Is labor’s day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan argues that even as organized labor seems to be crumbling, a revived—but different—labor movement is the only way to stabilize the economy and save the middle class.

The inequality reshaping the country goes beyond money and income: the places we work have ever more rigid hierarchies. A “perceptive, informed, and witty utopian thinker” (Michael Kazin, Bookforum), Geoghegan makes his argument for labor with stories, sometimes humorous but more often chilling, about the problems working people like his own clients—from cabdrivers to schoolteachers—face, increasingly powerless in our union-free economy. He explains why a new kind of labor movement (and not just more higher education) is the real program the Democrats should push.

Written “in the disarming style of a self-deprecating lawyer in a beleaguered field” (Kim Phillips-Fein, The Atlantic), Only One Thing Can Save Us is vintage Geoghegan, bearing unparalleled insights into the real dynamics—and human experience—of working in America today.