Introduction: On work, writing about work, and the workers in Decatur
Ch. 1: Destined to do right: Larry Solomon, union man, versus Caterpillar
Ch. 2: Searching for a strategy: Staley, a small-town family business, goes global
Ch. 3:. Labor's savior?: Ray Rogers, slayer of corporate battle plans
Ch. 4:. A leader for the new World Business order: Don Fites remakes Caterpillar's ambitions
Ch. 5:. An honest-to-goodness hard-liner: Bill Casstevens, career UAW man
Pt II:. A blue-collar legacy : working in history's wake
Ch. 6: On the prairie's terms
Ch. 8. The great industrial slide and washout: A storm cloud in American history?
Ch. 9. The scab ascendancy: how weakened unions got even weaker
Pt. III. A call to arms 10. sizing Up the enemy
Ch. 11. The new Paladins: guardians at the gates
Ch. 12. Collapse and surrender
Ch. 13. A historical question: what if . . . ?
Ch. 14. forming a second front: the Staley workers Join the fray
Ch. 15. A third flank: the tire workers go on strike and the beginning of the end of a longtime union
Pt. IV. skirmishes and sieges
Ch.16. Living amid fear and hatred: the strikebreakers
Ch. 17. the New law of a larger land: the gladiator companies
Ch.18. No help here: the trade union workers
Ch. 19. Lost in a maze: the NLRB
Ch.20. Hit and run at Caterpillar
Ch.21. Desperately seeking solutions
Ch. 22. The ballot box Rebellion
Ch. 23. The road warriors meet the labor mandarins
Pt. VI. Surrender and retreat
Ch.24. Slumbering into oblivion
Ch.25. Still waiting for victory
Ch. 26. A sad armistice: the Staley workers lose out
Ch. 27. All things fall apart: the Caterpillar workers suffer defeat too
Ch. 28. An unexpected good-bye: the Bridgestone/Firestone workers lose some of their history
Pt. Vii. Heartfelt losses
Ch.30. Leave no bodies behind: the autoworkers live up to their word
Ch.31. Strategic instincts: the steelworkers think globally
Ch. 32. Lost on Eldorado epilogue: Heartbreak in the heartland