The Indispensability of the Labor Organizer

Employers and elites have been wont to call the organizer an ​“outside agitator,” and there is much truth to that accusation because the labor organizer stands outside (and in opposition to) the enclosed hierarchies and insular work culture designed by the boss and helpmates in human resources departments that keep workers passively quiescent. Fred Ross, the legendary community organizer who worked closely with Saul Alinsky and César Chávez in the 1950s and 1960s, understood the necessity for such agitation.

“A good organizer,” Ross once wrote, ​“is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.”

There is no single handbook to guide the work, but all organizers do two things that are radically transformative. First, they raise and transform consciousness. They listen, they learn, they seek to understand the fears and hopes of the workers. At the same time, they explain that the boss is not, in fact, all powerful, that the workplace future can be made different from the past, and that, collectively, workers have a power that can offer them not only dignity and well-being, but a world transformed. 

Today, this consciousness has to be created in the face of intense employer opposition, often backstopped by a hostile political class and a National Labor Relations Board that is hardly of much help. Most workers have their own set of grievances and aspirations, a few loudly voiced, the majority held in secret abeyance. It is the task of the union organizer — whether someone who emerges organically out of the enterprise or someone ​“parachuted in” by a well-established union— to figure out the commonalities that unite the workers, raise their expectations and provide a realistic path toward the realization of those aspirations.

But if all organizers did was make people aware of their oppression, or even rouse them to collective protest, that wouldn’t be enough. In recent years, we’ve seen some remarkable progressive upheavals, like A Day Without Immigrants in 2006, Occupy in 2011, the Women’s March in 2017, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Pundits and politicians take notice, and such manifestations can each create a new generation of activists. Trade unionists can only envy the energy unleashed in these upheavals. But consciousness is episodic; it rises and falls and gets distorted. While we cheer these episodes of social movement activism, unionists also understand that consciousness and organization are dialectically imbricated — each sustains the other, and, in tandem, they create a powerful counterweight to the elites that rule the workplace and the political economy.

That perspective is something unique to the unions, which may be why people in power are almost always hostile to organized labor. Working people need their own structures, their own leaders, their own institutions that can channel, every day, the aspirations and anger of those they represent. The class struggle is a long haul, punctuated with more setbacks than victories, which is why successful organizers not only transform consciousness but create a collectively governed organization that can withstand the ideological and economic assault the boss is sure to throw their way. 

With the inaugural Labor Organizer of the Year Award, In These Times honors three such organizers. Antonio Rosario, a Teamster of 30 years, has become the union’s lead organizer in its herculean effort to organize Amazon. He represents the adaptation of a long and proud labor tradition to a new moment.

The recipient of the second award remains undisclosed, being one of the many immigrant worker-leaders who are braving the risk of expulsion from their homes and communities to stand up to exploitative employers. Immigrants have been a driving force in the U.S. labor movement since its inception, and they operate with considerable risk, no more so than now.

Katherine Passley organizes workers with criminal records, a group often considered ​“unorganizable.” The work they’ve done in power-mapping and successfully pushing for local legislative change is especially impressive in the hostile terrain of South Florida, reflective of a new surge in Southern labor organizing.

The 2025 Labor Organizer of the Year Award also gives honorable mention to the vibrant campaigns at Starbucks and in higher education, movements that have not only brought tens of thousands of new workers into unions, but have seen countless new labor leaders rising from their ranks.