Union Renegades follows the individuals who did not see the value of following union orders in the Gilded Age. As unions grew more centralized to combat worker grievances in the workplace, leaders were shocked to find that workers were often reluctant to fully follow labor organizations. Although union leaders were quick to cast these individuals as nonunion workers who were “indifferent to their own interests,” this book argues that workers’ decisions to follow or reject unions was based on their own assessment of what course would be most beneficial to them and their families. As corporations sought to increase capitalist gain, rural workers applied these same capitalist mindsets to their own economic needs. It looks closely at the seasonal work patters of rural industries like farming and coal mining to show how workers moved between occupations, causing many to see themselves as business-minded investors rather than as wage earners. This continuous effort to increase income caused farmers and laborers to form their own understandings of unionism that did not always fit with what union leaders envisioned. Workers’ decisions to break away from formal unions, then, did not come from an inability to look after their own interests as some union leaders claimed. Instead, it came from the belief that the union did not offer the surest means to secure their economic, social, and political needs.