Common Preservation in Action
How to Protect Workers While Protecting the Climate
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published by Labor Network for Sustainability for Strike! Commentaries on Solidarity and Survival on 19 July 2021, the original piece can also be accessed here: … Read More »
Interview with Common Preservation Author Jeremy Brecher
Deb Hobson, who interviews local and nationally recognized guests who are exploring innovations and traditions on the leading edge of personal and cultural change for WKOPN 89.5 FM, interviewed Jeremy Brecher about his recently published book Common Preservation Download audio file … Read More »
The Seas are Rising and Common Preservation: A Conversation with the Authors
Eddie Yuen hosts a conversation with Cynthia Kauffman, author of The Seas are Rising: A Climate Justice Handbook and Jeremy Brecher, author of Common Preservation. … Read More »
Jeremy Brecher’s Updated Strike!
Judy Ancel interviewed Jeremy Brecher for the Hartland Labor Forum podcast on 24 June 2021 over the airwaves via Kansas City Community Radio WKKFI 90.1 PM You can listen to the podcast here … Read More »
Discussion with Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!
American indie singer/songwriter and anarchist spend the hour with historian and self-described "participant-observer" in the making of history, Jeremy Brecher on his podcast This Week with David Rovics. They discussed Jeremy's brand new book out on PM Press, more relevant than ever -- Common … Read More »
Making “Build Back Better” Better: Aligning Climate, Jobs, and Justice
by Jeremy Brecher, originally published by Labor Network for Sustainability on 08 June 2021, original article can be accessed here: https://labor4sustainability.org/files/MakingBuildBackBetter_.pdf Download Article Here … Read More »
“A breath-taking manuscript: I am overwhelmed and beginning to think how I can integrate this into my teaching. [An] enormous contribution to the advancement of know how for common preservation.”
“A breath-taking manuscript: I am overwhelmed and beginning to think how I can integrate this into my teaching. [An] enormous contribution to the advancement of know how for common preservation.”
“Over the last decades Jeremy Brecher has known how to detect the critical issue of a period, to sort the many realities of suffering and injustice and to emerge with a clear, short, powerful description. He does it again in this important book--it is about people, how our system devalues people and what needs to be done.”
“I have been an advocate, a student, and a teacher of advocacy for more than forty years, but 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 last forty years with his analytic history of previous movements.”
This book tells the story of a group of factory workers, housewives, parishioners, and organizers who tried to create an alternative to the economic powerlessness manifested in the closing of dozens of factories in the Naugatuck Valley region.
Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
If Seth Thomas doesn't get you
Plume and Atwood must.
This book is dedicated to the people of the Naugatuck Valley, who have educated me, sustained me, and taken me unto them as their pet outsider. I can truly say of the valley, as Herman Melville' Ishmael said of his whale ship, that it has been my Yale College and my Harvard.
"If all the people in a city are banded together to make it a better place to live, then it will be a better place to live. That's what the Naugatuck Valley Project is all about."
"I think the Naugatuck Valley Project is an embryonic sign of what has to develop in the future on a much broader basis for this society to survive and be strong."
“This is a remarkable book: part personal story, part intellectual history told in the first person by a skilled writer and assiduous historian, part passionate but clearly and logically argued plea for pushing the potential of collective action to preserve the human race. Easy reading and full of useful and unforgettable stories about what ordinary humans from around the globe can do and have done to improve the condition of their lives. A medicine against apathy and political despair much-needed in the U.S. and the world today.”
"This is an indispensable book that everyone concerned about the human future needs to read and act upon. It offers a fascinating blend of political autobiography, manual for
social change, and illuminating account of the shifting agenda of progressive politics, giving cogent primacy to the stark goal of human preservation. With species survival at stake, what Jeremy Brecher writes is at once frightening and inspiring."
“It is an amazing piece of work indeed, accomplishing the unimaginable, to paraphrase the Port Huron Statement. The blend of personal experience, collective memories, social analysis, and indications of possible ways out of our current disastrous state is impressive.”
“One of America's most admired activist-scholars shines his light on the path
forward, reminding us that social change is both possible and urgent.”
"The most important story of the past half century is that of ordinary people organizing to transform the way society looked at workers, unjust war, women, people of color, and the environment. Jeremy Brecher's life and book tell this story with a passion and comprehensiveness that make this a must read for fans of justice."
ABOUT JEREMY BRECHER
You and I may not know each other, but I suspect there are some problems that we share -- problems like climate change, war, and injustice. For half a century I have been participating in and writing about social movements that address those problems. The purpose of this website is to share what I've learned. I hope it provides something of use to you in addressing our common problems.
For the record, I am the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements. I have written and/or produced more than twenty video documentaries. I have participated in movements for nuclear disarmament, civil rights, peace in Vietnam, international labor rights, global economic justice, accountability for war crimes, climate protection, and many others.
STRIKE! Commentaries on Solidarity and Survival
- How to Protect Workers While Protecting the Climate
- The Blue New Deal: Making a Living on a Living Ocean
- The Future of People Power in the Coronavirus Depression
- The Great Depression and the Coronavirus Depression
- The Biden Climate Plan: Part 2: An Arena of Struggle
- The Biden Climate Plan: Part 1: What It Proposes
- People Power in the Coronavirus Depression


























