With around 12.5 million members in more than fifty affiliate unions, the AFL-CIO remains a standard-bearer for the struggles of the American labor movement over the last several decades. The Federation has been subjected to much critical analysis, but we have not had a detailed internal history of the organization, especially since the rise of global neoliberalism from around 1980. Timothy Minchin’s meticulously researched and clearly written book provides a valuable resource to fill that gap. The author provides a wealth of information from insider participants in major events, and while the story Minchin tells raises more questions than it answers, it reminds us of critical conflicts that are still with us today.Minchin acknowledges the limits of the AFL-CIO’s “golden era” under founding president George Meany, including the dominance of more conservative AFL unions, the lack of racial and gender representation, resistance to new organizing, and Cold War ideology. As a relatively decentralized, voluntary federation, it typically focused on its self-defined role as a “people’s lobby,” especially at the federal level. Much of the book centers on events in Washington, DC, where the Federation has its headquarters a stone’s throw from the White House. Minchin organizes his narrative around what he sees as key turning points, including the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Reagan’s firing of the striking federal air traffic controllers in 1981, the 1993 passage of the North American Free Trade Act under President Bill Clinton, and the election of George W. Bush in 2000.Lane Kirkland took over as AFL-CIO president in 1979, just in time for the deluge. The 1980s were dominated by Reagan’s aggressively antiunion National Labor Relations Board and court decisions that turned the law against workers’ rights, and between 1980 and 1988 the number of union representation elections fell by almost half. The new political environment emboldened employers not only to resist unionization in new workplaces but to attack pattern bargaining in already unionized sectors and to use permanent replacements to break strikes. Against this onslaught, Kirkland’s main achievement was simply maintaining internal unity and bringing unions like the United Auto Workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and smaller affiliates back into the Federation.Labor would not regain access to the White House until the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. Yet even with a Democratic Congress, the Clinton administration failed to win either universal health care or labor law reform—two key union legislative priorities—and it delivered a stunning blow to the Federation on trade with its passage of the North American Free Trade Act. Those failures and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 led to Kirkland’s departure and the election of John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) as AFL-CIO president in 1995.Sweeney inaugurated a period of high hopes and activist reform, including more diverse leadership and staff in the Federation, an expanded commitment to organizing and to initiatives like Union Cities and Union Summer, coalitions with community and social movement groups, the abolition of the anticommunist American Institute for Free Labor Development, and a historic shift toward policy on immigration. For a time, the new momentum helped produce significant gains, and in 1998 union membership actually ticked upward by around a hundred thousand.It was not to last. In the 2000 presidential election, the US Supreme Court gave the contested Electoral College victory to Republican George W. Bush, bringing back a hostile administration in Washington whose power solidified after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Unions were back on the defensive for the second half of Sweeney’s tenure, and the number of union representation elections fell from 2,896 in 2000 to 1,588 in 2008. Minchin quotes Laborers’ union leader Terry O’Sullivan’s description of the Bush administration as “eight years of torture and hell” (264), yet the 2005 split of several major unions to form the Change to Win federation, led by Sweeney’s successor as SEIU president, Andy Stern, ultimately made little difference in the larger trend. One positive note during this period was the Federation’s continued development of a powerful voter mobilization capacity, but even this ran up against the persistent barrier of intense, united political countermobilization by business, especially against any attempts at labor law reform.It is a sobering record to recall. Through it all, Minchin stays close to his empirical data, and at times this can be slow going. The author devotes an entire chapter to the September 1981 Solidarity Day March, which no doubt consumed the Federation’s attention at the time and helped reassert its capacity to mobilize but now seems like mainly a symbolic achievement. Minchin also occasionally gets caught up in the micro-level details of Beltway political diplomacy or Federation protocol; but elsewhere his presentation is analytically astute. He notes the strategic importance of the Federation’s legislative interests, how rising health care costs reinforced employer opposition to collective bargaining, and how trade liberalization and job loss helped to decimate the unions in manufacturing and weak legal protections inhibited unionization in new sectors and geographic areas.One longs for a more explicit interpretive framework or institutionalist perspective, though, which could help explain why particular struggles and strategies were important. For example, if the AFL-CIO has concentrated especially on politics, in part that is because it is so consequential. Minchin effectively shows how law and government policy are inseparable from organizing success in the field, undermining the conventional but essentially false opposition between politics and workplace mobilization. The book also shows that leaders and activists have been grappling with problems like these for some time, and it’s instructive to see how much those who came before us frequently saw matters as clearly as we think we do now, even if they were not always able to do exactly as they wished. In part as a result, their struggles are still with us, and Labor under Fire provides a valuable resource as we face our own difficult choices for the future.