In 1969, Brecher and other collaborators including Paul Mattick, Jr., Stanley Aronowitz, and Peter Rachleff began sporadically publishing a magazine and pamphlet series called Root & Branch drawing on the tradition of workers councils and adapting them to contemporary America.
[5] Professor Robert Forrant of the University of Massachusetts Lowell wrote in the ILR Review, “Brecher employs his knowledge of labor history and a great capacity for listening to his interviewees to tell the story of the Naugatuck Valley Project’s (NVP) success in keeping open nearly a dozen industrial plants and eventually starting new employee-owned businesses.”[7] In 1984, Brecher and associates formed Stone Soup, Inc. a non-profit educational and cultural organization based in Connecticut.
According to historian James R. Green, the “exciting use of oral history” as a “record of how people told their stories and made their own historical interpretations” was “epitomized in the work of Jeremy Brecher and his colleagues.”[9] From 1989 to 2001 Brecher served as Humanities Scholar-in-Residence at Connecticut Public Television and Radio, a position supported by the Connecticut Humanities Council.
[10] He wrote the scripts for the documentaries The Roots of Roe, Schools in Black and White, Rust Valley, The Amistad Revolt, Electronic Road Film, Brass City Music, and Dance on the Wind, the last two of which he co-produced.
Global Labor Strategies organized an international protest against this corporate opposition in the aftermath of which international union federations pressured their employers to reverse course; human rights organizations mobilized support for Chinese workers' rights; US members of Congress introduced legislation decrying the corporate intervention and apparent administration complicity; and China's official labor organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), took a strong stand against corporate pressure.
[23][24] In the 1980s and 1990s he was active in the Campaign on Contingent Work,[25] the North American Federation for Fair Employment,[26] and the Naugatuck Valley Project.
[24] In the 2000s he helped organize the Iraq Pledge of Resistance, the Iraq Moratorium, War Crimes Watch, and Global Labor Strategies and with Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith edited the collection In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond which Booklist described as an “excellent anthology” that includes “interviews, FBI documents, legal briefs, and statements by soldiers turned resisters, all offering a chilling look at how the war was begun and is currently operating.”[28] In the 2010s he helped form Labor Network for Sustainability and the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs.