In The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the 21st Century, Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta deliver a transformative vision for the future of workers, along with innovative strategies to build an economy that works for everyone. This is essential reading for everyone turning toward state and local work after bouncing off the neoliberal ceiling of the Biden Administration and a divided Congress, and now reeling from the hard right majority Supreme Court and their spate of backward rulings.
~Social Policy
This book shows how to begin to think of conditions in society not simply as issues, but as systemically connected parts of a whole.... pick up Smiley and Gupta's book to spark new ideas and perspectives on what is possible—and needed—now for the working class.
~People's World
[The Future We Need] functions as an accessible device for individuals working within unjust labor complexes, and in examining the failings of the past, looks forward.
~WABE
The Future We Need reveals for scholars and lay people alike the many ways that we are part of a lineage of working people who dreamed of and fought for a democracy that has real meaning in our daily lives. The authors provide a blueprint for a future in which ordinary people practice democracy every day in all aspects of their lives, a vision that surpasses simply voting but encourages collective governance. I assert that The Future We Need will be the go-to text for labor educators, organizers, and scholars alike.
~ILR Review
Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta's new book The Future We Need makes a significant and original contribution. What is exciting [about the book] is not so much its familiar litany of organized labor's difficulties as the creativity of the solutions it proposes. Smiley and Gupta's analysis and prescription point the way forward.
~Dissent Magazine
[Smiley and Gupta] challenge the real powers in the economy on issues that affect not only the workplace but also family and community life.
~New Labor Forum
