We are the Union: How Worker-to-worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big by Eric Blanc (University Of California Press, 2025)
Eric Blanc’s We are the Union: How Worker-to-worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big is a wonderful book for trade union militants that pairs well with direct instruction manuals for worker activists like Labor Notes’ Secrets of A Successful Organizer. It gives practical advice and theoretical framing derived from hundreds of interviews and outreach with every single union drive that went public in 2022 (more than 2,000).
Worker-to-worker
Blanc also tries to address issues with Jane McAlevey’s model. McAlevey’s work was filled with prescriptions of what needs to be done to increase union density and what can be done by dedicated union staff, but short on answers as to how the kind of deep organizing she describes can be scaled up big enough to turn around the US labour movement’s slow, long-term decline. Blanc outlines what he calls a worker-to-worker organizing model which he sees as actually scalable on mass level.
While Blanc readily admits that the ideas he puts forward aren’t necessarily brand-new or patent-pending, he compiles a collection of some easily-translated lessons from these recent successful or near-successful union drives, placing them in the context of the recent radicalization associated with Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders and the Amazon Labour Union, as well as the digital tools now available to people eager to build a better world. In doing so, he advocates a model that is outside the recent standard practice of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations).
From below
Blanc comes out of traditions that advocate “socialism from below” and a kind of participatory rank-and-file unionism that places workers themselves, rather than union staff at the centre organizing strategies and it shows in his analysis of the US labor movement. He uses the examples of Burgerville in the Pacific Northwest, Starbucks locations across the country, Colectivo Coffee union in the midwest, NewsGuild workers as well as a slew of lesser detailed examples to explain this model of worker-to-worker organizing that he advocates.
For him, the key features of this model are: its low-cost, its replicability, relying less on paid staff to drive union growth but instead giving motivated workers the tools to organize each other. Key to this is the previously mentioned radicalization of a generation of young people. Much like the rank-and-file strategy that has been advocated for decades by socialists and other left-wing radicals, worker-to-worker unionism requires someone in the workplace to take the initiative and through their own blood, sweat and tears organize their co-workers to fight back; giving them a sense of ownership and democracy over the project.
As Blanc notes in the introduction, “this book’s argument is not that resources and staff are unimportant. It’s that they need to be deployed in a way that’s scalable. In other words, unionizing millions will require an absolute increase in staffing and financial support for organizing, but a relative decrease in the staff-intensivity of most campaigns.” For Blanc that means a few things: “by leaning much more on rank-and-file leaders, by holding well-publicized mass trainings, by funding widespread salting at strategic targets, and by seizing high-momentum openings to spread unionization as widely as possible. In other words, the labor movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.”
He notes that the limitations of many progressive movements since the 1980s is that they have been either small and deeply-rooted (think local nonprofits that provide important services to low-income communities) or poorly-rooted and big (think of huge marches that had little follow-up and no lasting organization to speak of). The worker-to-worker organizing model advocated by Blanc here attempts to capture the energy of movements such as BLM and Bernie and the fervor created by high-profile union drives to spread organizing far and wide. Rather than having unions decide where next to organize from on-high, going with the lead and supporting the ambitions of workers who are motivated. Along the way, rank-and-filers take responsibility for key tasks that are normally done by paid, full-time staffers. Three things that define the model are: 1) workers have a decisive say on strategy, 2) workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union and/or 3) workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.
Many of the workers Blanc talked to from Chipotle, Starbucks, Colectivo and others had received online training during the pandemic by doing the Jane McAlevey Organizing for Power course or a Labor Notes Secrets of A Successful Organizer study group. In this way, worker-to-worker organizing harkens back to the labour upsurge in the US in the 1930s, when communist and trotskyist radicals committed to a project of worker emancipation and used their skills and organization to organize and transform working conditions with those around them.
Organizing is infectious
Key to Blanc’s argument for scalability is his assertion that high profile labour wins (and even losses as in the case of Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama) can inspire others to organize their workplaces. In his survey with worker leaders from the 2022 strikes in the books’ sample, 60 percent of respondents said they were moved to organize their workplace based on hearing about other labour struggles. These results confirm a major theme of the book: “attention-grabbing worker struggles, momentum, and copycat organizing are crucial for rebuilding a mass labor movement. Over and over, workers said, ‘if they did it, we can do it too.’”
The examples from worker-to-worker campaigns fuel the assertions in this book that will ring true to socialists that see increasing the power of the working class at the point of production. Blanc makes the case for harnessing the power of radical politics and the energy of movement activism to revitalize the labour movement, a welcome idea in a world that desperately needs the organization and intervention of the working class.
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