Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, is now one of the classics, I guess. I see that it has a revised edition, as of 1998, but the original edition is probably easier to find in libraries and used book stores.

Check out the excerpt that Amazon has posted. A lot of the story (as told in that book, anyway) takes place in the northeastern US and what became the rust belt.

I'm curious to know if union people like it these days. It was a "New Left" critique when it came out. It really takes a dim view of what happened with the unions by the 1950s and '60s.