In high school, in the late ’90s, my friends and I played hooky and drove to Flint, Michigan, where we heard there was going to be a strike at the Delphi plant, an auto parts supplier to General Motors. We got there just in time to see the men walking out, marching slowly in horizontal lines, joined at the arms. Some of them were singing. An audience stood outside the plant gates, watching silently, and for a moment, everything held still. Later, I learned that 5,800 men and women had struck the Flint East plant, only to be joined by 2,700 strikers at nearby Flint Metal a week later. The two strikes were poised to shut down all 32 (at the time) GM assembly plants in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. That moment at the gates changed the trajectory of my life: My first post-college job was as a labor reporter.

BEATEN DOWN, WORKED UP: THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN LABOR by Steven Greenhouse Knopf, 416 pp., $27.95

A large, traditional strike action like the one I witnessed is now fairly rare. Striking used to be a union’s biggest tool. But in today’s employer-friendly atmosphere, with rife with anti-union legislation like the recent wave of right-to-work laws, strikes are used as an opportunity for employers to break the union, from firing the leaders to lockouts to hiring permanent replacement workers. From 2010 to 2017, there were fewer than 13 strikes involving 1,000 workers per year in the private sector. That’s a major reversal from the average annual number of major strikes in the 1980s (83) and throughout the 1970s (288).

Considering these numbers, it almost feels strange to be writing about unions in America at all right now. Labor unions represent only 6.4 percent of America’s private-sector workers and 10.5 percent of workers overall—the lowest percentages in 100 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why concentrate on the tiny minority of workers in union jobs when there are so many blue-collar, pink-collar, and even white-collar workers who can’t get anything close to a fair deal from their bosses?

That’s one of the main questions that Steven Greenhouse, who covered labor and workplace issues for The New York Times for 19 years, asks and answers in his new book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor. Greenhouse believes in the labor movement—it is a fact, he writes, that union jobs still empower workers and pay more—but he’s also a realist. He makes it clear that unorganized workers can enjoy benefits won partly on behalf of money and time put in by organized labor, and that’s OK. As Greenhouse chronicles alternate and nontraditional ways of organizing, the overarching lesson of the book is that virtually everybody ends up better off from mobilizing—even if they don’t add their names to union rolls.