“A lot of people in America understand what the problems are,” said Nolan about the book released in 2024 that looks at the American labor movement and its critical place in society and politics today. “But they don’t quite know exactly what the path is to fixing it.”
Nolan writes regularly for In These Times magazine and The Guardian, and he has written about labor, politics and class war for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Gawker, Splinter and other publications.
Nolan has heard, seen and experienced labor unions and unionizers all across the country.
“I’m a labor journalist,” he stated. “I’ve been a journalist for about 20 years… I went through my own union campaign at the place where I was working in 2015. It was called Gawker Media, and we were the first online media company to unionize.”
In 2021, while reporting on labor for In These Times, Nolan was covering the “intertwined crises and opportunities” that faced workers in America in the wake of the pandemic. Before that, he had spent five years reporting on labor.
He said those years weighed on him and led him to write the book, which he spent most of 2022 writing as he traveled around the country speaking to workers and union leaders.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Nolan’s interest has grown in educating citizens, especially working-class citizens, about unionizing, its benefits and potential.
He said it stemmed from “hearing all the struggles that people went through … seeing how working people suffered during the pandemic and, in a lot of cases, didn’t have a safety net to protect them. Thinking about how unions and the labor movement could be the safety net that people needed.”
This ties in to Nolan’s idea of shared labor equity, pertaining to lower and working classes, especially. “There was a time in the history of this country when unions were very strong,” he said. “Unions created the middle class that gave us a lot of the things we have today … A lot of people today don’t know that they can, in fact, have a different life. They can have different conditions at work. They can have more control over their own lives … I want people to know they can access a power they don’t have right now by unionizing.”
Since its release in 2024, the book has been written up in Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times. The Times called it “a lively account of the current landscape of American labor organizing … 'The Hammer' offers an impressive array of scenes from the front lines of the 21st-century economy.”
“I really hope that it reaches regular people who might not know that much about the labor movement,” said Nolan. “I hope that this book can be an easy way for people that might not have thought a lot about unions to learn about unions, and also to understand the potential they have in their own lives.”
