The quote, taken from his essay “What Life Means to Me” for Cosmopolitan Magazine, has come to be understood as Sinclair bemoaning The Jungle’s failure to galvanize a socialist revolution in the United States. Instead, the novel ignited a national controversy over the unsanitary practices of the meatpacking industry. Within a year of the novel’s publication in 1906, Congress passed both the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, establishing the agency that would later become the Food and Drug Administration.

But aside from being the muckraking novel that led to the creation of the FDA or a socialist call to arms that went largely unheard, The Jungle is a story of how U.S. society exploits immigrants. This reading is often overlooked, yet it is worth remembering that sympathy for and solidarity with immigrants is at the heart of this seminal work of literature — especially amid the xenophobic atmosphere of the United States today, where the president has shut down the government over a border wall with Mexico, detention facilities hold untold numbers of immigrants, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stalk communities across the country. It’s been more than a century since the publication of The Jungle, yet the predation described by Sinclair still persists.

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While The Jungle is a novel, it is not entirely a work of fiction. As Anthony Arthur explains in Radical Innocent, his biography of Sinclair, The Jungle is based on two months Sinclair spent living and conducting research in Packingtown, the Chicago neighborhood at the heart of the U.S. meatpacking industry in the early 1900s. There, Sinclair toured stockyards and meatpacking plants both openly and undercover, interviewing everyone from laborers to foremen, social workers to chemists, priests to police officers.

Distilling all of this reporting into a fictional narrative was not unusual for the time; what mattered was that Sinclair’s claims stood up to scrutiny. The meatpacking industry denied everything, but investigators dispatched by then-President Theodore Roosevelt after he read The Jungle found that, as the president relayed, “the Chicago stock yards are revolting.”

Yet very little of The Jungle has to do with unsanitary meatpacking practices. Depending on the edition, the novel runs between 300 and 500 pages, and “perhaps thirty in all” describe meatpacking, according to Arthur. Dedicated to “The Workingmen of America,” The Jungle was openly meant to bring attention to the plight of working people at large.

If it were not for the immigrants at the center of The Jungle, Sinclair would not have had a narrative on which to hang his facts. The author struggled to connect everything he had witnessed in the meatpacking plants to what he wanted to say about socialism until stumbling across, and being invited into, a Lithuanian wedding in Packingtown. As Sinclair later wrote in his autobiography, “There were my characters … I watched them one after another, fitted them into my story.” The Lithuanian wedding thus provided the entire framework of The Jungle: A tale of immigrants searching for a better life but finding only exploitation and misery.

The Jungle focuses on Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian man who comes to the United States with his extended family. He is easily a stand-in for all the immigrant workers of Packingtown. As Sinclair has long-time local resident Grandmother Majauszkiene explain in the novel, Packingtown was always home to immigrants working in the meatpacking industry — first German, then Irish, Czech, Polish, Lithuanian and, increasingly, Slovak. Each new group was brought in by the employing “packers” to undercut the previous workers; the most recent immigrants were paid lower wages and treated worse until an even more desperate group could be found. “Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea,” writes Sinclair, “but the packers would find them, never fear.”

Similarly, the trials that Rudkus and his family endure are the trials of each successive wave of immigrants. They abandon prospectless Lithuania for the promise of rewarding work in the United States. Hearing rumors of a fellow Lithuanian making it rich in Chicago, they head to the Windy City, where Jurgis finds work in a meatpacking plant, marries his wife Ona, and purchases a home for the entire family.

The journey was not idyllic, and it only gets worse. Buffeted by unemployment, dangerous working conditions, alcoholism, violence and systemic corruption, the family is driven further and further into abject poverty as almost every aspect of society — employers, landlords, politicians, police, merchants — preys upon them. Following the sudden deaths of his wife and his son, Jurgis’ downward spiral is halted only by his discovery of socialism.

Just as The Jungle accidentally caused a nationwide furor over the meatpacking industry, Sinclair may have accidentally produced a lasting portrait of immigrant exploitation; he was aiming to describe every workers’ struggle, but he most squarely hit upon the immigrant workers’ experience. A key difference, though, is that the “meat-graft” was addressed with reforms that are still in force today. In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act established the Bureau of Chemistry, which would become the FDA in 1930, and the Federal Meat Inspection Act tasked the U.S. Department of Agriculture with monitoring meatpacking plants, a task for which it is still responsible.

The same commitment to reform has not been applied to immigrant workers. Upon arriving in the United States today, immigrants face wage gaps that last for decades, with earnings remaining 10 to 23 percent less than comparably educated and experienced native workers, even after 20 years of residence. Immigrants are also more likely to work more dangerous jobs, and undocumented immigrants are often victimized by employers, with 37 percent paid below minimum wage and 84 percent denied overtime. In fact, so little has changed since Sinclair penned The Jungle that immigrants still make up much of the Midwestern meatpacking industry’s workforce, filling dangerous, poorly paid jobs with little security. The stockyards of Packingtown closed in 1971, but they still haven’t gone away.

While these victories are welcome for staffers who were previously working without the protections of union membership, their collective bargaining units and contracts usually omit the lowest, yet largest, rung of the newsroom labor ladder: freelancers. And without organizing freelancers, journalists’ unions rest atop a shaky hierarchy of labor, which is bound to be upset.

Finding data on the number of freelancers is tricky. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which are the best available — show that there are currently about 37,995 reporters and correspondents employed as staffers by newspapers, publishers, broadcasters, and other outlets, while about 83,968 people are self-employed writers and authors, a category which includes those who write for digital news organizations and blogs. The bureau predicts that the number of employed reporters and correspondents will decrease by 10 percent through 2026, while the ranks of freelance writers and authors will grow by 8 percent during the same period. David Hill, a freelance journalist and vice president of the National Writers Union, is confident that “every single media outlet” uses freelance writers.

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“I don’t think anyone has good numbers on this,” says Hill. “Some might quibble with how we decide to define ‘journalist’ here, because there is a lot of freelance writing that exists in the grey area between what was maybe once referred to as blogging and what we may think of as journalism, especially online.”

Coming together to bargain collectively is key for freelancers because of the many professional difficulties they face, beginning with low pay. According to the BLS, the median pay for writers and authors was $61,820 in 2017, but that figure masks business expenses and benefits, such as health care, which freelancers must independently purchase.

Without regular work as columnists or contributing writers, freelancers must jump from assignment to assignment, pitching story ideas, negotiating rates, completing articles, and then hoping for full and timely payment. And when publications go under or change their business models, freelancers are left without any recourse but to hunt for the next opportunity.

Describing the issues faced by members of the National Writers Union, Hill says, “Their issues are the same as every freelance journalist’s: low rates, waiting for many months to get paid with no guarantee of when or if the check will arrive, and a general feeling that rates are too low to make a full-time living anymore without supplementing your freelance income somehow.”

Typically, unions focus on organizing a “collective bargaining unit,” which is a well-defined body of workers who are not considered freelancers, contractors, or temps. This is often seen by labor organizers as a strategic necessity for classifying workers as proper employees whose right to unionize is legally protected. Under current law, independent contractors don’t have collective bargaining rights; regulators have even used antitrust law to go after groups of contractors who attempt to organize.

Additionally, unions usually operate on dues collected from their members’ paychecks by their employers, in a fashion similar to payroll taxes. Freelancers typically do not have any deductions made from their payments, making dues collection a more onerous process.

A branch of the United Automobile Workers, the National Writers Union is one of the only labor unions open to freelance journalists. Without a well-defined collective bargaining unit nor access to the traditional means of collecting dues, it has been creative in its approach to organizing. Members are free to join or leave as they please and must opt into paying dues. The union counts about 850 journalists among its dues-paying members.

The union is not able to collectively bargain for these writers, since they don’t work for any one outlet, but members are attracted to its other services and benefits, such as providing individual or group legal representation in specific disputes, lobbying lawmakers for legislation protecting freelancers, and negotiating voluntary agreements with publications. Most recently, the National Writers Union reached an agreement with the socialist magazine Jacobin, stipulating minimum rates, kill fees, payment deadlines, and more.

The Freelancers Union operates in some similar ways, although it is technically a non-profit organization rather than a certified union. Executive Director Caitlin Pearce estimates that 93,750 of the organization’s members are writers or editors, including journalists. Membership is voluntary and free.

“Freelancers Union offers its members a voice on advocacy issues impacting the independent workforce, resources, education, and events helping freelancers grow their network and navigate the ups and downs of freelancing, and benefits including health, dental, life, disability, liability, and retirement,” says Pearce. The organization is funded by state and private grants, donations, and paid services — the last of which has led critics to accuse the Freelancers Union of being more interested in hawking insurance products than organizing workers.

Together with two dozen other workers’ organizations, the Freelancers Union and National Writers Union were able to lobby New York City to pass the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, which went into effect in 2017. The law includes provisions requiring written contracts for freelance work, mandating a 30-day deadline for payment, and awarding freelancers double damages in court. It is touted as providing the strongest protections for freelancers anywhere in the nation.

While the Freelance Isn’t Free Act is certainly the highest profile recent victory, there are ways beyond legislation that freelancers can exert their collective power. Earlier this month, 115 members of Study Hall, an online community of freelance journalists, announced that they would cease working with The Outline after the website suddenly fired a quarter of its staffers, providing an example of freelancers self-organizing independently from any union in the industry. Similar efforts with freelancers in other sectors, such as food couriers working for Uber, have succeeded where traditional unions have failed or feared to venture.

“The nuts and bolts of how to do this is very tricky, and nobody has figured out a perfect model yet,” says Hill of organizing freelance journalists. “Labor law works against us and forces us to be creative. Whatever union freelancers end up forming will be very non-traditional.”

No, this isn’t the recent West Virginia teachers strike — it’s a 1921 coal miners strike, which escalated into what would come to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. The two sides battled for five days, until more than 2,000 additional U.S. Army troops entered the fray to crush the workers rebellion. Up to 100 laborers were killed, hundreds more were injured, and more than 1,000 were arrested. While the uprising seems like an episode relegated to the largely forgotten labor wars of past, the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) may make such conflicts part of the future for unions once again.

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The plaintiffs in Janus—backed by right-wing foundations and corporate lobbying groups—seek to deprive AFSCME of its ability to collect agency fees, which are essentially reduced union dues from non-union members. By setting a federal precedent, the case could cleave the public sector workforce across the country into two groups: those paying for collective bargaining and those not paying for it but still receiving benefits such as higher wages—often referred to as “free riders.” The fear is that, without a way to prevent free riding, collective bargaining will be overburdened and underfunded, and already embattled unions—which have fallen from representing 33 percent of workers in 1954 to just 11 percent today—will be finished. Or, as Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO, put it, “[S]uch a broad-based attack on workers would leave no group unscathed.”

But this prognosis ignores that unions both existed and made great strides before they were officially recognized or even legal organizations. And it ignores what organized labor has accomplished in the roughly half of U.S. states that already prohibit mandatory agency fees—including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky, where massive teacher demonstrations have led to statewide victories.

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Prior to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), employers had no obligation to recognize unions, and they even included anti-union clauses in employment contracts. This prevented millions of workers from joining unions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yet it was during this time that unions were their most militant. Without legal recourse, workers relied on direct action—such as boycotts, pickets, and strikes—to win their demands. These tactics put workers face to face with their opposition: the bosses and their lackeys; mercenaries; local law enforcement; and, as in the 1921 West Virginia coal miners’ strike, even the U.S. military. And with so many union sympathizers barred from official memberships, labor actions often included both unionized and non-unionized workers, if not their entire communities.

The results could be explosive. Besides the Battle of Blair Mountain, which remains the largest labor rebellion in U.S. history, the Haymarket affair of 1886 involved a bombing and Chicago police opening fire on a rally in support of striking workers; the so-called “Colorado Labor Wars” led to the deaths of both strikers and strikebreakers from 1903 to 1904; and two people were killed by the police and militia during the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Despite the overwhelming violence used against them in this period, unions were still able to win significant victories, such as the eight-hour workday (albeit only in particular locations and industries). By 1934—the year before the National Labor Relations Act granted unions state recognition—the tide seemed to be turning in favor of workers: Sailors and longshoremen unionized all West Coast ports in the United States, and 400,000 textile workers from New England to the South launched what was then the largest strike in U.S. history.

According to Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University, these strikes—and the “working class radicalism” they represented—were curtailed by the NLRA. Cole says the Act was designed to contain “radical left-wing forces by forcing employers to accept modest, if still quite beneficial, reforms,” like giving workers the right to unionize and strike.

In other words, the federal government used the NLRA to enforce a peaceful compromise between labor and business, rather than risk the escalation of all-out class war. In exchange for the right to unionize, strike, and collectively bargain, workers agreed to union elections and arbitration of unfair labor practice charges through the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That is, rather than rank-and-file union members fighting for their demands through direct action, labor struggles were decided by lawyers and bureaucrats behind the closed doors of NLRB regional offices. (Although the NLRA does not cover public sector employees, many of these same rights were later extended to them through various state and federal measures, such as President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988, with the substitution of federal and state boards for the NLRB.)

Janus threatens to dismantle this regime of compromise and deliver unions into the pre-NLRA era, shifting labor struggles from the courts back onto the streets. And we don’t have to look as far back as the 1920s for examples of how this could play out. Unions in West Virginia lost the ability to collect agency fees in 2017, yet rather than collapsing, labor’s struggle in the state has hit a new zenith. Without the backing of their union or much faith in their elected representatives, 20,000 rank-and-file West Virginia teachers organized and led their recent nine-day strike, winning raises for public sector workers statewide and inspiring successful teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky—all states where unions are barred from collecting agency fees. In an homage to the past—and perhaps a harbinger of the future—some of the teachers in West Virginia chose to wear red bandanas, just like the striking coal miners of 1921.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not representative of the Center for American Progress’ policy positions on any issue.