David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness and Peter Cole's Wobblies on the Waterfront both focus on race relations in labor history but provide a ton of general information for those without extensive subject matter background.

I'm suggesting three books that were on my doctoral exam US history reading list. Liechtenstein provides a good overview. He centers his narrative around the “labor question” or how progressives wrestled with how democracy and industrial capitalism could survive together. Korstad's book is a key text for civil rights historians as well as labor historians. He uses Winston-Salem, North Carolina as a case study. Cowrie is a fun read that provides context for twenty-first century politics.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Korstad, Robert. R. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003.

Cowrie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: The New Press, 2010.