I haven't read Empress, but my friends had mixed opinions on it. I should see if the library has it.

Mine is about this woman, Estelle, who takes a dangerous job building a colony on Mars so her arm won't get repossessed. She wants to just do her work and get paid, but the company keeps dicking over her crew, and she keeps fighting back, eventually leading an all-out strike, even though it could get her fired. And also there's a WLW romance. I did a lot of background reading on the Pullman strikes as research and skimmed a lot of wikipedia articles on miners' strikes in the early 1900s.

There's a sequel in the fermentation stages that can roughly be summarized as "capitalism sucks, then you seize the means of production."