Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover and What It Says About the Economic Crisis

Revised and updated, with a new afterword by the author

“There is much talk about ‘audacity’ these days, but true chutzpah is when the workers take over the factory and take on the bank. Kari Lydersen’s invaluable account of the Republic sit-down strike is an instruction manual for worker dignity.”
—Mike Davis, author of Buda’s Wagon and City of Quartz

December 5, 2008: It wasn’t supposed to work like this. Days after getting a $45 billion bailout from the U.S. government, Bank of America shut down a line of credit that kept Chicago’s Republic Windows & Doors factory operating. The bosses, who knew what was coming, had been sneaking machinery out in the middle of the night. They closed the factory and sent the workers home.

Then something surprising happened: Republic’s workers occupied the factory and refused to leave.

Kari Lydersen, an award-winning reporter, tells the story of the factory takeover, elegantly transforming the workers’ story into a parable of labor activism for the twenty-first century, one that concludes with a surprising and little-reported victory.

Kari Lydersen is a research associate at the Medill Watchdog Project at Northwestern University and a staff writer at Midwest Energy News. A former reporter at The Washington Post, she has had work also appear in The New York Times, People, The Christian Science Monitor, and In These Times. She is the author of Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American–U.S. Immigration in the Global Age and Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%.