Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance. 

Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records. 

Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through labor’s greatest hits, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been preserved on these fragile discs.