Worker-Led Unionism in the 21st Century

So you have to find a way to pass off the types of tasks normally done by staff onto worker leaders. Coaching, training other workers, initiating campaigns, and strategizing: these are things that are normally monopolized by staff, and that if you’re going to build a real mass movement of unionization, you’re going to need to find ways for workers to take ownership over those responsibilities. 

And that’s not only true in offensive battles — it’s just as true for the big battles right now to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s attacks on federal services and federal unions. There aren’t enough staff to organize millions of federal workers to fight back, which is why a new worker-to-worker organization, the Federal Unionists Network, has emerged and is playing a key role in the fightback.

Coming out of a left-wing tradition of unionism, a lot of what you say sounds familiar and unobjectionable. So who really disagrees with the idea that workers should be leading unionization efforts, or that workers should be the ones driving their unions? Who are your main philosophical opponents here?

The major obstacle is not that anybody is arguing staff should drive unionization, but that the nominal goal of having workers take the lead (which most unions at least pay lip service to) has not actually been widely implemented in practice. It’s much easier said than done. What I try to show are the precise mechanisms through which this type of bottom-up organizing is possible. Most unions still aren’t doing it, and certainly not at the scale this period of crisis demands, so it’s necessary to concretize what this looks like and to motivate its urgency. 

A lot of unions think that in today’s conditions, we’re just going up against such powerful enemies that unless you have an extremely staff-intensive approach, it’s not possible to win. So even when [they believe] you need to train worker leaders, the assumption is still that you have to have this army of staff behind them. That was the prevailing practice in the 1990s, and staff-intensive organizing is still the prevailing practice today. My book is trying to say to unions: if you’re serious about implementing our goals of empowering worker leaders, this is the only way to do it at scale and to do it consistently. 

You’re right that the argument is in some way a standard, long-standing left argument. It’s shared by Labor Notes and goes back to the Communist Party: the idea that workers should be in the driver’s seat of the labor movement. But I don’t think that Labor Notes has fully articulated what that looks like for building new unions today; their project of putting workers in the driver’s seat has been primarily oriented around transforming existing unions. So I see this as very much in the Labor Notes spirit, but trying to put flesh into the vision of what this looks like for bringing new members into unions. 

Relatedly, I argue that new organizing does have to take a different form than it did in the 1960s or ​’70s, or in the ​‘30s. And there are real debates in the movement about the extent to which you can just concentrate on a few critical big workplaces. This is part of the tradition going back to the ​’30s, which a lot of leftists in the 1960s and ​’70s still had; I think that hyper-concentrated approach is less valid today than it was 50 years ago and 100 years ago. That’s maybe a third point of divergence with parts of the left-labor tradition. I argue for an approach that seeks to unionize a very wide range of industries, and I argue that targeting strategic workplaces has to be combined with a more widespread seeding of drives. 

I want to press on that point a bit. Sure, there’s not really the equivalent of the big Ford River Rouge auto plant and the surrounding, tightly knit neighborhood communities. But isn’t there still a reason to focus unionization efforts on companies or on sections of the economy where workers have more economic or social power? Sometimes you seem to advocate a less targeted approach in general, even at the level of companies or sectors. It’s sort of, ​“We need to try to organize everywhere.”

In the book, I try to soberly analyze the changes in the political economy since the 1930s and the industrial and social dispersion that has come about through the decentralization of industry and housing. With the rise of the service sector and suburbia and long commutes and the decentralization of industry, the average worker today works in a small workplace and doesn’t live next to their coworkers; and the biggest companies in the United States in terms of workforce today are dispersed into thousands of relatively small workplaces all across the country that are harder to disrupt through central choke points like you had with some of the key auto plants in the 1930s. 

In the Flint sit-down strike, if you took down one or two mother plants, you could take down the entire production and distribution line nationwide. The nature of logistics and retail today makes it so that in order to hit an analogous level of disruption, you have to organize far more workers, more widely. Essentially, my argument is that the question of scale becomes much more important because of this socio-economic dispersion. 

My point isn’t at all that there are no longer choke points or that there are no longer strategic workplaces to focus on. I’m pretty explicit in the book that you do have to be strategic, and there are still industries and companies and occupations that are more strategic than others, and I talk a lot about the importance of salting such targets. Salting is, by necessity, targeted, and I’ve been supporting the Democratic Socialists of America’s new Workers Organizing Workers program to build wide-scale salting. When you have a salting program, you’re trying to focus them on the most strategic places. You’re not just saying, ​“Hey, go wherever”; what we do is help put people in the best places to initiate and support the country’s most pivotal campaigns.

And of the things I point out in the book is that part of the reason the labor uptick of the last four years has caught people’s imagination is it’s gone after the biggest companies. I don’t think it would have caught people’s imagination if you hadn’t had such high-profile targets. But to get to high levels of disruption, you need far more workers unionized than you did in the past. 

And I don’t think it’s so helpful to counterpose targeting and what I call ​“seeding.” To maximize the impact of targeted organizing, you need to combine this with efforts to proactively spread widespread seeds of unionization in the company or industry you’re trying to unionize. What that looked like in auto, for instance, was that the United Auto Workers organized a massive strike in the Big Three, and it used all of this attention focused on it to call on all autoworkers across the entire United States to unionize. What they were doing was mass seeding. It was targeted at a specific industry, but they cast the seeds very widely rather than predetermining one or two plants to focus all their attention on. 

If you look at what happened at Starbucks, salts were crucial for winning an initial union election in Buffalo in late 2021. But in order for them to win at scale nationwide, they had to pivot to seeding. They couldn’t then go salt thousands of new stores or send staff to target these from the outside. Instead, they called on everyone in the company to start unionizing, and they gave tools for these workers all across the country to start self-organizing. It was relatively targeted in the sense that they were trying to organize Starbucks — they weren’t calling on every coffee worker to unionize. But they had to pivot away from hyper-focused targeting to encourage this level of broader self-organization. 

Another issue I wanted to talk about was the importance you place on digital tools for worker-to-worker organizing. A point I saw Jane Slaughter raise in her review in Jacobin the other day was that you can’t build trust the same way with digital tools as you do with face-to-face interaction. Is that a problem? More generally, what sorts of challenges or dangers might the use of digital tools pose?

I was surprised by Jane’s comment, because my argument in the chapter I have on digital technology is that while digital tools can be used for shallow mobilizing — that’s frankly how most of the nonprofit left has used them — they should be used instead for deep organizing. It depends on how you use these tools. 

My argument isn’t that digital technologies can replace one-on-one conversations, but that they do two specific things that are very important for scaling up worker-to-worker organizing. One is they lower organizing costs, which makes it possible for workers to start self-organizing without needing the same degree of union resources. For instance, if you can meet over Zoom instead of having to rent an office hall, this helps workers start self-organizing before having to affiliate with an established union. 

The second thing new technology does is allow worker-to-worker coaching to happen on a national level. This is really a game-changer. Up until maybe 10 years ago, the only possible way for workers to coach other workers in this type of organizing was locally. If you were trying to coach a union drive all the way across the country, you would have to pay a staffer to go out and talk to that drive. There was no way for workers to have the kind of intensive back-and-forth training and coaching that good organizing entails. But now, because of digital technologies, workers are able to connect with each other in any part of the country, and that’s how these big campaigns at Starbucks and in the NewsGuild in particular have grown so widely through worker-to-worker mechanisms. 

I’m not saying this replaces workers at a worksite talking to each other in person or one-on-one. That’s not the argument. And in fact, what they’re training these workers to do over these remote trainings and coaching sessions is how to do precisely that: how to have intensive deep-organizing conversations with their coworkers. 

The big danger of digital is that people use this as a substitute for the traditional, time-tested tactics of building solidarity and community. In fact, the book argues that one of the crucial things we need to do much more of, given our social atomized context, is socialize. If anything, organizers need to proactively encourage socializing more than they did in the past, when workers tended to feel more connected to each other because they lived nearby, went to same churches, drank at the same bars, all that. You need it far more than in the past, because workers don’t feel as connected to each other intuitively as they maybe did in previous eras. The question is: How do we use digital tools to help rebuild up that type of dense working-class culture?

Earlier you said that this older left-wing tradition of bottom up-unionism has not really focused on the question of how to organize new unions, and it’s been more focused on union reform. On that point, especially thinking about some of the examples we’ve been talking about and that you talk about in the book: one reason why a lot of folks have focused on union reform, I think, is because of the idea that, in order to do new organizing at scale, we need to get the institutional resources of major unions behind it.

The example of UAW reform and the UAW’s subsequent new organizing efforts is a great example of that. And Starbucks, in a way, insofar as the later drives had institutional union support. On the question of strategy and where to focus our energies is, what’s your answer to the idea that there’s a wisdom in focusing on union reform, rather than going out on your own as a salt or just organizing your workplace, wherever you happen to be?

When it comes to union reform, I think my book is very much in the Labor Notes tradition, which poses the centrality of union transformation. I agree with that 100 percent. 

Where I’m trying to push in a new direction from the Labor Notes tradition — at least as it tended to be practiced until very recently — is the idea that union reform always has to happen first and then new organizing will only happen after. But that hasn’t been how it’s always turned out.

It’s not the case that you always have to wait for unions to be reformed through a caucus in order to start new organizing — in fact, new union drives have often turned out to be the key first step toward union transformation. I give an example from the NewsGuild, where a Los Angeles Times worker named Jon Schleuss helped unionize the paper in a very bottom-up way in 2019, despite a relatively moribund union organizing culture. And after they organized their shop, Jon and his coworkers decided that they had to take that same bottom-up energy and run against the incumbent president. In a major upset, they won that election and have proceeded to transform the Guild nationally. Self-organization in new organizing can bring in the energy that makes it possible then to transform the union; it wasn’t just because of a preexisting internal caucus. 

Union reform ideally takes the form of fightback troublemakers winning union leadership. But it also can look a bit like what happened in Starbucks Workers United, where workers started self-organizing from below across the country in 2022, and that dynamic pushed Workers United, and then SEIU, to start dedicating real resources to a militant, risky, grassroots campaign that they had not initiated from above.

So union reform also takes the form of workers starting to self-organize and pulling somewhat risk-averse unions into dedicating more resources toward new organizing. If we’re going to have enough fighters in the labor movement capable of transforming and taking back their unions, a big part of that is going to be workers entering the labor movement via self-organizing their shops mechanism and then, with that energy, posing the question of electing a new fighting leadership. So I think it’s more dialectical than ​“transform existing unions and then the external organizing will follow.”

Your perspective is that electoral politics on its own is insufficient: we need a powerful, militant, democratic, worker-led labor movement to actually push through the kinds of changes that Bernie Sanders was championing in his presidential campaigns, for instance. What do you think the prospects are for the labor movement politicizing? In other words, how do you see what’s currently happening in the labor movement and the worker-to-worker approach you’re hoping to spread transforming the political arena? Are there prospects for it reviving some of the hopes we felt at the height of the 2020 Bernie campaign?

I think Bernie could have won if we had a more powerful, more militant labor movement. And for the equivalent of a Bernie to win down the road, or to pass big transformative reforms like Medicare for All, or to definitively isolate MAGA, you’re going to need to have that bottom-up piece of the puzzle. 

One of the most promising things about the recent labor uptick is the political transformation that could make possible within the labor movement. You have the influx of a lot of young radicals into labor — folks who were politicized through Bernie, through Black Lives Matter, and through a kind of anti-systemic critique. That orientation is frankly at odds with the overarching political thrust of the leadership of the labor movement whose idea of politics primarily consists of cozying up to elected officials rather than articulating a working-class political vision and organizing a majority of people around that.

We’ve seen instances of what an alternative could look like. Starbucks Workers United, for instance, took a really strong stand on Palestine, and that ended up playing an important role in forcing the company to the bargaining table. And one of the things I would love to see is these bottom-up unions and this radical energy leading more unions to supporting anti-establishment candidates running for office, whether independently or within the Democratic Party. Most unions didn’t support Bernie or AOC, which I think is just hugely self-defeating. Unions should also be running their own members for office. Run more workers who have led strikes like [independent Nebraska candidate for US Senate] Dan Osborn. 

We need unions right now to push back hard against this idea that the secret to success is for the Democrats to be MAGA-lite, or to pivot to the center rather than articulating a compelling alternative vision. I think it’s incumbent on radicals to push for labor to start forcefully articulating a political approach that can win all working people away from Trumpism.

This interview is being co-published with Left Notes.