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The closing of and restart of a furniture factory provided a unique opportunity to interrogate worker skills. As part of the bankruptcy sale, workers and managers ‘discovered’ a large number of worker-made jigs that had been integral to production. I argue that these are artifacts of workers’ implicit knowledge over generations of workers, troubling the notion of skill as only the explicit static attributes of individuals. Despite being seen as deskilled workers, the creation and use of these jigs are sites of worker agency suggesting that workers were more integrally engaged in production and not simple appendages to machinery. After the firm was bought, start-up proved difficult without either experienced workers or the physical artifacts of knowledge in the jigs. As several workers from the shuttered facility came to train new workers, they brought not only an implicit knowledge but a habitus that had gone unrecognized in the old facility.

Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the Left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. Essays in the volume examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes. Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest; Bill Fletcher, Jr., author ofSolidarity Divided; Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Sarah Jaffe, co-host ofDissent Magazine's Belabored podcast; Cedric Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago; Jennifer Klein, Yale University; Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center; Jose La Luz, labor activist and public intellectual; Nancy MacLean, Duke University; MaryBe McMillan, President of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO; Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Lara Skinner, The Worker Institute at Cornell University; Kyla Walters, Sonoma State University

This \"soft\" approach to employee involvement is compounded by the fact that the labor movement has conducted virtually no systematic evaluation of these programs and their impact on workers and their unions. This evaluation should not be just an analysis of whether programs are improving quality or productivity or not, which are management's goals. Indeed, the value of systematic evaluation is to look specifically at how employee involvement is affecting the functioning of local unions in terms of grievance handling, bargaining power, and political action, its impact on the lives of workers, and how unions are adapting to these changes. No five-page \"best practice case studies\" can suffice in the absence of careful, objective, systematic analysis. Ironically, the TEAM Act was also a byproduct of the initiative by the labor movement for \"labor law reform.\" In 1994 President Clinton appointed the \"Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations,\" headed by Harvard professor John Dunlop. While many of the important reform issues for labor were outside its charge, the Committee nonetheless framed the labor law reform discussion. Despite receiving overwhelming evidence of massive employer opposition to organizing efforts and intransigence toward unions, the conclusion of their \"Fact-Finding Report\" contained virtually no acknowledgment of these fundamental problems and went on to suggest that, overall, the labor relations system was working. The final report stressed the importance of employee involvement and suggested that Section 8(a)2 needed to be revisited. In February 1994, the AFL-CIO released a third report of the \"Evolution of Work Committee,\" entitled \"The New American Workplace: A Labor Perspective.\" As one of the subheadings reads, it primarily addressed \"The Role of Organized Labor in Driving Workplace Change.\" The report reviewed the current organization of work, efforts at redefinition of the \"new American workplace,\" how labor could assist in moving American business from a low road to high road strategy, and the benefits this could provide for American workers. The report goes on to discuss the importance of mutual respect between labor and management, but leaves only half a page to discuss the role of the AFL-CIO.

After being dismissed as irrelevant for a decade, the labor movement has featured prominently in news headlines as this volume goes to press. There has been plenty of bad news. Right-to-work legislation was passed in Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME threatens to undermine public-sector unions. In the private sector, union density continued its long decline from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to under 7 percent in 2018 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019). The 2010 Citizens United decision, permitting unlimited corporate contributions to political campaigns, has crippled unions’ political clout. At