What Is New About Workers Organizing Workers?

I’m wholly in agreement with a significant portion of Blanc’s argument: In the 1990s, when organized labor began to confront the depth of its crisis, its investments in new organizing were generally quite staff-intensive, with the rule of thumb of one full-time staff organizer per every hundred targeted workers settling into common sense as what was required to win an organizing campaign. In addition to being too costly to scale to meet labor’s existential challenge, such an orientation is unnecessary today given renewed interest in unions among workers. The challenge today is to overcome the staid tendencies of unions and invest in translating increased worker self-activity into a real reversal in the union density trend. So far, so good.

The first conceptual obstacle to following Blanc much further pertains to the place of the titular “worker-to-worker” unionism in this framework. W2W, held up throughout the book as an “emergent organizing model” and “a new model of bottom-up unionism,” is defined as a “staff-light” (as opposed to staff-intensive) approach to labor organizing wherein “1) Workers have a decisive say on strategy, and 2) Workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union, and/or 3) Workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.”

Defined so, one might wonder why W2W is anything very new. Workers have always organized other workers. From a historical perspective, the organizing approaches of the 1990s that he critiques might be seen as something of an aberration in labor history rather than as the “traditional” or “orthodox” approach (two terms Blanc deploys throughout) from which W2W is a novel departure. Indeed, Blanc recognizes that W2W harkens back to earlier moments of “grassroots unionism” when staff-to-worker ratios were much larger than one to one hundred.

He nonetheless insists that W2W is an essentially “new model” for a few reasons. First, unlike in the pre-WWII era, the “reach [of bottom-up unionism] can extend beyond a local level” given “the rise of digital tools.” Those participating in the wave of sit-down strikes around the country in the 1930s would have been surprised to learn that their actions were “local,” but I take the point that digital connection has allowed such a close facsimile of in-person organizing that it is now possible to coordinate campaigns across space in a qualitatively new way.

Second, organizing in the 1930s relied on workplace centralization and dense working-class association, whereas W2W today aims to rebuild a common working-class culture in the face of deindustrialization, the decentralization of workplaces, and general geographic dispersion. Third (and relatedly, given that decentralization), W2W aims to cast organizing “seeds” as widely as possible, whereas grassroots unionism in the 1930s was very focused on targeting big companies in key industries.

While the first two marks of distinction do indeed differentiate present efforts from previous grassroots unionism, they do not speak to a different “model” or “roadmap” but simply different conditions. Had communists had smartphone technology in the 1930s, they would have availed themselves of it. And had they confronted geographic dispersion, they would have sought ways to forge a common culture among workers, as they did in overcoming racial and ethnic divisions. The thick associational and community ties of the prewar era posed problems to be overcome as much as they did rich seedbeds for organizing.

If there is a substantive difference here, it has to do with the last point of distinction, strategic targeting, and this perhaps is why Blanc devotes a chapter to connecting economic decentralization to the need “to let a thousand organizing flowers bloom.” As Scott Jenkins and I have argued elsewhere, Blanc goes much too far in painting his portrait of decentralization. But before launching into this question, what precisely does it mean for W2W?

Unlike the first two factors distinguishing W2W from previous forms of grassroots unionism, this last one is not something that emerges out of Blanc’s case studies but a question of economic analysis and labor strategy. A union official could push a W2W “model” while also only resourcing those efforts that they feel to be strategic. The question of targeting thus swings free of the conceptualization of W2W and is something that Blanc, through his own analysis of contemporary society, appends to it. This all leads to the conclusion that W2W in itself is not a fundamentally “new model” of organizing but an old idea executed in an atomized society that also has the internet.

Even if there is nothing very new here, one might nonetheless find the organizing methods he highlights useful. Again, the case studies are illuminating in this regard. But if there is no new model here, the book’s utility lies in those case examples, not the “worker-to-worker” framework. And there’s also no reason not to bring in many more examples from the history of grassroots unionism that I think we should also mine for lessons for the present — a task about which Blanc is more hesitant, given his argument about economic decentralization.

A Thousand Blooming Flowers or the Lowest Hanging Fruit?

Blanc is certainly correct that the United States is much more decentralized, in terms of workplaces and working-class communities, than it was pre-WWII. But his characterization of that decentralization is exaggerated, as Jenkins and I detail here; there are still plenty of massive employment clusters at the biggest corporations in the country, the organization of which would reap outsize rewards for the labor movement.

Let’s nonetheless run with Blanc’s proposal to cast organizing seeds widely. The vision conjured is of worker self-activity bubbling all over the country and rising to a boil thanks to throwing off the shackles of outmoded union ideas about strategic targeting. But thanks to the existence of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which Blanc laudably had a key role in starting up, we have a good sense of where those bubbles are.

According to EWOC’s education coordinator, Daphna Thier, the organization tends to attract workers from particular sectors: “We have a lot more headway into nonprofits, higher ed, and healthcare.” This tracks with macro trends in the union election composition: academic and health care organizing have really taken off in the last couple years, but in many other sectors, organizing activity appears to be stagnant or declining. As important as the recent victories in academia and health care are, those two sectors comprise 14.8 percent of all employment in the United States.

Punting on the question of targeting, then, is effectively a form of targeting the lowest-hanging organizing fruit. We know what the sectors in motion are, and their organizing momentum should be supported; EWOC is helping do that. But any viable “roadmap” to labor revitalization as a whole is going to have to have something cogent to say about that other 85.2 percent of the workforce that takes into account the marked differences and divisions between sectors and workers that can’t be registered within a single, master “model.”

Then there’s the question of size and impact. It’s terrific that the Burgerville Workers Union won a contract covering roughly 1,400 people (though union membership only seems to be around one hundred), or that EWOC has been in contact with about five thousand workers, passing many organizing campaigns that began with those contacts to unions. But how do these accomplishments stack up next to, say, SEIU’s Committee of Interns and Residents organizing almost 20,000 people into their union since the beginning of the pandemic? Why are the former cases exemplary of a “roadmap” for success but not cases like the latter?

In addition to these questions of scope and scale, there’s also one to be asked about simple strategic necessity. The country’s largest corporations have always set the standard for labor relations. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) upsurge in the 1930s was predicated on a great number of things, but one of them was that most of the organizers involved understood that organized labor would never have a seat at the political table until companies like General Motors, Ford, and US Steel recognized unions. I think the same can basically be said of companies like Amazon today: we should organize it today because we simply must, given its economic importance and what its current trajectory means for the labor movement as a whole (but the Teamsters in particular). That requires building strategic prioritization into any “model” of labor resurgence.

Blanc might object to my characterization here, bringing up the fact that he is always careful to recognize counterpositions. For instance, after making the case regarding economic decentralization, he immediately concedes that “targeting pivotal workplaces and companies is still an important tactic.” But after such one-sided economic analysis and being so clearly in favor of the thousand-blooming-flowers strategy, how exactly? If this is an admission that some balance between the two perspectives needs to be struck, how might that be achieved? As with much of the counterargumentative inoculation in the book, only mentioning a counterpoint without working through it doesn’t actually allow in other perspectives but simply provides cover for overhyping a branded “model.”

Is Starbucks Workers United a Generalizable Model?

I’ve offered a few reasons here why I don’t think it makes sense to adopt the W2W framework Blanc pushes in We Are the Union. But we might as well run with his line of thinking and take seriously the idea that the few case studies he presents, and in particular that of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), offer a generalizable model of unionism that is the “best bet” for a labor revitalization.

Blanc ties in many different types of campaigns into his conceptualization of W2W, but SBWU is a clearly privileged case: The book’s prologue narrates the story of one organizing Starbucks worker and concludes with the claim that “this history-making campaign — like recent efforts in media, higher ed, auto, and beyond — provides a roadmap for workers to win at scale in a society dominated by sprawling corporations.” SBWU is the only campaign that gets its own chapter, in which Blanc describes Starbucks as having “raised a white flag” on February 27, 2024, in agreeing to begin bargaining at a national level. He asserts directly that “Starbucks workers are going to get a union contract,” an achievement that you’d “have to go back to the 1930s to find a similar breakthrough.”

Today SBWU has organized over 550 stores and over 10,500 workers — about 6 percent of the 10,000 or so company-owned stores and less than 5 percent of its US employees. Those numbers were in the ballpark of where the campaign was in February 2024, when the company supposedly “raised the white flag.” As of this writing, negotiations over the master agreement have stalled. After the February 2024 announcement, SBWU apparently chose to file no new charges against the company, only ratcheting them back up near the end of year — with an outgoing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the prospect of active board hostility toward SBWU going forward.

I don’t know what’s going to come of the SBWU campaign. Maybe having 5 percent of its employees unionized and enough bad PR is enough for the company to eventually bargain in good faith. Maybe, on the other hand, it will become clear that the master agreement announcement in February 2024 was just a ploy to dam the stream of unfair labor practice charges and ride out the Biden NLRB’s term. I don’t know, and I don’t know how it would have been possible to know in February 2024 that SBWU had won a “historic victory” akin to the CIO’s breakthroughs in the 1930s.

So with regard to the exemplary iteration of W2W, I think the most that can be said for now from the outside is, “Let’s hope and do what we can to support their victory.”

But even if SBWU is ultimately successful, there are real questions to be asked about how generalizable their story is. A very successful strategy at one company or in one sector could be a total flop in another. SBWU’s organizing materials have all been developed with tiny stores in mind, where an organizer could easily imagine doing one-on-one’s with every single one of their coworkers. Are those materials going to translate easily to campaigns of Amazon or Walmart distribution center workers? Blanc notes at one point that 52 percent of the worker leaders he surveyed at Starbucks considered themselves “political radicals.” At few other companies will this percentage be so high. Starbucks is a unique company, its workers are also somewhat unique in their political orientations, and the SBWU campaign has been successful in that unique situation.

Blanc describes the SBWU campaign as “the emblematic struggle of the post-pandemic uptick.” One wonders why the greater numerical victories in academia and health care would not instead be emblematic, but the more important question to be asked of this statement is how such a particular campaign can be generalized, given the very specific brew (no pun intended) of factors that has led to its success. SBWU put together a great string of victories; it may yet get that master contract, but it may not. That’s a fair and praiseworthy characterization from where I’m sitting, but you can’t get there by exaggerating the degree of its success and then erasing its particularity in order to draw a generalizable model from it.

Calming the Hype Machine

Workers’ self-activity and decision-making should indeed be supported by unions, which need to make serious resource investments now. My argument here is that the “worker-to-worker” framework is not only unnecessary to make that claim but also something of a barrier to abiding by it, given its reductive and questionable addenda. As a point of comparison, I think that people should be nice to one another. If someone comes along and says that means I support “person-to-person kindness,” I would wonder what’s going on.

In general, it’s great for labor journalists and academics to cover real wins with enthusiasm. The trouble comes in taking those wins to be much more than they are, i.e., without precedent, indicating imminent larger victories, generalizable, and so on. Blanc and I agree that the labor movement is at a crucial inflection point, needing to find a way to translate the great popularity of and interest in unions into actual organizing gains, or else risk missing the moment and continue its slow bleed to death. It’s appropriate to hype up individual organizing wins in this situation.

But in the realm of analysis and strategy, some humility and sobriety are required, else we inadvertently contribute to missing the moment by pushing reductive and particular blueprints. This requires not simply bringing up counterpoints but actually working through them, and being OK with the fact that much of the time that work won’t lead to any new, branded “roadmap” for success.