s, Brecher began “autodidactic raiding parties” into general systems theory, cybernetics, and genetic structuralism, “what is now often called nonlinear or complexity theory,” seeking “to understand complex interactive processes and systems.”[70] This project was influenced by such thinkers as Norbert Weiner, Ludvig von Bertalanffy, and especially Jean Piaget.[71]  Over the course of forty years Brecher integrated the results with his own historical research and experience into a manuscript called Common Preservation.[72] The heuristic that emerged guided Brecher’s earlier work at least tacitly and his later work more explicitly.

The first volume derived from this longer study was published in 2012 as Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action. Save the Humans? argued that “Today, self-preservation depends on common preservation – cooperation in service of our mutual well-being. For any of us to survive, we must preserve the conditions of each other’s existence.”[73] Brecher described the book as “The story of a lifelong search for the means of common preservation.”[74]

Save the Humans analyzed many historical cases in which new forms of common preservation had emerged, and found them to often be related to what it called an “ecological shift” like the shift in worldview “from isolated to interdependent organisms” introduced by the science of ecology. In this shift, “people come to recognize apparently separate, independent entities as part of larger wholes.”[75] This often involves “the self-organization of people who have been isolated or even antagonistic.” It often “overcomes powerlessness” by making use of various forms of “people power” based on “a refusal to obey those currently in charge.”[75] Save the Humans explored the possibility of a “human preservation movement” specifically targeted against “the threats to human survival.”[75] Michael Pertschuk, former chair, Federal Communications Commission, wrote that “In forty years, I have never learned more useful knowledge about advocacy than from this book. It is absolutely unique in its integration of engaging personal narratives of the author’s direct involvement in every significant social justice movement of the past four decades with his analytic history of previous movements.”[76] An updated version of Save the Humans was published in 2020.[77]

In 2020 Brecher completed a companion volume Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction, intended to provide a heuristic for how to understand and nourish common preservation.[78]