"We Are the Union": Discounts, events, & how we defeat Trump's broligarchy
Don’t despair. Bottom-up workplace organizing can still change the world
In this week’s newsletter you’ll find everything you want to know about my new book, including how to get a 30% or a 50% discount, upcoming book launches nationally, internationally, and in NYC, some fancy blurbs, as well as an excerpt from the book’s introduction. But first, a few words about why I think We Are the Union can help provide some hope in our current (bleak) moment.
Hope in Tough Times
So many people since Trump’s election have told me they feel like going into political hibernation. I get the sentiment, especially after witnessing month after month of heartbreaking genocide, combined now with the recent spread of devastating wildfires. But succumbing to despair is exactly what those in power would like us to do.
Even in the last week we’ve seen some big wins. Internationally, there’s finally a ceasefire (at least for now). And yesterday it was announced that the United Auto Workers has succeeded in defeating Stellantis’ push to move thousands of union jobs abroad. We know from history, and from recent experience, that the tide can quickly turn when large numbers of workers come together to fight back.
It is possible to defeat the billionaire broligarchy. But with the Democrats in disarray and other liberal institutions seemingly resigned to Trump 2.0, we shouldn’t expect much help from above anytime soon. Fortunately, despite a more hostile political context, the labor movement still has the momentum, resources, and latent disruptive power to expose Trump’s sham populism, beat back his attacks on America’s most vulnerable populations, and overcome our bosses through ambitious workplace organizing.
With that goal in mind, I’m very excited that my new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big is coming out on February 18 with UC Press. It’s full of inspiring stories about working people building power at work and winning big. At the same time, the book tries to lay out a compelling (and rigorous) case for how to scale up unionization by the millions, through concertedly inspiring and training scores of rank-and-file leaders. This definitely won’t be easy. But it’s necessary. And it’s our best bet to reverse economic inequality, isolate Trumpism, constrain the US war machine, and prevent climate catastrophe.
Even for regular readers of this newsletter, there’s lots of new research data, analysis, organizing tips, and stories in the book for you to chew on and to help inform your efforts. As UAW president Shawn Fain puts it, "We Are the Union is an urgently needed blueprint for how we beat the billionaire class. Every worker should read this book." I’m hoping it sparks lots of debate, and I can’t wait to hear what you think. In the meantime, here’s how you can get a copy, spread the word, and get connected:
Democratic Socialists of America, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, and Organizing for Power are holding a big national and international study group of We Are the Union. Please register here for the March 3 Zoom book launch with myself, labor writer Kim Kelly, and Moe Mills of Starbucks Workers United. Everybody who participates in the study group will get a 50% off discount on the book. (You’ll get more details on this discount and subsequent study group dates once you RSVP for the launch.)
Live near NYC? Come to the in-person book launch on Wednesday, February 26 at 6:30pm at the People’s Forum, with me, Jacobin writer Alex Press, and Amazon and Starbucks worker leaders. RSVP here, it’ll be lots of fun!
Any reader of this newsletter can get a 30% off discount. Here's how: Click on this link. Click on the "Buy" button on the right. A dropdown menu will appear. Click on the "UC Press" button. You will be directed to the IndiePubs website. Click on the "Check Out" button. Input the code UCPSAVE30 to the Discount code section on the right. Fill in your financial and address info to buy the book. Press "Continue to Shipping."
I need all of your help spreading the word! It’d be really helpful if you post about We Are the Union on social media — e.g. share a graph or quote you found interesting; invite people to join the national or local study groups; or encourage your friends and followers to get copies.
Unions, activist groups, and other membership organizations can get a big discount if they do a bulk buy of the book or if they publicize it to their members. (I’d especially love it if folks organized study groups of the book with their co-workers or fellow union members.) Contact me at ericblancsf[at]gmail[dot]com for more info.
I’m happy to speak about the book — and how labor can defeat Trumpism — to any union, political org, podcast, substack, etc. Big or small, in the US or abroad, over Zoom or in person. Get in touch over email! (Also, if you live in Baltimore, come to the book event I’m doing with Maximillian Alvarez on March 27 at Red Emma’s! RSVP here)
Unions and rank-and-file groups interested in learning how they can scale up their efforts by adopting worker-to-worker structures should reach out to the new Worker to Worker Collaborative I recently founded at Rutgers. We’ve already begun doing a bunch of exciting trainings with unions (some very big, some very small), and would be happy to help your organization introduce these new best practices into your work. Reach out via email: ericblancsf[at]gmail[dot]com.
Advanced Praise for We Are the Union
"To overcome MAGA extremism and corporate rule, Eric Blanc shows how unions can fully harness the power of rank-and-file leadership. This book should transform the labor movement—and the fight for democracy at home and abroad."—Sara Nelson, President of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA
"Though Blanc's emphasis is on how to organize on the scale necessary to qualitatively build worker power, this book is really about taking a cold look at the challenges workers face in the twenty-first century in organizing. Blanc does not avoid the hard questions and issues, but takes them straight on. Reading this book immediately catalyzed ideas and scenarios for me in thinking about new organizing. Bravo!"—Bill Fletcher Jr., trade unionist and coauthor of Solidarity Divided
"A timely, powerful, and optimistic assessment of the recent labor uptick. Based on extensive new research, Blanc shows that young workers have forged a new model of union organizing, facilitated by social media, that offers a promising path forward for the beleaguered US labor movement."—Ruth Milkman, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, City University of New York
"In this extraordinary moment of possibility for the labor movement, Blanc has penned an essential roadmap for how workers can go from possibility to revolutionary power."—Krystal Ball, cohost of Breaking Points
Sneak Preview (an excerpt from the book’s introduction)
We Are the Union’s central argument is that worker-to-worker organizing is the only plausible path to scaling up union power. In other words, it can help organized labor extricate itself from the impasse of big-but-weak or small-but-powerful campaigns.
Though they’re scalable, labor’s largest initiatives—thin PR-oriented mobilizations and getting out the vote for Democrats—can’t consolidate the degree of people power needed to unionize millions, transform national labor law, or win big structural change. For such heavy lifts, you need to create crises for economic elites by combining air-war tactics—back-room pressure, media exposure, etc.—with a strong ground war of rank-and-file intensive organizing.
Many staff-heavy union drives have shown on a small scale what this alternative looks like. Via time-tested organizing tactics culminating in (or at least credibly threatening) disruptive mass action, they’ve beaten the bosses, won material gains, and empowered worker leaders. Their accumulated lessons on winning over a majority of coworkers, building toward strikes, establishing community support, and pressuring politicians constitute a crucial reservoir of knowledge for present and future labor struggles.
But even if we leave aside the challenges of maximizing democratic practices and workers’ capacities in staff-intensive efforts, any model that requires something close to one staffer for every hundred workers can’t possibly lead enough organizing drives to transform America. In other words, staff-intensive organizing can win battles, but not the war. For that, we need a movement. And to build such a movement, we need an organizing model that can scale up worker power.
While recent worker-to-worker efforts have developed from current best practices and left union traditions, they aren’t just more of the same. Pushed by circumstances to rapidly expand rank-and-file responsibilities, they’ve forged something new in the heat of battle. “There’s no blueprint for what we’re doing,” notes Daisy Pitkin, a national staff organizer for Starbucks Workers United. By trying to make sense of this emergent organizing model, I hope to provide, if not a blueprint, then at least a road map for other workers, unions, and social movements to follow in their footsteps.
We Are the Union is simultaneously a book of social science and an activist intervention. The book’s duality partly reflects the fact that I’m both a professor of labor studies and an active participant in the labor movement. If the methods used are typical for a social scientist, the questions I ask come out of two decades of work with and within unions. In addition to being a proud member and strike captain of my faculty union, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, I was part of the group of organizers that at the onset of the pandemic launched the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) to support worker-to-worker organizing. Ever since, I’ve helped coordinate EWOC’s free online trainings, which have taught a few thousand people how to build collective power at work. It was this concrete movement-building experience that forced me to start grappling with the big strategic questions addressed in the following pages.
While I’m under no illusions that neutrality is either possible or desirable in a society riven with injustice, I began this project with a commitment to make my research and analysis as rigorous as possible. More specifically, I’ve sought to avoid three common mistakes of labor scholars and organizers.
First is a tendency to overgeneralize from a relative handful of examples (or from personal organizing experience), thereby confirming one’s analytical priors by relying on fragmentary evidence. I think a more open-minded approach has paid off, since the process of gathering the data for this book has significantly altered my views on more than a few issues—for example, the challenges of scalability and economic sprawl now loom much larger in my analysis.
Painting one’s preferred organizing approach as a panacea is the second mistake I’ve sought to avoid. Worker-to-worker unionism makes building widespread working-class strength easier, but it does not guarantee it. To overcome some of the most powerful companies in the world, organizing efforts also need a major influx of resources. They need to make smart tactical and strategic choices. Plus they need economic and political conditions to be relatively favorable.
Worker-to-worker unionism, in short, is not a cure-all. Even the best models can still lose. And nobody has all the answers for what, if anything, can turn around labor’s decades of decline. But, as I hope to demonstrate, this new organizing model is workers’ best bet to win widely.
Finally, by specifying the precise mechanisms, methods, and dilemmas of worker-to-worker unionization in today’s decentralized conditions, and by grounding my analysis in a sober appraisal of postwar social fragmentation, I avoid a tendency of other calls for bottom-up unionism to flatten contextual and organizing differences between our current era and labor’s big breakthrough during the 1930s.
To make sense of recent bottom-up insurgencies, I’ve gathered what is to my knowledge the largest existing dataset on contemporary US worker leaders and their organizing experiences. With the help of my research assistant Jacob Robinson, I reached out to every union drive that went public in 2022—resulting in over two hundred interviews with worker leaders and over five hundred responses to my anonymous survey asking about their drives and personal backgrounds. To round out the picture, I interviewed over a hundred staff organizers and elected union officials, while also digging deep into the quantitative data on socio-economic shifts, organizing costs, and union staffing, both historically and today.
Much of We Are the Union narrates post-pandemic worker-to-worker unionization struggles, with all their heroism and solidarity, their crushing lows and ecstatic highs. By telling the stories of a growing number of workers who are daring to fight for a collective voice at work, I aim to encourage others to do the same, while providing a slew of how-to organizing tips and ideas. In an era where doom is the pervasive political mood, labor’s recent wins are a rare source of hope and inspiration. As Colectivo baker Doug Thompson put it, “The only advice that I could give is: you got to follow your heart, and you gotta do what you think is right. . . . Go for it [unionization] because the win felt so good. . . . I’ve been happy for all kinds of things, but this alone, I can’t compare to any other success that I’ve had in my life. Nothing. Not graduation. Not marriage. Nothing felt like this.”
At the same time, one of the unique strengths of worker-to-worker organizing is that it can build bottom-up power widely. Making a credible case for scalable power requires exploring a series of topics that at first glance might seem less than titillating, such as organizing costs, staff-to-worker ratios, and national peer-to-peer organizing structures. I hope to convince readers—including staffers and leaders of deep-pocketed unions—that these questions are pivotal and that there are concrete steps they can take to seize the moment by going all in on worker-to-worker unionism.
The book’s basic structure and argument proceeds as follows.
Part 1: Analysis
Setting the analytical stage, Chapter 1 defines what I mean by worker-to-worker unionism and how exactly it’s different than heavily staffed approaches.
Pushing back against assumptions that it’s possible to closely replicate the tactics of labor’s big breakthrough in the 1930s, in Chapter 2 I examine how the decentralization of industry and housing since World War II has dramatically changed the organizing terrain. Because dense workplace-based communities have been pulled apart, new organizational and tactical approaches are needed to scale up today.
Part 2: Examples of Victories
Since the main knock against the new model is that it romanticizes bottom-up organizing and doesn’t have the punch to force companies to grant first contracts, Part 2 focuses on recent examples of success.
I start by looking at three examples of victorious worker-to-worker unionism: Burgerville in the Pacific Northwest, Colectivo in the Midwest, and the NewsGuild nationally. Each of these illuminates key differences between staff-heavy and worker-to-worker unionism. And, contrary to the skeptics, each has already won first contracts.
While good contracts are pivotal, they’re not the only important type of union victory. In Chapter 4, I show that worker-to-worker unionism is also forging large numbers of workplace leaders, transforming public opinion, reforming stagnant unions, and winning big concessions from employers through direct action.
Chapter 5 tells the story of the successful years-long campaign by Starbucks baristas to force one of the largest corporations in the world to the bargaining table. Overcoming such a powerful and sprawling company took an exceptional degree of worker initiative, perseverance, and chutzpah, plus lots of union resources.
Part 3: How to Win Big
Case studies of victories can be illuminating, but they don’t necessarily provide a compelling argument for the generalizability of a given organizing model. That’s why Chapter 6 examines the available data on organizing costs to show that even once unions start seriously investing in new organizing, only a worker-to-worker model can build working-class power at scale.
What tactical approaches are needed to win widely? Chapter 7 addresses this question and argues that worker-to-worker unionism is uniquely positioned to spread and develop the most effective organizing tactics, both in normal periods as well as when momentum is exceptionally high. I show that while deep organizing methods are essential in most times and places, these should be supplemented (or occasionally tweaked) in whirlwind moments when fear is suddenly replaced by hope and determination.
Part 4: Driving Forces
A rigorous analysis of how we got here and where we might be going requires examining the roots and driving forces of the recent surge of worker-to-worker unionism. Chapter 8 shows how bottom-up organizing has been boosted by state policy, via a tight labor market and a surprisingly effective NLRB.
Though I make no predictions about the longevity of the post-pandemic uptick—momentum comes and goes—there are compelling reasons to believe that the new worker-to-worker model will remain a central driver of good organizing over the decades to come. Along these lines, Chapter 9 argues that one key driving force—digital technology—has irrevocably altered the unionization landscape by, first, lowering organizing costs, making it easier for workers to organize with less staff support, and second, by enabling lightly-staffed unionism to operate beyond a local level for the first time in history.
In Chapter 10, I examine another relatively long-term factor: the politicization of Millennials and Gen Z. Young workers—spurred by post-2008 economic frustrations, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie—are pulling the labor movement into a more ambitious, democratic, and politically independent direction. Even if labor’s current momentum is kneecapped, it’s unlikely that the genie of digitally enabled, generationally rooted worker-to-worker organizing can be put back in the bottle.