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off every day. Welcome

1:19

to The Dig, a podcast from

1:21

Jacobin Magazine. My name is

1:23

Daniel Denfer, and I'm broadcasting

1:25

from Providence, Rhode Island. The

1:28

resistance is back, but the

1:30

Democratic Party is nowhere to be

1:32

found. Bernie Sanders, technically

1:34

still not a Democrat, is

1:36

a rare exception, rallying

1:39

giant crowds of angry Americans

1:41

to fight the oligarchy. The

1:43

bad news is that the Democratic Party

1:45

is MIA, but that's also

1:47

the silver lining. The

1:50

Democratic Party, with all

1:52

their post -2016 Russiagate histrionics,

1:54

have mostly absented themselves

1:56

from fighting Trump 2 .0. The

1:59

task of the left is now to

2:01

approach our organizing with a ruthless

2:03

eye toward effective strategy. We

2:06

need power. There's no

2:08

time for bullshit. Petty fights. Stupid

2:11

games. Nowhere

2:13

is this more important than

2:15

labor. Workers have unique

2:17

leverage against capital. What's

2:19

more, existing unions,

2:21

however battered, represent

2:24

by far the largest form

2:26

of organized working class power in

2:28

this country. Trump and

2:30

Musk launched their administration's assault

2:32

first and foremost against

2:34

workers because they know they must first

2:36

crush organized labor, starting with

2:39

federal workers unions to

2:41

impose their reactionary agenda. We

2:43

must act in solidarity with

2:45

federal workers and rekindle organizing

2:48

among workers and against bosses

2:50

everywhere. Never before has

2:52

it been more clear that

2:54

far -right politics are the

2:56

inevitable expression of oligarchic power

2:58

and that the struggle against

3:00

Trump is likewise necessarily the

3:02

struggle against the billionaire class. The

3:05

destruction of the labor movement is

3:07

what made Trump is impossible in

3:10

the first place and its reconstruction

3:12

will be necessary. for its defeat. Again,

3:15

Bernie is one of the

3:17

few national figures to recognize this,

3:19

and yet masses of people

3:21

feel it in their bones. Today,

3:25

longtime Dig guest Gabe Weynant is

3:27

taking a turn as guest

3:29

host, interviewing Eric Blanc on his

3:31

book We Are the Union, How

3:34

Worker to Worker Organizing is

3:36

Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.

3:39

Eric's book makes an important

3:41

argument backed up by loads

3:43

of research that we can't

3:45

organize millions, tens of millions of workers

3:47

through union staff alone. We

3:50

need union staff. But what we

3:52

need them to do is to

3:54

set up an infrastructure that facilitates

3:56

worker to worker organizing at scale

3:58

to defeat Trumpism and the

4:00

billionaire class. This isn't

4:03

just a hypothetical fancy. workers

4:05

at Starbucks, in the emergency

4:07

workplace organizing committee, and in many

4:09

other fights are showing the

4:11

way. Before we get

4:13

started, this podcast is laser focused

4:15

on giving you the in -depth and

4:17

ruthless analysis of everything that you

4:19

need to make sense of the

4:21

world amid your struggle to transform

4:23

it. That's why we don't pay

4:25

while a single episode. Paywalling

4:27

would make us a ton more money,

4:30

but this is a political education

4:32

project, and we want everyone possible to

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listen to everything we put out,

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particularly people who can't afford to contribute,

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but also people who just don't

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contribute now. That's

5:14

P -A -T -R -E -O -N dot

5:16

com slash the dig. Really quick,

5:18

I've included some useful links

5:20

in the show notes. First, there's

5:22

a link to get involved

5:24

in the Rapid Response Campaign to

5:26

defend federal workers and federal

5:28

services against Musk's wrecking ball operation.

5:31

Second, I've included a link

5:33

to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee,

5:35

or EWOC. If you

5:37

want to organize your workplace,

5:39

contact EWOC and they'll support

5:41

you. Lastly, there's a

5:43

link for the Workers Organizing

5:45

Workers Committee of DSA Labor,

5:47

or Wow. Wow recruits,

5:49

trains, supports in places

5:51

people interested in taking

5:54

jobs in strategic industries

5:56

to unionize. If

5:58

you're looking for work you want

6:00

to get a job to organize,

6:02

sign up for Wow. No

6:05

organizing experience required. Again,

6:08

all three of these links are in

6:10

the show notes. We need

6:12

to rebuild the labor movement. To

6:14

do that, we need

6:16

you. Okay, here's Gabe Weynand

6:19

interviewing Eric Blank. Gabe

6:21

Weynand teaches history at the University

6:23

of Chicago. His first book

6:25

was The Next Shift, The Fall of Industry

6:27

and the Rise of Healthcare in Rust Belt

6:29

America. He's a volunteer organizer

6:31

with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a

6:34

former staff organizer and researcher for Unite

6:36

Here, and currently an officer

6:38

of the American Association of University

6:40

Professors. Eric Blank is

6:42

a professor of labor studies at Rutgers

6:44

University. in the author of The

6:46

Substact, Labor Politics, as well as the

6:48

new book he's here to discuss

6:50

today. We Are the

6:52

Union, how worker to worker

6:54

organizing is revitalizing labor and

6:56

winning big. Blanc is

6:59

an organizer trainer for the

7:01

Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Eric

7:14

Bank, welcome to the dig. Thanks

7:16

for having me on. So

7:18

this is a book about workplace

7:20

organizing strategies and tactics. And at the

7:22

heart of it is an argument

7:24

about why what organized labor is generally

7:26

doing right now isn't working. Despite the

7:28

widespread ideological popularity of labor unions and

7:31

the commonplace aspiration to be represented

7:33

by them, density is not growing. And

7:35

there are a lot of reasons for

7:37

this. And we'll get into a lot

7:39

of them over the course of

7:41

the interview. But the book

7:43

is about what unions can and can't

7:45

do and therefore what workers can and

7:47

need to do themselves So I thought

7:49

we'd start there with what unions can

7:51

and can't do and just to begin

7:53

with a really basic question I often

7:55

find that people outside the labor movement

7:57

don't really know or have any idea

8:00

about the actual mechanics of how organizing

8:02

happens different activities that go into it

8:04

and enable it just what organizers do

8:06

and That's you know hard to know

8:08

about all unions are all a little

8:10

different from each other and how they conceptualized

8:12

organizing how they deploy their

8:15

resources and a good union staffer

8:17

generally operates behind the scenes, you

8:19

know, doesn't want to make things about themselves. So

8:22

to begin, what do unions have

8:24

to do and why is it

8:26

not enough? Sure, that's a

8:28

good question. And I think it's actually

8:30

important to preface that. with a higher

8:32

order question, which is why anybody should

8:34

care, because I actually don't think that

8:36

that is also so obvious. So just

8:38

to really briefly state that and then

8:40

to go to your question, the

8:42

reason we should be caring about

8:44

all these staff and internal questions about

8:46

unions is essentially the crises in

8:49

our country and really across the advanced

8:51

capitalist world right now are deeply

8:53

rooted in the power imbalance between workers

8:55

and bosses. Union density

8:57

goes up inequality goes down inequality

8:59

goes up union density goes down

9:01

and so Trump is on climate

9:03

catastrophe militarism all of these things

9:05

essentially aren't gonna be resolved In

9:07

a positive way until workers can

9:09

revive the labor movement until we

9:12

can have tens of millions more

9:14

workers So that's just the background

9:16

why people who aren't necessarily already

9:18

involved in labor should care about

9:20

this and then the question is

9:22

you know, what do staffers normally

9:24

do? What do unions normally do?

9:27

This is extremely complicated because unions

9:29

look different. But if we're talking

9:31

about building a new union, right?

9:33

So if this is the question

9:35

of how do you get new

9:37

workers to join the union? Well,

9:39

generally speaking, the approach is that

9:42

it's very staff intensive. You'll have

9:44

a full -time staffer maybe reach out

9:46

to workers at a given site

9:48

that's targeted and at its best,

9:50

and this is not necessarily the

9:52

norm, but at its best, that

9:54

staff person will identify worker leaders,

9:56

will coach them on how to

9:59

build a committee, they will coach

10:01

them and train them through the

10:03

very arduous task of getting a

10:05

majority, winning a union election, and

10:07

then eventually they'll pass them off

10:09

to another staff person who will

10:11

be like the bargaining rep who

10:14

will then help them bargain a

10:16

first contract. And so this

10:18

is at its best. Staffers are

10:20

oriented towards training up worker leaders. Oftentimes

10:22

that doesn't even happen, but the

10:24

driving mechanism tends to be this full

10:26

-time staffer. And

10:28

what is it about that role

10:31

and the way it's configured in

10:33

the labor movement right now that

10:35

is keeping the labor movement from

10:37

capturing what seems like the opportunity

10:39

of millions and millions of people

10:41

seeming to want to be organized

10:44

for the first time? Yeah,

10:46

the argument I make in the book And this

10:48

is actually something that was less clear to me

10:50

before I did the research for the book. And

10:52

it was really the research convinced me of this

10:54

more and more. The problem

10:56

is essentially just that this model isn't

10:58

scalable. You can't organize tens of millions

11:01

of workers this way for basically logistical

11:03

reasons. It's just too expensive. And there's

11:05

not enough time to organize large numbers

11:07

of workers this way. So I don't

11:09

actually make a case in the book

11:11

that staff are unimportant or that resources

11:13

are unimportant. Actually, I think that we

11:15

need on the whole more staff and

11:17

we need more resources towards organizing. The

11:19

problem is you need to leverage that

11:21

in a scalable way, in a way

11:23

that has the capacity to bring in

11:26

tens of millions of workers who want

11:28

unions. As you mentioned, this isn't that

11:30

there's a lack of desire for them,

11:32

but there's a gap between that desire

11:34

and the ability of the labor movement

11:36

to seed and support the number of

11:38

drives necessary to turn around union density.

11:40

Well, let me just ask you, let's

11:42

talk a little bit about some of

11:44

the specifics of what that like what

11:46

that looks like in the staff -driven model,

11:49

you know, we've been talking about generally, okay,

11:51

you know, there are all these things

11:53

that unions typically rely on staff to do

11:55

in a sense of the numbers and

11:57

maybe the money involved. What kind

12:00

of resources do we see union concentrate

12:02

when they want to organize a new shop,

12:04

right? You're saying it's not scalable. What

12:06

is that sort of quantitatively? What does it

12:08

look like at the scale that unions

12:10

do do it? Right. So the best practice

12:12

for staff intensive unionism is you need

12:14

one staffer for about every hundred workers you're

12:16

trying to bring into the union. And

12:18

I crunched the numbers and I did a

12:20

lot of interviews for the book. And

12:22

what that comes out monetarily is about, what

12:25

that comes out to on average

12:27

is about $3 ,000 per worker you're

12:29

trying to bring into union. And of

12:31

course that depends on the employer,

12:33

depends on the industry, but on average,

12:35

that's what we're talking about. And

12:37

so you can do sort of basic

12:39

back of the napkin math to

12:41

figure out how many workers you could

12:43

organize this way. The liquid assets

12:45

of the labor movement is about $13

12:47

billion, which is a lot

12:49

of money. But even with all of

12:51

that money available, if you were to

12:54

use very ambitiously 30%, this would be

12:56

a very aspirational goal. If you use

12:58

30 % of the liquid assets of the

13:00

labor movement towards new organizing through a

13:02

staff -intensive model, that would only be

13:04

able to bring labor strength back

13:06

to the levels we had in 2015,

13:08

about 11 % union density. So it gives

13:10

you a sense of the real limitations

13:12

of this model. You can win battles,

13:14

but just for basic money reasons, you

13:17

can't organize enough workers this way. And then

13:19

there's just maybe even deeper question, which

13:21

is the question of time costs. The

13:23

labor movement has tended to

13:26

grow historically and again recently through

13:28

spurts, where all of a

13:30

sudden large numbers of workers almost

13:32

seemingly overnight are interested in

13:34

organizing. And in moments like that,

13:36

you just don't have the ability as

13:38

a union to train up a lot

13:41

of new staffers, get them to know

13:43

the company, get them to be able

13:45

to sort of deploy in a manner timely

13:47

enough to be able to go viral.

13:49

And so if you look at the Starbucks

13:51

campaign, which I'm sure we can talk

13:53

about a little bit more, had they

13:55

tried to lean on a staff intensive

13:57

model when all of a sudden you had

13:59

hundreds and thousands of workers all across

14:01

the country reaching out, to the Buffalo

14:03

workers after they went public and eventually

14:05

won their union election in late 2021, if

14:08

they tried to do it through a

14:10

staff -intensive way, they just couldn't have

14:12

it. They literally wouldn't have had the capacity

14:14

to start supporting hundreds of drives all

14:16

across the country. There were literally two new

14:18

union elections being filed every day for

14:20

the first half of 2022. So they

14:22

had to rely on workers to do

14:24

that. And so because of the virality and

14:26

contagious factor when there's mass unionization at

14:28

play, You can't rely on a staff

14:30

-intensive model for those types of moments. Yeah,

14:33

you don't really say this in the

14:35

book, but something I've wondered about in my

14:37

own experience as a union staff organizer

14:39

at some points. I worry sometimes,

14:41

and I'm curious how you would react to

14:43

this, that the approach

14:45

of the staff organizer,

14:47

which I believe in in

14:49

a serious way, Is

14:51

subject to a certain kind of set

14:53

of disciplines from the large organization and that's

14:56

appropriate right that you have to sort

14:58

of hit numerical goals, right? You're accountable to

15:00

a bureaucracy and I mean that in

15:02

a non -pejorative sense you're accountable to a

15:04

bureaucracy kind of over you and your. Tactics

15:07

and activities have to be geared to

15:09

the larger tactics and activities of that bureaucracy

15:11

now that can be a source of

15:13

great power and. even security for workers activity,

15:15

right? Because moving in sync with a

15:17

large group of people obviously is a kind

15:20

of source of protection. At the

15:22

same time, I sometimes worry that not

15:24

only do we not have the capacity to

15:26

organize the large groups of people, you

15:28

know, set huge numbers of people kind of

15:30

in motion and into activity, but that

15:32

there was a way in which the discipline

15:34

of the union staff organizer in some

15:37

ways even sometimes seemed to constrain workers. I

15:39

don't mean in the sense of Selling

15:41

them out to the boss, but rather in

15:43

the sense of okay, there's actually a

15:45

kind of way of doing this right we

15:47

kind of know the steps we need

15:49

to take and let's let's follow the kind

15:52

of template that the union generally uses

15:54

for fights like this and again all that

15:56

is appropriate and makes sense and I'm

15:58

not saying you know union shouldn't do that

16:00

but it does seem like there's a

16:02

kind of organizational conservatism that sometimes comes to

16:04

the staff driven model. These

16:07

spurts of union growth you're talking

16:09

about right they do often depend

16:11

on. some form of tactical

16:13

or strategic experimentation that a more

16:15

risk -averse organization is going to be

16:17

averse to taking in some way. And

16:20

they often depend on even risks, right, that

16:22

a more risk -averse organization is obviously going to

16:24

be anxious about. So I'm curious what you

16:26

think about that kind of dilemma or that

16:28

dynamic. Yeah, it's a

16:30

real tension and it's not easily resolvable

16:32

because it would be easy to

16:34

say, well, yeah, that's why workers should

16:36

just on their own do everything.

16:38

And there's traditions of the labor movement

16:40

that have pointed more in that

16:42

sort of rank and file -less direction.

16:44

And that's not the argument I'm making

16:46

the book. I actually do think

16:48

there's a really important role to play

16:50

for staffers and these bureaucracies, because

16:52

we're going up against some of the

16:54

biggest corporations in the world, and

16:56

frankly, particularly in the political economic context

16:58

in which we're in, in which

17:00

the working class is relatively atomized. You

17:02

need that spurring factor and that

17:04

fostering factor that staff can bring with

17:06

its capacity and expertise. That being

17:08

said, It's also the case, as you

17:10

mentioned, that unions are very risk -averse

17:12

institutions, and a staffer

17:14

works for the union. So even

17:17

if the individual staffer, and this is

17:19

oftentimes the case, is maybe a

17:21

lefty and is very much oriented towards

17:23

worker leadership, there does

17:25

arise very frequently a tension between

17:27

that desire and the sort of

17:29

institutional needs of the union, especially

17:31

when the union is doing a

17:33

very staff -intensive model. So there's a

17:35

bit of a vicious cycle there.

17:38

Because union organizing tends to be

17:40

currently so costly, then unions are

17:42

very reluctant to engage in battles

17:44

that might lose. And so we

17:46

actually have a problem where the

17:48

labor movement is too focused in

17:50

some ways on winning. That might

17:52

sound crazy, but it's actually true

17:54

that if you're... going to take

17:57

on Union battles that you have

17:59

extremely high likelihood of winning and

18:01

that you know that ahead of

18:03

time, you're dramatically constraining your ability

18:05

just to take on targets. So

18:07

even if we leave aside the

18:09

question of tactics, you know, what

18:11

tactics you might do, do you

18:13

file for a Union, you know,

18:15

with less than 70%, this is

18:17

a classic tactic that people debate, the

18:20

best practice is generally that you need

18:22

a super majority because the union busting will

18:24

whittle down your support. I think that

18:26

that's generally true. But even if we leave

18:28

aside these tactical questions, there's just a

18:30

more basic question of targets. How

18:33

do you target enough workplaces? And

18:35

what is your criteria for letting them

18:37

go for it? And most unions

18:39

systematically say no to drives that reach

18:41

out. This is a problem that

18:43

sort of emerges. over and over again

18:45

where workers reach out to a

18:47

union and the union for a variety

18:49

of reasons will decline to take

18:51

them on because they don't think that

18:53

they're win, they think that it's

18:55

outside of their jurisdiction, they don't have

18:57

the time and money to support,

18:59

but this again is a question of

19:01

risk aversion is that a lot

19:04

of unions just don't have the mechanisms

19:06

in their current repertoire to

19:08

take on these more risky drives. And

19:10

then so you have these staffers who

19:12

actually probably want to support, and this

19:14

goes more directly to your question, the

19:16

staffers who would really want to provide

19:18

this support for workers, but because of

19:20

the institutional prerogatives of the union, they

19:22

can't. They're just not allowed to. So

19:25

it's a real tension. And I don't

19:27

think it's easily resolvable as long as

19:29

the deciding factor for what happens with

19:31

a union drive lays in the hands

19:33

of full -time staffers. There just has

19:35

to be a new model through which

19:37

the decisive decisions being made about when

19:39

to file, where to organize are made

19:41

by workers, you know, oftentimes in conjunction

19:43

with staff, but more as partners and

19:46

not as a question of deference. And

19:48

I would just say it's not a

19:50

surprise then that the biggest wins that

19:52

we've had over the last few years

19:54

have not come from the sort of

19:56

preconceived plans of top union leaderships, but

19:58

have tended to come from below, from

20:00

ranking filers, organizing on their own, and

20:02

doing things that, frankly, most of the

20:05

labor movement said was impossible. Yeah,

20:07

you know, it strikes me listening

20:09

to you that I think in

20:11

the parts of the labor movement

20:13

that do new organizing, there's a

20:15

self -account, and I mean among

20:17

staff. and among union leadership, there's

20:19

a self -account of a kind of

20:21

transformation since maybe the 1990s, right,

20:23

that our unions used to be

20:25

kind of complacent, you know, through

20:28

the whole second half of the

20:30

20th century. And,

20:32

you know, it took a decade or

20:34

decade and a half to react

20:36

to kind of the Reagan and Petco

20:38

firing their traffic controllers and the

20:40

whole kind of sea change of neoliberalism

20:42

in the 80s. But by the

20:44

late 90s, you know, a number of

20:46

unions, SEIU, CWA, United Here,

20:49

HRE at that point, had kind

20:51

of gotten the message and had

20:53

begun proactively organizing again, sort of

20:55

for the first time in a

20:57

while. But what that looked like

20:59

was a very sort strategically

21:02

driven model, it seems to me. I'm

21:04

thinking about the version of this that I

21:06

would often hear inside HRE, which was that

21:08

the union used to decide which hotels to

21:10

organize by a local president would see one

21:12

on the highway that he didn't remember and

21:14

think, why don't we have that one? and

21:17

it had shifted to a

21:19

much more sophisticated kind of legal

21:21

and financial analysis of which

21:23

hotel operators might be vulnerable and

21:25

where might the union have

21:27

some kind of economic leverage and

21:29

so on. And so it

21:31

seems to me that in union

21:33

leadership and among union staff, by

21:36

the beginning of this century, there had

21:38

developed a sense that, okay, we actually are

21:40

organizing again, right? And there was some

21:42

truth in that, but it was a change

21:44

within a kind of remaining or

21:47

continuous staff -driven

21:49

model. I think that's definitely

21:51

true. And I try to provide the

21:53

balance sheet that's fair of the 1990s

21:55

model. And frankly, I think we could

21:57

use a little bit more of the...

21:59

fervor for new organizing from top union

22:01

leadership and you know some of the

22:03

best parts of the 1990s and early

22:05

2000s have been sorely lacking which is

22:07

to say like a real investment of

22:09

top union leaderships monetarily and strategically and

22:11

new organizing that actually has been a

22:13

missing factor over the last few years

22:15

I think we could have gone even

22:17

farther with that spirit as you mentioned

22:19

though the problem in practice turned out

22:21

to be that there's only so far

22:23

you can go through a staff

22:25

intensive model. Just for all the reasons described

22:27

before, it's not that they couldn't win. They

22:30

actually had a very good

22:32

track record of winning these campaigns.

22:35

You know, you don't win every one, but

22:37

eventually they were able to sort of

22:39

win a lot of these big comprehensive strategic

22:41

campaigns. The problem was that it was

22:43

so expensive to do so. It was just

22:45

so expensive to do so that that

22:48

ended up being a major factor. in

22:50

limiting the appeal of this approach.

22:52

So you had, on the one hand, you

22:54

had all of these more fuddy -duddy unions

22:57

that didn't want to even do staff

22:59

intensive organizing and said, you know, until labor

23:01

law changes, nothing can be done. And

23:03

then you had unions that were

23:05

oriented towards new organizing, and they

23:07

weren't able to prove in practice

23:09

the ability to start organizing large,

23:11

large numbers of workers through the

23:13

model that they employed. And part

23:15

of that crisis then ended up

23:18

leading to the split in the

23:20

AFLCA in the early 2000s. But

23:22

there really was a real hard

23:24

cap on how far and how

23:26

wide you could go with that

23:28

more staff intensive model. One

23:30

thing that really struck me in the

23:32

book is that you did some historical work

23:34

to show that union growth in the

23:36

past and kind of moments of upsurge did

23:38

not depend on full -time staff in the

23:40

way that it seems to have

23:43

done more recently. So, will you tell

23:45

us a little bit about how did workers join

23:47

unions in earlier moments of working class upsurge? And

23:49

when I say how, I mean like literally how?

23:51

Who showed a worker the card? You

23:53

know, how did they do the things that staff

23:55

do today? Map the workplace, et cetera. And

23:57

then maybe we can kind of

23:59

explain the shift to a more staff

24:01

driven model from there. Yeah, it's

24:03

a good question. And it really does

24:05

depend a bit of when you're

24:07

talking about whether it's before the National

24:09

Labor Relations Act was passed in

24:11

1935, or what industry you're in. But

24:13

generally speaking, the norm

24:15

was a very high

24:18

degree of worker initiative. And

24:20

it tended to be the case

24:22

that the equivalent of the role of

24:25

staffers, somebody who is more experienced

24:27

and who would help drive things forward,

24:29

tended to be worker leaders themselves,

24:31

oftentimes people who had been through different

24:33

rounds of struggle, oftentimes radicals, who

24:35

would take the initiative on talking to

24:38

their coworkers about signing a union

24:40

card, and they would

24:42

help essentially their coworkers via

24:44

word of math and via local

24:46

meetings sign up. One

24:49

of the things that people forget about a

24:51

lot is that one of the big obstacles

24:53

back then was just sheer employer violence and

24:55

repression. So when you read about union organizing

24:57

in the 1930s, a lot of it reads

24:59

like a spy novel. It's like, how do

25:01

you suss out who the spies are locally

25:03

and how do you just not get made,

25:06

how do you stay underground before the company

25:08

finds out? A lot of the organizing had

25:10

to do with things like that. And

25:12

the initiative tended to come from workers. And

25:15

we have data on that. So

25:17

to give one example, you

25:19

can look at the most

25:21

top -down drive of the 1930s,

25:24

which was the Steel Workers Organizing

25:26

Committee. This was sort of

25:28

famously the big initiative of the

25:30

new CIO and people considered

25:32

it to be the most machine

25:34

-like bureaucratic organization,

25:37

the number of staffers they had by today's

25:39

comparison was minimal. And so I

25:41

crunched the numbers on this. The average, again,

25:44

remember, today the best practice is considered

25:46

one staffer for every 100 workers trying to

25:48

organize. In steel, they had one staffer

25:50

for about every 1700 workers. And this was

25:53

the most top -down model, right? And if

25:55

you look beyond that, it was one

25:57

staffer for every 2000, 3000. So

25:59

you get a sense that essentially,

26:01

really, the workers themselves took

26:03

the initiative, they would eventually connect with

26:05

a CIO organizer who would, you know,

26:08

in big battles, maybe give some strategic

26:10

advice, send them some pins,

26:12

but the touch was a lot

26:14

lighter. There was just not this

26:16

intensive day -to -day coaching like you

26:18

have today. Yeah,

26:20

and I'm really struck by your point

26:22

about the importance of kind of layers

26:24

of past struggle. I mean, if

26:27

you read it all in the

26:29

history of the labor movement in the

26:31

1930s, the presence of ex -wobblies, of

26:33

Debsian socialists, of people who had

26:35

experience in one form or another of

26:37

class struggle in their home countries

26:40

before immigrating, it's just unmistakable, right? Everywhere

26:42

in the historical record. And

26:44

those weren't all the same kind of

26:46

experience, right? And they certainly weren't the

26:48

same kind of collective discipline exactly that

26:50

we're talking about in terms of union

26:52

staffers, but they were the functional equivalent

26:54

in some way. Yeah. And

26:56

I think that's an important point to raise

26:58

because there can be a tendency today

27:01

maybe to romanticize the 1930s and it

27:03

looks just like all of a sudden

27:05

the workers rose up. Well, there's aspects

27:07

of that being true. But

27:09

again, oftentimes there's a reason you needed

27:11

radicals. Oftentimes young radicals be there as the

27:13

sort of spark plug as it were. And

27:16

so it's just worth pointing out that spark plug doesn't

27:18

necessarily have to be a staffer. It can come on the

27:20

shop floor. And we are seeing that again to a

27:22

certain extent today with the revival of salting as a tactic.

27:25

Yeah, I mean just to kind

27:27

of give a couple examples that

27:29

listeners may not know about Walter

27:31

Ruther who would go on to

27:33

become the president of the United

27:36

Auto Workers by the mid 1940s

27:38

was he was a son of

27:40

a Socialist skilled worker. I forget

27:42

what trade and himself grew up

27:44

a socialist Ruther's father had organized

27:46

a campaign in West Virginia where

27:48

they were from to reject

27:50

the offer of Andrew Carnegie to build

27:52

a library in their town, which

27:54

was Carnegie's PR program after the violence

27:56

against workers in the homestead strike.

27:58

He was building libraries all over America

28:00

to improve his reputation. Ruther's

28:02

father led the struggle to stop that.

28:05

Sydney Hillman, who was the president

28:07

of the amalgamated clothing workers of

28:09

America, had been in the Jewish

28:12

labor bond back in the old country. And

28:14

Hillman and Ruther Were among

28:16

many of the kind of key leaders

28:19

of the CIO and that's at the

28:21

very top rank of leadership, right? But

28:23

that like that that same principle was

28:25

true throughout the CIO at sort of

28:27

all levels of the organization so a

28:29

key idea in the book is worker

28:32

to worker unionism as the alternatives to

28:34

the staff model and although I want

28:36

to get more into Why this has

28:38

emerged as as the alternative where it

28:40

comes from what makes it succeed with

28:42

what are the limits on it? And

28:45

then I want to get into as well

28:47

some of the examples of what it's looked

28:49

like. I want to ask you first, just

28:51

kind of give a general definition, right? If

28:53

it's possible to kind of in an overview

28:55

characterize, what is the thing that you call

28:57

worker to worker unionism? Yeah,

28:59

in the most general sense,

29:01

what I'm talking about is a

29:03

form of organizing in which

29:05

workers are taking on the responsibility

29:07

that normally is done by

29:09

staff. And I point to three

29:11

factors in particular. One is

29:13

initiating campaigns. The second

29:15

is training other workers. And

29:18

the third is strategizing. And so we

29:21

can dig into any one of those

29:23

three things, but it's through a combination

29:25

of those three sort of specific responsibilities

29:27

that normally on the staff intensive drive

29:29

are done by full timers, workers are

29:31

taking on all or most of those

29:33

responsibilities. And it means that in practice,

29:36

the effort is just far more dependent

29:38

on their leadership and less on the

29:40

sort of intense coaching of staffers. So

29:43

what do you think is driving what

29:45

appears to be a kind of organic

29:47

explosion of this kind of worker -to -worker activity,

29:49

right? It's not engineered by unions themselves.

29:51

That's the whole point of the book

29:53

in a way, right? Is that this is

29:55

drawing on some different source? What

29:58

are the sources of it? Some

30:00

of it has to do with just

30:02

the general background conditions that support

30:04

labor organizing in general and not specifically

30:06

worker to worker organizing. So for

30:08

instance, we had a tight labor market.

30:10

Whenever you have a tight labor

30:12

market, that helps workers organize. We had

30:14

the pandemic, which sort of for

30:16

obvious reasons showed that bosses didn't care

30:18

if workers lived or died and

30:21

created all sorts of crises that spurred

30:23

workers to organize. We had

30:25

a very good National Labor

30:27

Relations Board under Biden, which made

30:29

there be more legal space

30:31

for unionization. And all of

30:33

those things really support any

30:35

form of organizing. What I point

30:37

to in the book is

30:40

factors that particularly led to worker

30:42

-to -worker organizing becoming so predominant,

30:44

because it is just the case

30:46

that the biggest and most

30:48

successful drives in the last few

30:50

years have come through this

30:52

model. Think about Starbucks, higher

30:55

ed, journalism, Amazon

30:57

on a smaller scale basis. What

31:00

leads to that dynamic emerging, I

31:02

would focus on two major factors,

31:04

and maybe we can dig into

31:06

more. But the first is youth

31:08

radicalization. So there's a radicalization of

31:10

young workers. And the second is

31:12

that the organizing landscape has been

31:15

dramatically changed by digital tools. So

31:17

just briefly lay out those dynamics.

31:19

On the youth piece, it's

31:21

just anecdotally, my impression before doing the

31:23

research on the book was that it

31:25

seemed like the people leading these struggles

31:27

tended to be young. And I wasn't

31:29

sure whether this was the case. And

31:31

one of the things that I did

31:33

for the book was to try to

31:35

test these anecdotal impressionistic sense of things

31:37

with hard data. And so I reached

31:39

out to every single drive that went

31:41

public in 2022. was like, it took

31:43

a lot of work. So it was

31:45

over 2 ,000 drives. I did a

31:47

large -scale survey of all of the workers

31:49

who responded. And it turned out that

31:51

the average age of worker leaders in

31:53

these drives in 2022 was 27. So

31:55

you're talking essentially about Zoomers and millennials

31:57

overwhelmingly. I believe over 80

31:59

% of the worker leaders were under

32:02

35. So it is

32:04

a generational dynamic. It's not just

32:06

that unions are more popular amongst

32:08

the youth, which is true, but

32:10

it's in fact the case that

32:12

young workers themselves have been taken

32:14

to lead, that there's something about

32:16

this generation of young, oftentimes left -leaning

32:18

workers that is oriented towards the

32:20

labor movement. And that's really interesting

32:23

because there have been many times

32:25

in US history where young people

32:27

are activists and oriented towards social

32:29

justice. But it's actually somewhat new

32:31

and in many ways historically surprising

32:33

that young left -leaning people are

32:35

turning towards the labor movement. And

32:37

I think that there's a variety

32:39

of conjunctual reasons for that. Part

32:41

of it has to do with

32:44

the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. These

32:46

are people who grew up after

32:48

the Great Recession, after

32:50

Occupy, in which economic concerns

32:52

come to the fore. These

32:54

are workers who oftentimes voted for

32:56

or volunteered for Bernie Sanders. And

32:58

so the Bernie impact as far

33:01

as just framing the world as

33:03

workers versus bosses, which has a

33:05

sort of a natural corollary into

33:07

seeing the labor movement is important,

33:09

played a very big role. Similarly,

33:12

a lot of the workers came

33:14

from witnessing or participating in the

33:16

Black Lives Matter movement or queer

33:18

movements and coming at sort of

33:20

a social justice, radical critique of

33:22

society via these movements, but then

33:24

also maybe seeing some of the

33:26

limitations of those struggles and trying

33:28

to figure out how you could

33:30

fight oppression and racism and for

33:32

equality in maybe a more grounded,

33:35

more power -based model than street

33:37

protests. So there's just been

33:39

a whole accumulated experience, and

33:41

it's different for millennials like

33:43

you and me who maybe

33:46

went through. the anti

33:48

-war movement, and then Obama and

33:50

occupied DSA. So there's like

33:52

that trajectory. And then there's younger

33:54

Zoomers who maybe Black Lives

33:56

Matter, maybe saw Bernie, might

33:58

consider themselves queer, or somehow

34:00

got radicalized through those politics, and

34:02

then who found themselves in the labor

34:05

movement. And so you scratch below

34:07

the surface, it's really that layer across

34:09

the board. And not just college -educated

34:11

workers, though, that tends to be

34:13

disproportionately college -educated, but really pretty widespread

34:15

amongst young workers. And so that is

34:17

That is a central factor because

34:20

the dynamics that we described in the

34:22

1930s now can be replicated, which

34:24

is to say that a lot of

34:26

the spark plug aspect where who's

34:28

initiating, who's spending 40 hours a week

34:30

of their free time to organize. It

34:33

takes a lot of work and it takes a lot

34:35

of initiative to organize still. And so

34:37

if staff aren't doing it, who's going to do it? Well,

34:39

it turns out a lot of time it's going to be

34:41

young lefties who have that sort of ideological or

34:43

maybe social milieu that would be

34:45

conducive for them to take such

34:47

a own risk, sort of time

34:50

burden onto themselves. Well, that layer

34:52

now exists on a much more

34:54

wide scale than it did even

34:56

five, 10 years ago. And so

34:58

that's a major factor. I'm

35:00

just curious, as you collected this data,

35:02

how you came to see those kind

35:04

of different historical influences, what form they

35:06

took in the answers you got back,

35:08

the follow -up you did. I mean,

35:10

in terms of actually realizing

35:12

what was shaping these workers, you

35:15

know, how they articulated it for themselves. I'm

35:17

sure many of them had a self

35:19

-conscious kind of generational account similar to

35:22

the one you just gave. But I

35:24

imagine you also piece that together from

35:26

many sort of fragments of subjective accounts

35:28

of different kinds. I guess I'm

35:30

curious for some examples of what some of

35:32

those trajectories look like from the perspective of

35:34

individual workers. Sure. So

35:36

maybe I'll give one example

35:38

to start with, which is a

35:41

pretty remarkable story, which I actually

35:43

start the book off with a prologue

35:45

with Salwa Mogadewi, who was a

35:47

Starbucks worker in Vernon, Connecticut, who organized

35:49

her shop, even though she had

35:51

stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer. And so

35:53

there's an aspect of her story,

35:55

apart from the generational political piece, which

35:57

is very inspiring, because she decided

35:59

that the most meaningful thing she could

36:01

do with her life, and she

36:03

didn't know how long she had left,

36:05

would be to unionize her shop.

36:07

So I just sort of on a...

36:09

a human emotional basis, I found

36:11

that very powerful. But it's linked

36:13

to the question because how did she get

36:15

to this point where on her own

36:17

initiative, she decided that when she had cancer,

36:19

the thing that would be most meaningful

36:21

to her would be to try to unionize.

36:24

Well, so she's a child

36:26

of immigrants. Her parents

36:28

were Afghan immigrants. And

36:31

she grew up seeing them with

36:33

very precarious jobs. So there's this

36:35

context in which she grew up

36:37

sort of with the economic concerns

36:39

being something she was very aware

36:41

of. She herself, you

36:43

know, went to community

36:45

college, eventually transferred to

36:48

a Connecticut state. And

36:50

so there's this background condition too of

36:52

some people getting some higher education for herself.

36:54

But then, you know, she said very

36:56

explicitly, you know, she was a Bernie person.

36:59

The Bernie campaign for her resonated and

37:01

she already considered herself by the time

37:03

the pandemic hit. a radical who, you

37:05

know, I don't think was organized as

37:07

far as I know in any organized

37:09

sort socialist way, but who was a

37:11

Bernie person and who sort of saw

37:13

the bosses as bad and the workers

37:15

as good and who had read some

37:17

labor history and she said, I never

37:19

thought it could happen. I liked

37:22

unions, but I didn't think it was

37:24

possible. And then the spark of just

37:26

seeing one union win in Buffalo, New

37:28

York. flip the switch, she said, okay,

37:30

well now, and I guess I better

37:32

do it, right? If they could do

37:34

it, I could do it too. So

37:36

for her, I do think you see

37:39

some of this trajectory of in the

37:41

context of neoliberal crisis and the context

37:43

of young people's sort of the resonance

37:45

of the Bernie campaign in particular, made

37:47

it that there was a preexisting layer

37:49

of people like herself who when it

37:51

seemed all of a sudden possible, were

37:54

ready to jump and to take the

37:56

initiative. So you see that trajectory. And

37:58

then I do think you see an older trajectory

38:00

as I mentioned before, where

38:02

I talk to so many

38:04

workers who... I'll give one

38:07

more example. This

38:09

is maybe the more millennial version. The

38:12

president now of the News

38:14

Guild had been, whose name

38:16

is John Schluss, was

38:18

a worker at the

38:20

LA Times and is basically

38:23

my age, so somewhat

38:25

older millennial, and got radicalized

38:27

in college through... issues,

38:29

he's gay, and was

38:31

sort of a dissatisfied liberal, ended

38:33

up becoming a little bit

38:35

more left -leaning, ended up organizing

38:38

his shop and took the lead

38:40

then in transforming the news

38:42

guild. And again, so

38:44

you see that for him that

38:46

it was somehow the process

38:48

of fighting around equality issues had

38:50

brought him into activism, but

38:52

there was a search for maybe

38:55

a more sustainable form of

38:57

collective power. that wasn't present elsewhere,

38:59

and that forced him, as he described it,

39:01

to organize his shop, and then forced

39:03

him to run for union president because he

39:05

saw that journalism was getting destroyed. And

39:07

then, again, you see the context of sort

39:09

of neoliberal crisis and the hedge funds

39:11

and all of this coming in. So it's

39:13

the subjective sort of pathways that are

39:15

always combined with these structural factors in a

39:17

way that only the aggregate when you

39:19

do hundreds of interviews and data would do

39:21

you see these broader patterns emerge. Right,

39:24

I feel like in the Starbucks campaign

39:26

the theme of queer and particularly trans

39:29

workers has been a really important one

39:31

And their leadership has been very significant

39:33

and there too there's that structural connection

39:35

because the question of access to care

39:37

and the kind of insurance that people

39:39

get through through their jobs at Starbucks

39:41

right has actually emerged I think is

39:43

a quite important topic of that campaign

39:46

so the sort of high -level national

39:48

political question and you know the broken

39:50

health care system and the kind of

39:52

individual and subjective experience of wanting to,

39:54

you know, become free in one's own

39:56

person, are really intersecting there, it seems

39:58

to me. Yeah, and it's just a

40:00

huge part of the reason why Starbucks

40:03

exploded in the way it did is

40:05

that it had this reputation for being

40:07

queer -friendly, particularly. Like, that really is the

40:09

norm, especially if you get out of

40:11

the bigger cities, people maybe underestimate this.

40:13

In bigger cities, it's also like that,

40:15

but not to the same extent. But,

40:17

you know, if you're outside of the

40:20

big metropolitan areas, Starbucks is one of

40:22

the few places at least

40:24

has been considered that you could

40:26

work and sort of be openly

40:28

yourself if queer or trans. And

40:31

because of that you had this

40:33

pre -existing layer of queer young

40:35

workers that had politics of some

40:37

sort and they were predisposed actually

40:39

to having a higher expectations for

40:41

what their company should be. And

40:43

that's important. the reputation and

40:45

brand of Starbucks ended up rebounding against

40:47

it because people actually thought the company represented

40:49

something better, including on queer issues. And

40:51

then when it turned out it didn't and

40:53

it was backtracking and it wasn't giving

40:55

enough hours to get, for instance, medical

40:58

coverage for transitioning, right? If you

41:00

can't get enough hours to get healthcare

41:02

for that, well, then the nominal

41:04

decision of the company to provide this

41:06

is purely nominal. It's not a

41:08

real right. It's just a right on

41:10

paper. And so all of these

41:12

tensions then became manifest and it is

41:14

a big part the reason why

41:16

Starbucks ended up exploding the way it

41:18

did and it is just worth

41:20

sort of dotting the eyes on this

41:22

it shows again why even if

41:24

our orientation is towards sort of uniting

41:26

the working class as the class

41:28

which I do think is sort of

41:30

strategically correct the pathways through which

41:32

workers get into that struggle are very

41:34

varied. And it's just not the

41:36

case in Starbucks or in many other

41:38

places that sort of identity issues

41:41

were a distraction. In fact, in

41:43

that particular context, identity issues were very central

41:45

towards feeding into the kind of class struggle, which

41:47

ended up becoming the most important union drive

41:49

of the last four years. And I think people

41:51

haven't fully wrapped their head around that. So

41:54

the other piece alongside this kind

41:56

of sociology of generation and gender and

41:58

sexuality and race and so on,

42:00

the other piece that you alluded to

42:02

is the importance of technology. And

42:04

just speaking for myself, you know, as

42:07

a socialist, I'm always nervous about

42:09

attributing political significance to technology because it

42:11

feels like you risk becoming like

42:13

a globalization era. You know,

42:15

cell phones are going to change the world and bring democracy

42:17

everywhere or something. That's just a bad reflex on my

42:19

part. I'm not saying that's right. So,

42:22

you know, one thing that

42:24

I appreciate about a grounded research

42:26

study like yours is the

42:28

effort to actually think about, okay,

42:30

there is obviously something significant

42:32

in the technological transformations of the

42:34

last generation and what they

42:36

might mean for workers' ability to

42:38

communicate and coordinate. That doesn't

42:40

mean that, you know, the cell phone in your

42:43

pocket brings the revolution kind of on its own, right?

42:45

But it does actually play an important role. So

42:47

let's talk about what that role is. Yeah.

42:49

I mean, my inclination, frankly, before

42:52

doing this research and particularly before

42:54

the 2018 red state strikes which

42:56

I wrote my first book around

42:58

and that really started shifting my

43:00

opinion on a lot of the

43:02

stuff but it really wasn't until

43:04

this project that I sort of

43:07

had to concede that turns out

43:09

the digital piece is really important

43:11

more so than I had thought

43:13

and that technology can be used

43:15

for deep organizing because the critique

43:17

which is not wrong is that

43:19

a lot of times technology This

43:22

is the left critique is that

43:24

technology even at its best can only

43:26

lead to sort of shallow mobilizations

43:28

because it's easier to coordinate and mobilize.

43:31

You don't actually have to go through the

43:33

arduous process of building an organization. And so

43:35

you can get people out into the streets,

43:37

but you can't sustain a movement because you

43:39

haven't built the relationships and structures necessary for

43:41

that. One of the things I

43:43

found and that I really try to

43:45

highlight in the book is it turns out

43:47

that's not true. It can be true. This

43:50

is certainly the case that there's

43:52

a lot of sort of shallow digitally

43:54

based mobilizations, but it's also the

43:56

case that so much of this recent

43:58

unionization upsurge, which almost by definition

44:00

has required a deep level of organization,

44:02

because you can't win a union

44:04

election in this legal context and you

44:06

can't win a first contract without

44:08

implementing a very deep level of sort

44:10

of relationship building and organization building. But

44:12

it turns out that digital tools

44:14

were central to making that happen, and

44:16

so it's just worth spelling out

44:18

why it's been so important. The reality

44:20

is, until maybe 10 years ago, pre

44:23

-Zoom era in particular, the

44:25

only way you could do worker

44:27

-to -worker organizing was on a local

44:29

level. For just basic reasons is

44:31

that workers, in order to

44:34

train other workers to provide the sustained

44:36

support, you could only do that with

44:38

essentially people you could meet within person.

44:40

And so it really narrowly constrained the

44:42

scope of this type of organizing. If

44:44

you wanted to organize a national campaign,

44:46

you'd have to pay for a full -time

44:48

staffer to go fly out somewhere else

44:50

and meet with leads. And

44:52

so if imagine Starbucks campaign 15, 20

44:54

years ago, well, when all of

44:56

a sudden you have workers in Mesa,

44:58

Arizona, or in Seattle all reaching

45:00

out to Buffalo, there's no way

45:03

those workers could have trained them. There just wouldn't

45:05

have been the mechanism to be able to build

45:07

the type of worker -to -worker program that they ended

45:09

up building in Starbucks. And so

45:11

it's a game changer as far as

45:13

the scope of worker -to -worker organizing. There's

45:15

a reason you can have these campaigns

45:17

be on a national level or on

45:19

a regional level worker -driven in a way

45:21

that wasn't possible before. And then there's

45:23

a second piece, which is that digital

45:25

tools lower organizing costs. It's

45:27

just significantly cheaper to organize than it

45:29

was before. So to give an example, if

45:31

you don't have to rent a hall

45:33

but you can jump on Zoom, well, then

45:35

you might not have to affiliate with

45:38

a union. from the get -go, like you

45:40

would have maybe 20 years ago or 50 years

45:42

ago, it allows workers to

45:44

start self -organizing, coordinating if you

45:46

don't have to pay for a

45:48

huge number of flyers because you

45:50

can send people texts. If

45:52

you can do all of these

45:54

sort of basic coordination and communication tasks

45:56

through digital tools, and it doesn't

45:58

mean you have to only do that,

46:00

but it gives you the possibility

46:03

for starting to self -organize without having

46:05

to rely on an established union with

46:07

a lot of resources. Again,

46:09

eventually all of these drives came up

46:11

against the need for more resources. And

46:13

so the argument of the book isn't

46:15

that all of a sudden existing labor

46:17

unions are superfluous. In fact, most of

46:20

these self -organized drives ended up voting to

46:22

affiliate with unions for precisely this reason

46:24

that they wanted more capacity and financial

46:26

and legal support. But nevertheless, the dynamic

46:28

has been to a far greater extent

46:30

than in previous eras that are at

46:32

least going back to the 1930s, that

46:35

workers themselves self -organized and took a

46:37

lot of the first steps that in

46:39

the past would have only happened once

46:41

they were affiliated with the union. And

46:43

then they voted on which union to

46:45

affiliate with oftentimes. And that just changes

46:48

the whole dynamic of how workers related

46:50

to the unions. Because even once you're

46:52

affiliated, if you had come

46:54

in with some sort of pre -existing

46:56

sense of purpose and strategy and structure,

46:58

then you can relate to the

47:00

established union as a... and not as

47:02

just a relationship of deference. And

47:04

so the dynamics as far as democratizing,

47:07

organizing, and keeping workers in the

47:09

driver's seat have been driven in this

47:11

sense by the lower costs of

47:13

organizing, facilitating sort of bottom up organization

47:15

and in turn changing the dynamics

47:17

of organizing more generally. Yeah,

47:19

you made an implicit comparison there. You

47:21

know, you said imagine a Starbucks campaign,

47:23

you know, 15 years ago or something,

47:25

and there was something like that in

47:27

a way, right, which was fight for

47:29

15. And that comparison might be worth

47:31

making explicit in some ways. So if

47:33

I for 15, for folks who don't

47:35

remember or dimly remember, right, was the

47:37

effort coming from SCIU to demand $15

47:39

in a union and at fast food

47:41

stores around the country, you

47:43

know, I don't think it would be fair

47:45

to it to say that it came up

47:48

with nothing. I think in particular, the kind

47:50

of most widely agreed success of that effort

47:52

was to center the minimum wage and the

47:54

stagnation of the minimum wage and to trigger cities

47:57

and states to begin to raise the minimum

47:59

wage. And it probably also trained

48:01

the cohort of people and generated kind

48:03

of pockets of consciousness and militancy that

48:05

are harder to see from a kind

48:07

of high level. But what it

48:09

did not do was achieve a kind

48:11

of union recognition breakthrough of any kind in

48:13

the fast food sector in the way

48:15

that the Starbucks workers have. So I'm curious

48:17

how you would think about that comparison

48:19

and where worker to worker unionism fits in

48:22

that. Yeah, it's a

48:24

good question. I do talk

48:26

about Fight for 15 in

48:28

the book, and this is

48:30

a case of what I

48:32

consider scalable, but somewhat thin,

48:34

campaigning. And that's not

48:36

to say it didn't achieve important

48:38

goals. I think it really was

48:40

centrally important for winning tens of

48:42

million workers, better wages, and for

48:44

keeping the political focus in the

48:46

US to a higher extent than

48:48

it had been prior. on

48:50

inequality. And so in that sense, it was a

48:52

success. But it's not just that they didn't win

48:54

first contracts. It's that there

48:57

was not really the

48:59

process of building sustained worker

49:01

organizing on the ground

49:03

over time. And so

49:05

the limitation of that as

49:07

an approach was that it

49:09

did tend to be heavily

49:11

reliant on one day actions

49:13

and not sufficiently focused on

49:15

essentially giving workers the tools

49:17

to start organizing unions at

49:19

their shop. They punted on

49:21

the question of building a

49:23

union on the assumption shared

49:25

by many SEIU leaders that

49:28

under the existing labor law

49:30

regime, essentially, you wouldn't be

49:32

able to scale up organizing

49:34

on all of these small

49:36

shops, right? You wouldn't be

49:38

able to organize enough workers

49:40

and enough workplaces. to

49:42

be able to force management to the

49:44

table. The operating assumption was

49:46

that you would sort of create pressure

49:48

on the companies and then hopefully there'd

49:50

be labor law reform that would create

49:52

some sort of sectoral bargaining down the

49:54

road to which you would then, under

49:57

a new legal paradigm, be able to

49:59

organize at scale. And I think,

50:01

frankly, that intuition gets

50:03

a lot of things right. One

50:06

of the things that I try to do

50:08

in the book is be generous to SEIU

50:10

and say, SEIU, to its credit, is one

50:12

of the very few unions that thinks seriously

50:14

about organizing at scale. What would it take

50:16

to organize millions of workers and not just

50:18

hundreds of workers? And so because

50:20

of that, they tried this approach. The

50:22

problem is that, first of all, if

50:24

you don't build organizing from

50:27

below, if you don't actually start

50:29

building unions now as hard

50:31

as it is, it's hard to

50:33

create enough of a crisis

50:35

that the state will provide meaningful

50:38

labor law reform. And even

50:40

if they do, because we've seen

50:42

this in some states. There's

50:44

been some sectoral bargaining -ish laws

50:46

passed. You still then have to

50:49

go out and organize from the bottom

50:51

up if you're going to turn these into

50:53

real unions and not just sort of

50:55

very top -down legal pressure campaigns. So

50:57

the intuition of the book and

50:59

the argument of the book is to

51:02

show that the best strategic

51:04

vision of fight for 15 was trying

51:06

to organize something very widely to organize large

51:08

numbers of workers and they did use

51:10

digital tools to a certain extent for that

51:12

can be now. Concertized into

51:14

something more powerful that you can build

51:16

the scalable approach but you can do that

51:19

in a way that actually gives workers

51:21

a decisive. ability to start

51:23

building power workplace by workplace. So

51:25

I think you can combine the sort

51:27

of big national campaigns with the

51:29

tools and inspiration and frankly, democratic structures

51:31

necessary for workers to start self -organizing.

51:34

And you saw that in Starbucks.

51:36

People didn't think you could organize a

51:38

massive corporation, you know, the

51:40

sixth largest company, private sector company in the

51:42

US. Nobody thought, frankly, before a few

51:44

years ago that you could organize and force

51:46

them to the table because there's just

51:48

too many small workplaces. too high turnover, and

51:51

the assumption was it's impossible in this

51:53

current context. And it was proved that that's

51:55

not true. It turns out that you

51:57

can force massive companies to the table if

51:59

you do worker -to -worker organizing, if the

52:01

organizing goes viral, if you use digital tools

52:03

to provide sort of the scope and

52:06

possibility for workers to start self -organizing. And

52:08

so this is a lesson that I don't

52:10

think has been fully absorbed yet about

52:12

what do you do in this political economic

52:14

context to build power at scale. And

52:16

I think Starbucks shows basically

52:18

a better model than Fight for

52:20

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53:29

That's bit .ly slash digjackabin.

53:31

All lowercase. There's a link

53:34

in the show notes. You

53:39

talked about these kind of three pieces

53:41

as initiating training and strategizing. I think

53:44

we've talked a fair amount about initiating,

53:46

although maybe you want to say more

53:48

about it. I would love to dig

53:50

in more, though, on training and strategizing

53:52

as parts of building a union that

53:54

workers can and do themselves. What

53:57

does that look like? What have been the kind of

53:59

real successes of that? What have been the limits of

54:01

that? Sure. So let's talk

54:03

about the training piece first.

54:05

I think the best example we

54:07

have of a worker to

54:09

worker union is the News Guild.

54:11

So I go into detail

54:13

in the book about the News

54:16

Guild's member organizer program. And

54:18

in part, it's the best because

54:20

it's been around the longest

54:22

release since 2017, 2018. And

54:24

the very explicit purpose

54:26

of this member organizing program is

54:29

that every worker leader can and should

54:31

be trained to be able to

54:33

do anything a staff person can do.

54:35

And so a huge part of

54:37

that is that workers are the people

54:39

training other workers in how to

54:41

win. And obviously there's still some staff

54:43

support. It's not just sort

54:45

of the Wild West workers do

54:47

whatever they want. It actually takes

54:49

a lot of sustained effort and

54:51

structure and resources to build the

54:53

scaffolding through which workers can train

54:55

other workers systematically so at the

54:57

news guild what that looks like

55:00

is that they have monthly trainings

55:02

on organizing led by workers in

55:04

which all of the basic tasks

55:06

and some not so basic tasks

55:08

of organizing from initiation to getting

55:10

a first contract to then enforcing

55:12

the contract afterwards are taught by

55:14

workers to other workers be these

55:16

big national zoom calls but then

55:18

they also have smaller pods of

55:20

10 to 12 workers that Provide

55:22

the emotional and day -to -day back

55:24

and forth that normally a staff

55:26

intensive drive would do through with

55:28

staffers checking in on other workers

55:30

Well now through these pod structures

55:32

Essentially workers all across the country

55:34

at different stages their campaign are

55:37

providing this training and coaching support

55:39

to their co -workers in other

55:41

companies Across the country and so

55:43

you're able again to take a

55:45

step back these are the types

55:47

of things that staff normally

55:49

do, coaching, training, and workers are

55:51

able to do it, not just because

55:53

they've unleashed the full gates, but

55:55

because they've built very systematically structures through

55:58

which those important tasks of support

56:00

and training can be diffused much more

56:02

widely. And

56:04

then what about strategizing, right? I mean,

56:06

that seems like the place where staff

56:08

monopoly would make its own case most

56:10

easily, let's say. Well, you

56:12

know, workers contribute the energy and the effort

56:14

and they even teach and support each other, sure,

56:16

sure, sure. But strategy is

56:19

really a question that depends on

56:21

legal expertise and economic expertise and

56:23

industry expertise and huge accumulated experience

56:25

of fights won and lost and

56:27

so on. So what have workers

56:29

been able to do for themselves

56:31

in that regard? That's

56:33

a good question. And on all

56:36

these pieces and particularly on strategy,

56:38

I do think that there's an important

56:41

role for staff to play and

56:43

particularly in big issues, particularly in big

56:45

campaigns. possible

56:47

for very experienced staffers to help provide

56:49

strategic advice without it being so staff

56:51

intensive. And so I do think that

56:53

there's an important role for staff to

56:55

play in this as partners, but just

56:57

not as the exclusive agents of strategy. What

57:00

does that look like? Well, let

57:02

me give a few examples. At

57:05

Starbucks, for instance, one of the

57:07

big breakthroughs that happened was something

57:09

that no staff person would have

57:11

ever initiated, and it was very

57:13

surprising. And that's that the

57:15

company was forced to the

57:17

bargaining table in part because workers

57:19

from below initiated a fight

57:21

around Palestine, which in turn created

57:23

a whole unexpected series of

57:25

events that ended up leading to

57:28

a boycott of Starbucks, them

57:30

losing over $13 billion in sort

57:32

of wealth, and that in

57:34

turn forcing the company to table.

57:36

And the reason this was

57:38

important and shows the strategy pieces,

57:40

it was so risky. for

57:42

the union to engage in

57:44

a battle in solidarity with

57:46

Gaza and with Palestine after

57:48

October 7th. This was just

57:50

a few weeks after the

57:52

attacks. And you can

57:54

remember the moment where everybody's

57:57

getting vilified for being anti -Semite

57:59

if you're saying anything even

58:01

mildly pro -Palestine. And

58:03

nevertheless, the workers, because

58:05

they were still in the driver's

58:07

seat of strategy, because oftentimes

58:09

many of them were politically leftist

58:11

and just felt... and political

58:14

reasons, the importance of standing solidary

58:16

with the press peoples, they

58:18

fought really hard within the union

58:20

to adopt a statement in

58:22

solidarity with Palestine. And it

58:24

ended up sparking this very unforeseen number

58:27

of events that ended up culminating in

58:29

a huge breakthrough at the bargaining table.

58:31

And so this was a strategic, well,

58:33

somewhat. It wasn't that they even knew

58:35

what was going to end up happening,

58:37

but for them, the importance

58:39

of taking that risk was so important

58:41

that they would push back even

58:43

against the staffers and the national union

58:45

leaderships that were skeptical whether that

58:48

risk was worth it. So again, this

58:50

gives you an example of sometimes

58:52

the risks involved in labor organizing, even

58:54

when unexpected, can have big breakthroughs

58:56

that just certainly no experienced strategist would

58:58

have counseled this as a path

59:00

towards getting a first contract. It's just

59:02

outside the frame of reference. And

59:04

that's sort of maybe an important point

59:07

because the reality is we haven't

59:09

won first contracts at major

59:11

corporations since the 1930s at the biggest

59:13

corporations in the world. The reality is

59:15

nobody actually has the answer yet for

59:17

what it takes to bring these companies

59:19

to the table. And so this is

59:21

where I do think the strategic piece

59:23

is really important is that there has

59:25

to be some level of experimentation and

59:27

risk taking that is beyond, frankly, the

59:30

purview of even the experience of the

59:32

best staffers. And that's not to say

59:34

that they shouldn't chime in, but we

59:36

should just be really humble and say,

59:38

you know, if Starbucks when it's wins

59:40

its first contract, which I think they

59:42

will pretty soon. This will be

59:44

the biggest blow in the private sector for decades

59:46

and decades and decades, but we still don't

59:48

know what it's going to look like to force

59:50

Amazon to the table. What's it going to

59:52

take to force Walmart to the table? And

59:55

so given that reality, having workers

59:57

as sort of a co -constituent

59:59

and developing the strategy is so

1:00:01

important because there has to be

1:00:03

the development of some new approaches.

1:00:05

And we saw that in the

1:00:08

1930s in which the major breakthrough

1:00:10

tactically did not come from above.

1:00:12

It didn't come from sort of

1:00:14

very, very well thought out preexisting

1:00:16

research. It came from workers sitting

1:00:18

down at their workplace and that

1:00:20

tactic unexpectedly going viral. And I

1:00:22

think it's likely to be the

1:00:25

case that in many of these

1:00:27

big battles that we don't yet

1:00:29

know what all of the tactics

1:00:31

necessary to bring companies to the

1:00:33

table. are going to require. And

1:00:35

so I do think that workers are maybe

1:00:37

best positioned to take those risks because A,

1:00:40

they're not working for the union. So the

1:00:42

cost of them trying to experiment is lower.

1:00:44

This goes to what we were talking about

1:00:46

before. And then B, they're

1:00:48

working at these companies. So they have

1:00:50

a level of insight that maybe even

1:00:52

the best staffer doesn't about what the

1:00:54

choke points might be, about what the

1:00:56

possibilities might be. And so you need

1:00:58

to have a sort of creative process

1:01:00

of experimentation together with staff. to make

1:01:03

these strategic breakthroughs. We've been

1:01:05

making this comparison with the 30s, but some things

1:01:07

are different from the 30s in important ways that

1:01:09

I think are worth talking about. One,

1:01:11

in the kind of sociology of the working

1:01:13

class, this is a point that you make

1:01:15

in the book that I think would be

1:01:17

worth bringing out more. The

1:01:20

rank of file leaders of

1:01:22

the movement of the 1930s came

1:01:24

out of, you know, really

1:01:26

kind of socially integrated and cohesive

1:01:28

working class communities. You

1:01:30

know if you think about parts of New

1:01:33

York parts of Chicago where I live parts

1:01:35

of Detroit, right? There were whole sort of

1:01:37

neighborhoods wherever and kind of had the same

1:01:39

job almost that's really different now What do

1:01:41

you think is the significance of that? Yeah,

1:01:43

it's a big part of

1:01:46

the argument in my book is

1:01:48

that you can't just replicate

1:01:50

the strategies and tactics in the

1:01:52

1930s Precisely because as you

1:01:54

described the political economic social context

1:01:56

is so different and the

1:01:58

major frame through

1:02:01

which I look at this in

1:02:03

the book is decentralization and sprawl both

1:02:05

economically and just in terms of

1:02:07

housing. The working class has

1:02:09

essentially been stretched apart over the

1:02:11

last century due to companies themselves

1:02:13

becoming far more decentralized. That has

1:02:15

to do with both industry spreading

1:02:17

out all over the country to

1:02:20

South Southwest. But then also the

1:02:22

rise of the service sector. The

1:02:24

service sector almost by. definition has

1:02:26

to be far more sprawled and spread out

1:02:28

because it wouldn't make sense to have just

1:02:30

one huge concentration of all Walmarts in one

1:02:32

part of the country because you need to

1:02:34

be able to have an interface through which

1:02:36

local communities are able to buy your products.

1:02:38

And so it's the same in the care

1:02:40

economy. You have to have schools spread out.

1:02:42

You have to have hospitals spread out. You

1:02:45

have to have retail spread out. The

1:02:47

reality then is that process

1:02:49

economically combined with the rise of

1:02:51

suburbia, the rise of long

1:02:53

commutes, means that just the organic

1:02:55

relationships of workers to other

1:02:57

workers is far more frayed than

1:02:59

it was in the 1930s.

1:03:01

And this is one of the

1:03:03

reasons why it's, frankly, harder

1:03:05

to unionize today, even though support

1:03:07

for unionization is very high.

1:03:09

It just takes a lot more

1:03:11

fostering than it did in

1:03:13

the 1930s to get workers to

1:03:15

see themselves as part of

1:03:17

a broader community. It's not as

1:03:19

intuitive as it was when

1:03:21

all of your friends went

1:03:23

out to the bar, afterwards went to the

1:03:25

same church, played in the same sports

1:03:27

league, absent those sort of pre -existing communal

1:03:29

ties. The unionization process often has

1:03:31

to create them in a way that it

1:03:33

didn't have to create them in the 1930s

1:03:35

to the same extent. And so this is

1:03:37

a tactic that in the emergency workplace organizing

1:03:39

committee we talk about as socialized before you

1:03:42

organize. You oftentimes have to just get a

1:03:44

potluck together, get people to hang out, get

1:03:46

people to play a video game, whatever it is. You

1:03:48

need to build that relationship in a way that wasn't

1:03:50

the case back then. Similarly,

1:03:53

when you have a union election victory,

1:03:55

it doesn't organically spread just via

1:03:57

word of mouth and pre -existing social

1:03:59

relationships to the same extent that it

1:04:01

did a century ago. For the

1:04:04

same reason is that workers aren't as

1:04:06

connected to their coworkers. They

1:04:08

don't have these same ties through which

1:04:10

just kind of via... pre -existing relationships,

1:04:12

things can go viral. And so again,

1:04:14

it poses the question of more proactively

1:04:16

having to foster the contagion of mass

1:04:18

unionization than was necessary a century ago.

1:04:20

So now unions have to, if we

1:04:23

had a union election victory in Buffalo,

1:04:25

well, you have to make a very

1:04:27

compelling video about that and post it

1:04:29

all over social media with your email

1:04:31

contact. You have to systematically seed these

1:04:33

idea of unionization and systematically reach out

1:04:35

oftentimes via digital tools and the media.

1:04:37

to make it possible for large numbers

1:04:39

of workers who aren't already connected to

1:04:41

you to feel connected to you or

1:04:43

to see the possibilities of connecting with

1:04:45

you. So I get the big implication,

1:04:47

therefore, is that it does take more

1:04:50

fostering and more resources to unionize than

1:04:52

it did a century ago. And that

1:04:54

is why, frankly, so many unions turned

1:04:56

to the more staff -intensive model, because it

1:04:58

seemed to be the only way to

1:05:00

do that systematic fostering. And the argument

1:05:02

of the book is that that intuition

1:05:04

wasn't wrong. It's just not scalable. So

1:05:06

you need to find ways to do

1:05:08

the fostering, but on a more worker

1:05:10

-led basis. I feel

1:05:12

like the obvious question all this raises is,

1:05:14

can it win? I

1:05:17

think you paint a very compelling

1:05:19

portrait of how unionism can

1:05:21

ripple across Society in

1:05:23

some way right it takes work.

1:05:25

It takes effort. It's not

1:05:27

a totally organic phenomenon But rather

1:05:29

requires workers to lead it

1:05:31

themselves and communicate, you know with

1:05:33

one another and train one

1:05:35

another But you know, it's possible

1:05:37

as we've seen over the

1:05:39

last few years to as you

1:05:41

say foster participation of thousands

1:05:43

and tens of thousands and You

1:05:45

know in some cases beyond

1:05:47

that even in certain industries what

1:05:49

we haven't seen as you

1:05:52

say is a decisive verdict on

1:05:54

how this new form of

1:05:56

unionism might or might not be

1:05:58

able to overwhelm boss resistance.

1:06:00

And so I'm curious about the

1:06:02

evidence that we have for

1:06:04

how worker to worker unionism actually

1:06:06

can generate not just activity,

1:06:08

not just enthusiasm, not just participation,

1:06:11

but leverage and power. Yeah,

1:06:14

it's a good question. It's a

1:06:16

tough question. I will say that

1:06:18

the major knock against this type

1:06:20

of organizing that comes from skeptics

1:06:22

and sometimes very sort of honest

1:06:24

skeptics is that, well, can they

1:06:26

win first contracts? This is somewhat

1:06:28

what you're getting at. My

1:06:30

response is, first of all, they

1:06:32

have won first contracts in so many

1:06:34

of the same types of companies

1:06:37

and industries that unions have traditionally targeted,

1:06:39

which is to say smaller companies,

1:06:41

smaller chains, the exact types of targets

1:06:43

that all unions have focused on

1:06:45

up until recently. This type

1:06:47

of model has one in first contracts.

1:06:49

And so in the book, I talk

1:06:51

sort of at length about some of

1:06:53

these examples, talk about Burgerville Workers Union,

1:06:56

which is a chain of fast food

1:06:58

chain on the West Coast. Well, they

1:07:00

won a first contract impacting over 1 ,000

1:07:02

workers. And they showed

1:07:04

that worker -led organizing can win precisely

1:07:06

the types of industries that SCIU

1:07:08

and others assumed that was impossible

1:07:11

to win under this legal regime.

1:07:13

So they did win a first

1:07:15

contract. at Collectivo, which is a

1:07:17

mid -sized coffee chain in the

1:07:19

Midwest. They also won a

1:07:21

first contract with this bottom -up organizing,

1:07:23

and I tell that story in

1:07:25

the book. And then again, the News

1:07:27

Guild has won over 100 first

1:07:29

contracts in extremely difficult boss fights. These

1:07:31

are not easy fights. These are

1:07:33

fights in which you're going up against

1:07:35

huge hedge funds intent on destroying

1:07:37

journalism and destroying media. And nevertheless, the

1:07:39

workers won, and it was precisely

1:07:41

through a worker -to -worker model. So it's

1:07:44

just not the case that this

1:07:46

model hasn't been able to get first

1:07:48

contracts. I would argue, if anything,

1:07:50

that available evidence suggests that not only

1:07:52

are the contracts better, but that. one

1:07:54

of the real limitations of a staff

1:07:56

intensive model is on getting the first contract

1:07:58

because there tends to be a real

1:08:01

drop off in participation and leadership in staff

1:08:03

intensive models after the union election in

1:08:05

which everything is punted to a staff or

1:08:07

representative who doesn't actually have the time

1:08:09

or organizing capacity or relationships to help win

1:08:11

a first contract. So I would actually

1:08:13

turn the tables and say, well, actually staff

1:08:15

intensive organizing is the one that has

1:08:17

the real limitation when it comes to first

1:08:20

contracts. And then on the second piece

1:08:22

though, which is, Well, what about these big

1:08:24

corporations? The first thing to

1:08:26

say is you need to have some

1:08:28

sort of realistic criteria through which you

1:08:30

would assess the time horizon through which

1:08:32

you would get a first contract at

1:08:34

some of the biggest companies in the

1:08:36

world. It took 20, 30 years to

1:08:38

organize General Motors and Ford a century

1:08:40

ago. They had repeated attempts, ups and

1:08:42

downs, and just the nature of a

1:08:44

huge corporation is that you have to

1:08:46

organize far more workers. than you would

1:08:48

at a smaller company. And so that

1:08:50

just takes longer. And so at Starbucks, again,

1:08:53

they have succeeded in forcing the company

1:08:55

to the table. It's not the case

1:08:57

like at Amazon, for instance, that the

1:09:00

company is just ignoring the union. The

1:09:02

company at this point seems to actually

1:09:04

want to sign a first contract. They

1:09:06

just don't want to give them a

1:09:08

good first contract and the workers rightly

1:09:10

are demanding serious wage increases and all

1:09:12

of that. But they have shown in

1:09:15

practice an ability to put one of

1:09:17

the biggest corporations in the world on

1:09:19

the defensive and bargain, and that wouldn't

1:09:21

have happened had they not generated just

1:09:23

a huge amount of power. And so

1:09:25

I do think that there's sufficient evidence

1:09:28

to show that this model can win

1:09:30

not just in smaller companies, not just

1:09:32

in hospitals and universities and not just

1:09:34

in smaller chains, but against some of

1:09:36

the biggest companies in the world. It's

1:09:38

again a question primarily of scale. You

1:09:40

know, at Amazon, you have

1:09:42

to organize more than one warehouse.

1:09:45

You have to organize more than a

1:09:47

dozen units of drivers. It's a

1:09:49

question of how do you get enough

1:09:51

workers out there and enough community

1:09:53

support to force these companies to table.

1:09:55

It is worth flagging that one

1:09:57

of the vulnerabilities of many of these

1:10:00

companies compared to a century ago

1:10:02

is that they are more liable to

1:10:04

brand damage. than the old manufacturing

1:10:06

companies. So what you've lost in maybe

1:10:08

disruptive leverage because it's harder to

1:10:10

choke off the profits of Starbucks when

1:10:12

they have 15 ,000 stores. If you

1:10:14

have 500 stores strike, it's not

1:10:17

the same level of profits you're cutting

1:10:19

off. On the other hand, you

1:10:21

have the ability to directly involve and

1:10:23

speak out to and reach out

1:10:25

to the community because all of these

1:10:27

companies have to sell their products.

1:10:29

to community members, and they depend really

1:10:32

heavily on their brand. They're very,

1:10:34

very brand conscious, including Amazon and some

1:10:36

of these other companies that maybe

1:10:38

as leftist we think are evil. The

1:10:40

companies themselves are very intent whole

1:10:42

foods, very intent on preserving a certain

1:10:44

image of themselves, and that gives

1:10:47

a tremendous amount of leverage, potentially, to

1:10:49

unionization drives to bring in the

1:10:51

community. And it's not, again, I think,

1:10:53

a secondary factor that so many

1:10:55

of these drives that have gotten first

1:10:57

contracts have not just sort of

1:10:59

asked community members to come up on

1:11:01

picket lines or to protest, but

1:11:04

have organized boycotts of some form or

1:11:06

the other in a real organized

1:11:08

way, not in these sort of diffuse,

1:11:11

just post something on the internet and

1:11:13

hope people stop shopping, but in a

1:11:15

very concentrated, organized campaign way, calling

1:11:17

on community members to stop buying, to

1:11:19

support the union, and that worked at

1:11:21

Burgerville. played an important role in the

1:11:23

Palestine dynamics at Starbucks. And I think

1:11:25

that there has to be maybe some

1:11:27

more creative ways of bringing back the

1:11:29

boycott tactic in combination with bottom -up

1:11:31

organizing to force some of these big

1:11:33

companies to the table. We've been

1:11:35

talking about worker -to -worker unionism as

1:11:37

a way that workers have retaken the

1:11:39

initiative and started offensive fights. But

1:11:41

you wrote the book, obviously, during the

1:11:43

Biden administration. And now

1:11:46

the political dynamic has shifted, I think,

1:11:48

in a quite important way. That

1:11:50

probably concerns labor law. And

1:11:53

it concerns a whole

1:11:55

new set of workers who

1:11:57

will be targeted for

1:11:59

different kinds of attack and

1:12:01

retaliation by the new

1:12:03

administration. So where do you see some

1:12:05

of the biggest labor questions arising out of this

1:12:07

kind of sociopathic first couple of months of Trump

1:12:09

administration? I'm thinking in particular

1:12:11

of federal workers and university workers, but there

1:12:13

may be other examples you want to

1:12:16

bring. And then I'm curious how the lessons

1:12:18

of the book would relate to these

1:12:20

emerging fights. It's

1:12:22

one of the things that people

1:12:24

ask me a lot about as I've

1:12:26

been talking about the book. And

1:12:28

it's a good question because, yeah, obviously

1:12:30

the book was written before we

1:12:32

knew what the outcome of the election

1:12:34

would be. But there was also

1:12:36

clearly a good chance that the Republicans

1:12:39

could win. And the book sort

1:12:41

of hedges its bets and tries to

1:12:43

articulate what more or less would

1:12:45

be the path forward in both cases.

1:12:47

And I do think we're seeing

1:12:49

now over the last few weeks that

1:12:51

not only is this type of

1:12:53

organizing still possible, but in some ways

1:12:55

it's even more urgent than it

1:12:57

might have been under the Biden administration,

1:13:00

which is to say that Trump

1:13:02

and Musk are wielding a sledgehammer against

1:13:04

the public sector, against basic democratic

1:13:06

norms, and against some of the biggest

1:13:08

unions in the country, the public

1:13:10

sector unions, and the federal

1:13:12

sector, and in education. And

1:13:14

so the question is immediately posed, what

1:13:16

will it take to organize enough workers

1:13:19

to beat back these attacks? And

1:13:21

the problem, in many ways, is

1:13:23

the same that was described before

1:13:25

on offensive struggles. It's also the

1:13:27

same in defensive struggles, that there's

1:13:29

just not enough staff to organize

1:13:31

millions of workers to defeat Trump

1:13:33

or Musk. It's the same essential

1:13:35

dilemma, which is that power in

1:13:37

the labor room, it comes from

1:13:39

activating worker leaders, connecting their coworkers,

1:13:42

building up this bottom -up dynamic. And

1:13:45

if you are reliant on staff

1:13:47

to make that happen, there's just no

1:13:49

world in which you're going to

1:13:51

be able to generate a wide enough

1:13:53

and deep enough fight back in

1:13:56

the federal sector, in higher ed, in

1:13:58

K -12, through which you can defeat

1:14:00

what is an extremely dangerous and

1:14:02

extremely reactionary offensive from the government. So

1:14:05

concretely, in the federal workers,

1:14:07

which is where I've been sort

1:14:09

of spending all of my

1:14:11

time supporting for the last month,

1:14:14

the national unions not surprisingly,

1:14:16

have focused almost exclusively on

1:14:18

sort of a legalistic fight

1:14:20

back. And it's good they're

1:14:22

doing that. I'm not saying

1:14:25

that the legal route is

1:14:27

unimportant. You know, that has

1:14:29

put some blockages, even if

1:14:31

temporary, on the administration. And

1:14:33

so that's usually important. But

1:14:35

still, just the reality is

1:14:37

that the courts are ultimately going

1:14:39

to get The legal questions

1:14:41

are ultimately going to get punted to the

1:14:43

Supreme Court, and we should have no

1:14:46

confidence in the Supreme Court doing the right

1:14:48

thing. And a huge amount

1:14:50

of damage can be done, even in the meantime,

1:14:52

to all of these services. And

1:14:54

it's not even clear that the administration

1:14:56

will even listen to the courts,

1:14:58

ultimately, if they side against them. So

1:15:00

you have to combine a legal

1:15:02

approach with a bottom -up fight back.

1:15:04

And that is not what, unfortunately, the

1:15:07

vast majority of unions in

1:15:09

the federal sector have yet done.

1:15:11

Hopefully that change, and I'm

1:15:13

hoping and somewhat optimistic that as

1:15:15

was the case in the

1:15:17

2018 teachers' revolts, which

1:15:19

people might remember, were

1:15:21

organized, initiated from below from rank and file

1:15:23

teachers and local presidents, went viral over

1:15:25

Facebook groups. Eventually the unions and the top

1:15:27

leaders came on board. I'm hoping we're

1:15:29

going to see something similar in the federal

1:15:31

sector. But the initiative came

1:15:33

from below and to organize Millions

1:15:35

of workers you're talking about 2

1:15:37

.3 million federal workers there has

1:15:39

to be unfortunately now there is

1:15:42

emerging mechanisms for workers to start

1:15:44

self -organizing so it's a very promising

1:15:46

development that the federal unionist network

1:15:48

has caught on there was a

1:15:50

national day of action in February

1:15:52

and there's growing organizing all across

1:15:54

the federal sector of rank and

1:15:56

filers and local union leaders essentially

1:15:58

trying to build the popular power

1:16:00

necessary to defeat these attacks and

1:16:02

they're doing through a worker -to -worker

1:16:04

model. They can't rely on staff.

1:16:06

They don't have staff. They just

1:16:08

literally don't have staff in many

1:16:10

of these locals. And on

1:16:12

a national level, there isn't really an organizing

1:16:14

tradition because the federal sector hasn't had to

1:16:16

strike. They've been somewhat institutionally set

1:16:18

for a long time. And so it's a

1:16:20

huge dilemma now because all of a

1:16:22

sudden you have to fight, fight, fight, and

1:16:24

aren't staff within these unions or at

1:16:26

least not enough of them. to lead that,

1:16:29

so you do have to build this

1:16:31

type of leadership from below, and you're seeing

1:16:33

that in the federal sector. And

1:16:35

similarly, in K -12 and

1:16:37

in higher ed, everything

1:16:39

that Musk and Trump are doing

1:16:41

against the federal workers right now,

1:16:44

whether it's trying to cut off

1:16:46

funding, doing mass layoffs, wielding the

1:16:48

threat of cutting off funding for

1:16:50

anybody who talks about race or

1:16:52

DEI or whatever their pretext is,

1:16:56

they're going to come after higher ed.

1:16:58

Next and K -12 after that and

1:17:00

they're already starting to do that

1:17:02

and so again it poses this question

1:17:04

of like what how are you

1:17:06

gonna get the Union movement in these

1:17:08

sectors to really get on war

1:17:10

footing you right because it is it

1:17:12

is you know in a very

1:17:14

real way the existence of these institutions

1:17:16

and existence of these unions being

1:17:18

put into question and it's not just

1:17:20

business as usual and There's a

1:17:22

real inertia from above towards

1:17:24

pivoting to war footing and mass

1:17:26

scale organizing. And again, I

1:17:28

think it's going to be incumbent

1:17:30

on the rank and filers

1:17:32

and local organizers and maybe more

1:17:34

reform minded unions to build

1:17:37

the type of mass based campaigns

1:17:39

that can involve the community

1:17:41

that can inspire and onboard and

1:17:43

train up worker leaders to

1:17:45

fight back. And that isn't currently

1:17:48

the norm, it hopefully, again, will happen.

1:17:50

But I don't see it happening without

1:17:52

a huge amount of rank and file

1:17:54

leadership from below and without developing the

1:17:56

types of worker structures locally and nationally

1:17:58

that are going to be required to

1:18:00

build sustained enough power to beat back

1:18:02

what is a terrifying prospect, frankly, if

1:18:05

there's not sustained opposition. Yeah.

1:18:07

I mean, that all makes sense to

1:18:09

me. I think the question of what

1:18:11

kind of campaigns to fight is a

1:18:13

challenging one. I mean, I'm thinking about

1:18:15

this myself and my own. higher ed

1:18:17

labor activities, you know,

1:18:20

it's one thing when you have a target

1:18:22

near at hand, a boss obviously, or

1:18:24

you know, even a kind of local corporate

1:18:26

headquarters or something like that, what it

1:18:28

means to organize at your workplace against the

1:18:30

federal government or against the attack coming

1:18:32

from the federal government seems like it presents

1:18:34

new strategic challenges just in terms of

1:18:37

you know where does our power lie what

1:18:39

kind of actions might we take to

1:18:41

kind of exercise and expand that power i

1:18:43

mean i you know i'm the president

1:18:45

of my chapter of the american association of

1:18:47

university professors for example which is not

1:18:49

a bargaining agent i mean i work in

1:18:51

the private sector so we're just an

1:18:54

advisory kind of you know we just agitate

1:18:57

And, you know, we've been turning people out to,

1:18:59

you know, these national days of action to defend

1:19:01

scientific research and this kind of thing, and that's

1:19:03

good, and we need to keep doing that. But

1:19:05

I think people are rightly asking us the question, like,

1:19:08

what's the plan here? And, you

1:19:10

know, I can't presume to know what

1:19:12

it is yet, but I think it's

1:19:14

worth talking about, or we need to

1:19:16

talk about it more collectively, and we

1:19:18

should hear to right now, I think,

1:19:20

just in terms of the strategic challenge

1:19:22

of how one mobilizes against this

1:19:24

kind of very political and sort

1:19:26

centralized assault on many different kinds of

1:19:28

institutions that we live our lives

1:19:30

in locally. My starting

1:19:32

point on this is that the

1:19:34

central issue and frame through which

1:19:36

we win is convincing the public

1:19:38

that these attacks on public sector

1:19:41

workers and federal workers are attacks

1:19:43

on them, which is to say

1:19:45

in the federal sector, like in

1:19:47

higher ed, you need to be

1:19:49

able to convince people who aren't.

1:19:52

immediately impacted as workers that they are

1:19:54

deeply involved and that their lives will

1:19:56

be worse and their kids' lives will

1:19:58

be worse if Trump gets his way.

1:20:01

And so you need to pose it

1:20:03

that way. So it's not just sort

1:20:05

of sympathy with fired workers, but that

1:20:07

this is an attack on all of

1:20:09

us. So in the federal sector, how

1:20:11

do people think they're going to get

1:20:13

Social Security if Trump cuts The

1:20:15

workforce of the social security administration by

1:20:17

half, you know It poses a real question

1:20:20

like will you actually get your social

1:20:22

security benefits? And I think that if you

1:20:24

listen to Elon Musk That's an open

1:20:26

question because he's saying that social security is

1:20:28

like a Ponzi scheme, you know Maybe

1:20:30

maybe he doesn't think social security should exist,

1:20:32

right? And so that I think should

1:20:34

set off alarm bells to the broader community

1:20:36

It needs to be communicated more and

1:20:38

similarly a sort of across the board with

1:20:41

all of these federal services that people

1:20:43

take for granted people take for granted that

1:20:45

companies aren't just going to be dumping

1:20:47

chemicals into their water like they used to

1:20:49

or they assume that this isn't happening.

1:20:51

Well, who's going to enforce these really basic

1:20:53

norms that have been implemented to a

1:20:55

certain extent over the last century if you

1:20:57

don't have an EPA, right? And people

1:20:59

just don't think about it as much because

1:21:02

they have been functioning and they're invisible

1:21:04

for that reason. So you have to make

1:21:06

visible the public stakes of what Trump

1:21:08

is doing. And I think that Frankly, I

1:21:10

think Trump and Musk are playing with

1:21:12

fire because a lot of what they're doing

1:21:14

is very unpopular. And it's not even

1:21:16

sort of marginally related to the nominal mandate

1:21:18

that they got as reactionary as it

1:21:20

was. This is coming a little bit out

1:21:22

of left field. Unions are very popular.

1:21:25

A lot of these services are very popular.

1:21:27

And I think that creates a huge

1:21:29

opening for public backlash. So to me, the

1:21:31

question is how do the unions organize

1:21:33

enough for their workers to be able to

1:21:35

bring out enough community support to create

1:21:37

enough public backlash to force Musk and Trump

1:21:39

to retreat? And that, again,

1:21:41

poses the question of new types of

1:21:43

structures, though, because the issue, as you

1:21:45

suggested, is there's a disconnect between the

1:21:48

existing forms of organization of the labor

1:21:50

movement, which are highly atomized, particularly in

1:21:52

education and the federal sector, but just

1:21:54

across the board. We live in a

1:21:56

labor movement in which it's extremely

1:21:58

decentralized, extremely locally based, and you

1:22:00

have all of these local fiefdoms and

1:22:03

weird... stuff, and there's not a tradition

1:22:05

of sort of uniting nationwide, certainly, or

1:22:07

even on a regional level, and certainly

1:22:09

not sort of across union. But at

1:22:11

this point, given the scale of the

1:22:13

attacks of the Trump administration in these

1:22:15

sectors, anything short of really

1:22:17

widespread coordination and campaigns is, I

1:22:19

think, going to fall short, not

1:22:21

just for power reasons, but because

1:22:24

we need to, at this exact

1:22:26

moment, break through what I think

1:22:28

is still the dominant obstacle, which

1:22:30

is so many people opposed to

1:22:32

Trump are unsure whether protests and

1:22:34

fighting back can work, right? This

1:22:36

is the dominant sense of doom

1:22:38

and gloom and sense of maybe

1:22:41

it's all futile, you know, he's

1:22:43

just gonna do whatever he wants

1:22:45

no matter what. That hasn't

1:22:47

been fully... even partially reversed yet. It's

1:22:49

not the same mood of fight back

1:22:51

that we had after the first Trump

1:22:53

administration Part because the signals from the

1:22:55

Democratic Party are so much weaker this

1:22:57

time Nevertheless, it's necessary and I think

1:22:59

then the role of the labor movement

1:23:01

in particular and in some ways It's

1:23:03

an opening for the labor room to

1:23:05

reassert itself as the best fighter for

1:23:07

democracy and the best sort of centerpiece

1:23:09

of fighting for all of us in

1:23:11

this country labor has to signal that

1:23:13

now is to the time to fight

1:23:15

that we're in a authoritarian coup power

1:23:17

grab, whatever you want to call it,

1:23:19

and that not only is it possible

1:23:21

to win, but it's not only is

1:23:23

it necessary to win, but it's possible.

1:23:25

And that the plans of action, I

1:23:27

do think look in many ways like

1:23:29

the days of action we've had, but

1:23:31

at a far larger scale. And to

1:23:33

get out of far larger scale, you

1:23:35

need the big unions uniting with the

1:23:37

big organizations, like move on and

1:23:39

indivisible. And you need the unions talking

1:23:41

with each other to bring out not just

1:23:43

thousands of people, but millions of people

1:23:46

into the streets. And I think it's not

1:23:48

going to take just protest. We're going

1:23:50

to need to start seeing some of the

1:23:52

spirit, I think of like the Madison

1:23:54

protests of 2011, where people were occupying, you

1:23:56

know, the capital, some of the best

1:23:58

spirit. of Occupy where you basically have mass

1:24:00

peaceful civil disobedience to raise the political

1:24:03

crisis and to show that Americans aren't willing

1:24:05

to let the government get sold off

1:24:07

for parts to the richest people on the

1:24:09

planet. And so just I will give

1:24:11

one quick plug for the fun federal unionist

1:24:13

network is trying to initiate and has

1:24:15

begun to initiate such a campaign in the

1:24:17

federal sector of essentially a rapid response

1:24:20

network through which every single illegal

1:24:22

and unjustifiable firing that happens

1:24:24

will be met locally through

1:24:26

mass protests. And

1:24:28

that initiative is just sort of getting on

1:24:30

its feet right now, but I think

1:24:32

it's very promising. It could go viral. And

1:24:35

the way for people who are listening

1:24:37

to the show can get involved with that,

1:24:39

whether a federal worker or a community

1:24:41

supporter, you just go to the following website.

1:24:43

You go to go .savepublicservices.com. go .savepublicservices.com,

1:24:45

put in your info, and then

1:24:47

you'll be notified, essentially, when there's an

1:24:49

emergency protest in your area. And

1:24:52

I think if these types of, you

1:24:54

know, mass, creative, a

1:24:56

bit unruly protest can kind of

1:24:58

catch the imagination, then you will

1:25:00

see the possibility of a much

1:25:03

wide -scale backlash sufficient to force

1:25:05

them to retreat. An appealing

1:25:07

feature of worker -to -worker unionism, as we've

1:25:09

been talking about it, obviously, is

1:25:11

how it can proceed relatively independently of

1:25:13

union leadership. which may just be

1:25:15

proceeding at its own pace or its

1:25:17

own agenda. But since

1:25:19

it doesn't depend on leadership resources, do

1:25:22

you think the development of this

1:25:24

kind of unionism has ramifications for the

1:25:26

internal politics of organized labor? And

1:25:29

in particular, I'm thinking of the sort

1:25:31

of fork in the road between Sean Fain

1:25:33

and the UAW and Sean O 'Brien and

1:25:35

the Teamsters, two presidents who were elected

1:25:37

around the same time to lead their unions

1:25:39

and sort similarly hailed as militants. They

1:25:41

had different histories, but they were often compared.

1:25:43

But while Fain has led the union through a

1:25:46

major strike and sharpened its political stances, O

1:25:48

'Brien has moved to court the political

1:25:50

right. He's flirted openly with Trump and

1:25:52

recently has echoed his sort of racist

1:25:54

and xenophobic politics. So since

1:25:57

we're talking about trying to get out from

1:25:59

under the tactical dependence on union leadership, I'm

1:26:01

curious about what you think the

1:26:03

DIY model you write about means for

1:26:05

the kind of political disposition of

1:26:07

labor. Yeah, I think

1:26:09

it's a central question in part because

1:26:13

My argument isn't that

1:26:15

you can win widely

1:26:17

without unions. I wish

1:26:19

it were the case that sort of just

1:26:21

workers on their own without the existing

1:26:23

labor movement could go all the way. I

1:26:25

don't see much evidence for that. So

1:26:27

it poses very sharply the question not only

1:26:30

of workers taking the initiative, but of

1:26:32

transforming the existing unions so that those resources

1:26:34

and capacity can be leveraged to fighting

1:26:36

the boss and fighting the right in a

1:26:38

way that they're currently not being done

1:26:40

sufficiently. You

1:26:43

know, there's a long and

1:26:45

very rich tradition of union reform

1:26:47

that I think that the

1:26:49

book mostly stands in that same

1:26:51

tradition. Labor notes in particular,

1:26:54

sort of the troublemaker's wing of

1:26:56

the labor movement that has

1:26:58

foregrounded the democratization of unions and

1:27:00

turning them into organizations of

1:27:02

and for working class leadership and

1:27:04

fight back. One of

1:27:06

the things that the book tries to

1:27:08

do, which I think is under articulated

1:27:11

by labor notes and sort of the

1:27:13

existing reform movements, at least until recently,

1:27:15

and this is starting to change, is

1:27:18

to show how intertwined this

1:27:20

type of worker to worker organizing

1:27:22

and new organizing is with

1:27:24

union reform. It's not the case

1:27:26

that the only path towards

1:27:28

changing the labor movement is that

1:27:30

you have to get an

1:27:32

existing union job, or maybe you're

1:27:34

already in a union, run

1:27:36

a caucus, win leadership,

1:27:38

and then transform the union.

1:27:41

through that way and then wage

1:27:43

larger fightbacks. That's part of it.

1:27:45

That is certainly part of it.

1:27:48

And we saw that in the

1:27:50

UAW, as you mentioned, where one

1:27:52

of the most corrupt, most top -down

1:27:54

unions got taken back by its

1:27:56

workers through a reform effort and

1:27:58

has led a really dramatic new

1:28:00

life and fight back approach. But

1:28:02

one of the things I try to show in the book is that There's

1:28:05

multiple paths towards union reform,

1:28:07

and if we're going to

1:28:09

get enough unions to start

1:28:11

moving in a UAW -type

1:28:13

direction, you do actually need

1:28:15

far more worker -initiated campaigns and

1:28:18

driving energy into these unions.

1:28:20

So very concretely, the UFCW, for instance,

1:28:22

the United Food Control Workers, which

1:28:24

it organizes or it normally should be

1:28:27

organizing all retail workers, but hasn't

1:28:29

been doing a very good job of

1:28:31

it, at least in most parts

1:28:33

of the country. The reality is

1:28:35

that you have all of these

1:28:37

workers now, and REI, Whole Foods now

1:28:39

most recently, that are

1:28:41

young, oftentimes Bernie, Black

1:28:43

Lives Matter, workers like we described earlier,

1:28:45

who want to fight back, oftentimes

1:28:47

with a very militant approach. And by

1:28:49

organizing their shops, they're posing the

1:28:51

question of reforming that union in a

1:28:53

really stark way, first by just

1:28:55

obliging the union to take organizing more

1:28:58

seriously, because when you have large

1:29:00

numbers of workers self -organizing and reaching

1:29:02

out, it puts pressure on the union.

1:29:04

to start putting more resources towards

1:29:06

organizing. But then also, frankly, there's an

1:29:08

influx of a lot of young,

1:29:10

radicalized workers into these unions, which is

1:29:12

extremely promising for union reform, because

1:29:14

a lot of the labor movement, it

1:29:16

frankly, has gone calcified over decades

1:29:18

and decades and decades, and requires people

1:29:20

within the unions who are willing

1:29:22

to put forward a different vision. And

1:29:24

so the mechanism through which you

1:29:26

get a wide enough layer of workers

1:29:28

into unions and interested in unions capable

1:29:31

of reforming them in large part

1:29:33

passes through new organizing. And you saw

1:29:35

that even in part through the

1:29:37

UAW, part of the reason why the

1:29:39

auto worker sort of opposition led

1:29:41

by Sean Fain was able to win

1:29:43

was that they were able to

1:29:45

build an alliance with a bunch of

1:29:47

oftentimes left -leaning graduate students who'd gotten

1:29:50

organized into the UAW. most time

1:29:52

through very bottom -up self -organized efforts. And

1:29:54

you saw then the alliance of

1:29:56

this sort of internal reform effort with

1:29:58

the spirit and energy of new

1:30:00

organizing played a decisive role. So I

1:30:02

do think that that type of

1:30:04

energy is crucial for reforming the labor

1:30:06

movement. And it has to proceed

1:30:09

with a vision of very dramatic transformation

1:30:11

of organized labor structures. It's not

1:30:13

just, as was the case in the

1:30:15

90s, to a large extent. that

1:30:17

you just need more and more members.

1:30:19

This was one of the limitations

1:30:21

of the 1990s model. It was so

1:30:23

focused on just sort of quantitatively

1:30:25

transforming the labor and bringing in more

1:30:27

people. You can't actually get to

1:30:29

the quantitative breakthroughs without also qualitatively transforming

1:30:31

the way unions function for a

1:30:33

variety of reasons. How are you going

1:30:35

to get workers to keep on

1:30:37

dedicating their time and energy and passion

1:30:39

and to risk their lives? if

1:30:41

they don't feel like they have real

1:30:43

ownership of their campaigns and if

1:30:45

they feel like their unions aren't really

1:30:47