In an age of a corporate-driven globalization, austerity and attacks on unions, it often seems like workers today face insurmountable challenges. Yet today's workers aren't the first to feel all around them the effects of massive changes in capitalism. Labor history offers lessons in how workers tried to win power over their work places and lives in transformational times. Sometimes they won and sometimes they lost, and their histories offer powerful ideas and inspiration to workers and leaders who want to effect change today.