“Beaten Down, Worked Up” paints vivid portraits of labor champions, from the firebrands of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the early 20th century, to the African Americans who led the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, to the multiethnic organizers — Latino, black, white — of Las Vegas’ Culinary Workers Union, which raised wages for 57,000 hotel and casino workers in recent decades.
