The Walking Delegate

Winter wind cuts across the St. Etienne Hotel construction site, where ironworkers dangle above frozen streets and Tom Keating tries to lead his crew through increasingly dangerous conditions. But the real threat isn't the height or the cold. It's Buck Foley, the walking delegate who trades worker safety for his own power, who turns union membership into a protection racket, who makes the men who build this city fear the very organization meant to defend them. Leroy Scott's novel captures the raw physicality and moral weight of early industrial America with striking immediacy. The workers face real dangers: unsafe scaffolding, grueling hours, the ever-present risk of a fall. Yet the deepest conflict lies between those who want to build something decent and those who've learned to profit from others' labor. Tom Keating isn't a hero in the grand sense. He's a foreman who simply believes workers deserve a union that actually represents them. When he stands against Foley, he stands against everything corruption has made of the labor movement. This is a book about what happens when the people who organize workers become more dangerous than the bosses they're meant to fight. It's for readers who know that power doesn't automatically belong to the righteous, and that the struggle for dignity never ends.