How can unions adapt to a new landscape of work?
Seattle, Washington, 2022.(Jason Redmond / Getty)
If you’re looking for a bright spot in today’s political and social gloom, the union idea seems to be it. Organized labor has rarely been more popular: Gallup reports that 68 percent of Americans “approve” of labor unions, while another poll found that almost 90 percent of people under the age of 30 view unions favorably. Just two years ago, the power of these statistics was put to the test with a series of attention-grabbing strikes and wage increases among teamsters, autoworkers, academic workers, and Hollywood writers and actors. At coffee shops, warehouses, and retail stores, and among cultural workers, nurses, and interns, organizing drives have revived the “labor beat,” generating headlines, podcasts, and books celebrating the ambitions of so many “essential workers” during the pandemic years and after.
But even if we’re in a moment of renewed interest in labor, the actual number of American workers covered by a union contract has grown but incrementally, with the unionized proportion of the entire workforce in seemingly inexorable decline. Just 10 percent of workers overall are unionized, and it’s even lower in the private sector, where only 5.9 percent of workers are union members. And these statistics do not yet reflect the impact of the Trump presidency, which has already abrogated a slew of union contracts in federal employment and begun to staff the National Labor Relations Board—assuming it survives legal challenges from Tesla, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s—with an aggressive set of anti-union lawyers and operatives.
In his new book We Are the Union, Eric Blanc, a sociologist at Rutgers, argues that the chasm between the popularity of the union idea and the paltry collective-bargaining payoff can be bridged only by a radical decentralization of labor’s organizing efforts. Blanc considers the staff-reliant organizing model deployed by most unions, even the most progressive ones, to be the main problem. An issue he first explored in a stirring earlier work, Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, staff-centered organizing drives, Blanc argues in his current book, are too expensive, too cumbersome, too top-down, and, perhaps most important, are unable to take advantage of the enthusiasm and creativity emerging out of the workforce itself. It’s not that the model doesn’t work when enough people and money are targeted on a single workplace, but it is not “scalable,” Blanc explains. A staff-intensive effort can “win battles, but not the war.”
In a typical organizing effort, Blanc notes, most unions employ one staffer for every 100 workers they seek to unionize. This costs about $3,000 apiece, far higher than in the 1930s, when Blanc estimates that in the drive to organize the steel industry, $88 (adjusted for inflation) would do the job for each worker. Even if unions were to vastly increase their economic commitment, devoting 30 percent of their assets to new staff-intensive efforts, union density would improve but marginally. That reality may well have guided AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler in 2022, when she forecast that the unions in her federation would organize 1 million new workers during the next decade. Given the growth of the American workforce, that is an exceedingly modest, even a defeatist goal, and one that would do nothing to stanch labor’s relative decline. Blanc’s book is therefore a plea for what he calls “worker-to-worker organizing,” in which union staffers are marginal to the organizing effort and the initiative lies with on-the-job workers. Only by creating a “new unionization model,” Blanc writes, can we “develop a scalable approach to worker power capable of fueling exponential union growth and changing the world.”
Blanc’s book was inspired in part by his involvement in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a collaboration between the United Electrical Workers and the Democratic Socialists of America that started during the pandemic to support “any worker looking for organizing help…even in small shops.” A volunteer project linking, via Zoom conversations, veteran organizers with untutored union enthusiasts, it sought to teach workers how to organize themselves, even when established unions were not involved or interested.
Well informed by such hands-on organizing experience and numerous interviews, as well as his own sociological surveys, Blanc offers readers a set of inspiring narratives that get inside the unionization effort at several companies, including the now-famous Starbucks campaign, when a set of Buffalo “salts” and self-starters began a movement that eventually saw more than 500 coffee shops vote to join Workers’ United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.
In the face of intense opposition from a powerful cohort of Starbucks executives, including its founder, Howard Schultz, that organizing drive won national attention late in 2021 when a couple of Buffalo coffee shops voted to join a union. Thereafter, organizing “exploded” across the country, with Starbucks workers filing for more than 250 union elections in the first four months of 2022. Social media was awash with the news, prompting baristas in hundreds of other stores to get in touch with coworkers who were more advanced in the unionization process. “Given the tiny size of Starbucks workplaces,” Blanc writes, “a traditional approach was basically off the table.” Short strikes and protests were frequent, prompting Blanc to cite Napoleon’s military adage “On s’engage et puis on voit”—roughly translated, “Jump into battle and then figure it out.”
But perhaps even more emblematic of worker-to-worker organizing, if on a smaller scale, was the situation at Burgerville, a fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest where employees won a collective-bargaining contract with no assistance from any established union. There was nothing formless, however, about these workers’ exercise in self-organization. Every step of the way, a set of “hyper-committed” organizers recruited new members and planned strikes, job actions, boycotts, and community events, all the while resisting managerial intimidation and the firing of union activists. “My message to anyone who wants to do this is it does take planning and it does take preparation and organizing work,” a key activist explained in 2018. “Those magic, spontaneous moments happen, but there’s a lot of hard work behind [it] too.”
While the Burgerville workers won a collective-bargaining agreement without any assistance from organized labor, established trade unions did play a part in the other worker-to-worker organizing drives that Blanc highlights. At Colectivo, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers provided vital legal counsel for workers at a set of coffee shops in the Midwest, while at the NewsGuild, a new leadership elected in 2019 revitalized a once-battered newspaper union. In the latter case, the staff played an active educational and organizing role, but a Member Organizer Program emphasized that “workers are capable of learning how to do everything a staff organizer knows and does.” Through the MOP, member activists—with some staff input—were put in charge of finding and fielding new organizing leads. “Workers who’ve organized their own workplace are the best people to spread the gospel and to train new shops,” notes Jon Schleuss, the NewsGuild’s president, who won his spurs as the rank-and-file leader of a victorious organizing drive at the historically anti-union Los Angeles Times. Although employment in the media world has been chaotic, the NewsGuild has organized more than 8,500 new members in 210 “shops” during the last four years, including 600 tech workers at The New York Times.
Blanc argues that this kind of decentralized, worker-initiated effort requires that existing unions eschew a strategic focus and “let a thousand flowers bloom by providing as many workers as possible with tools to start self-organizing.” This strategy reflects not just his own enthusiastic commitment to the rank-and-file; it is also a hard-nosed evaluation of the 21st-century social and economic terrain on which organizing must take place.
In the 1930s and for decades thereafter, workers lived in dense, work-adjacent communities, and the economy revolved around large, centrally located establishments like steel and auto factories. In the 1930s, General Motors had 69 factories employing nearly 3,500 workers each. The radicals who organized the industrial unions needed a cohort of dedicated workers inside the factories and mills, but they could also hand out thousands of leaflets on the morning shift and reach just about every employee. The famous sit-down strikes of that era were successful because a minority of workers in a large corporation could throw a monkey wrench into the entire operation by shutting down two or three vital worksites.
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But today’s giant corporations have much more attenuated profiles, as do their workforces. While organizers in the 1930s “could focus their limited resources on a relative handful of big, geographically concentrated targets,” Blanc explains, “that’s no longer the case.” Walmart has 4,600 stores, averaging a few hundred employees each; Starbucks directly runs 9,000 coffee shops, with thousands more owned and operated by hotels and grocery stores in the US and abroad. Other top private nonunion employers—Home Depot, Target, and Amazon, as well as auto factories sited in the rural South—are also multi-unit enterprises whose workers live many miles away from work and from each other. In 1934, more workers in Pittsburgh walked to work than drove, but today the average American commutes over 20 miles to work each way. Trying to unionize contemporary wind technicians in Texas has nothing in common with organizing an older generation of electrical-power-plant workers. As one utility union organizer observes, “Good luck finding these people…they’re all over creation.”
To cover such a diffuse and difficult terrain, Blanc writes, organizers have come to embrace today’s vast array of new communication technologies. Zoom meetings and other social media help bridge the distance, emotional as well as geographic, between organizers and those they seek to energize in collective endeavor. Digital tools also have another advantage: They are cheap, dramatically lowering communication costs so that it’s now easier for rank-and-filers to initiate organizing drives or get trained by other workers, even when they live thousands of miles away.
For this reason, the use of digital means of communication became common practice among the organizers at Starbucks. This was also true at the NewsGuild and in the United Auto Workers’ successful “stand-up strike” in the fall of 2023, when the union’s president, Shawn Fain, proved an exceptionally effective YouTube communicator. Even Littler Mendelson, the notorious union-busting law firm, notes that social media enables employees to “begin organizing on their own in a grass-roots fashion [and] allows local organizers to use the collective knowledge of the best organizers around the country.”
Blanc’s outlook is an implicit critique of the tactics developed by the late Jane McAlevey, who was this magazine’s chief labor correspondent. Throughout We Are the Union, Blanc honors the tactical sophistication of McAlevey’s approach, including the step-by-step identification of key workplace leaders and the utilization of frequent stress tests—including the wearing of union buttons, attendance at workplace meetings, and the display of worker names and pictures on pro-union posters—in order to measure union strength. But he also advocates for an approach to organizing that is willing to tolerate more chaos, more false starts, and more organizational gambits than McAlevey would in her approach.
Today, Blanc notes, unions win upwards of 70 percent of all certification elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, but he contends that this is hardly a statistic to celebrate. For him, it represents a far too cautious approach by organizers who view losing an NLRB election as a black mark and therefore often don’t take risks. But what if unions were able to double or triple the number of organizing drives that result in an NLRB election? They might win less than half of those elections, but they would, Blanc predicts, actually organize more workers. Moreover, even a failed effort doesn’t necessarily mark the end of a labor struggle at a particular worksite: At the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and among the graduate students at Yale and New York University, unsuccessful drives left behind a set of determined veterans who prepared the way for union victory when the organizing winds turned more favorable a few years later.
Although Blanc’s book should be read by every aspiring unionist, it is not a magic bullet. Worker-to-worker strategies are hardly foreign to the efforts of existing unions. As any veteran organizer will tell you, union staffers alone can’t persuade a worker to sign a union authorization card. That task has to be done by a fellow worker, which is why the establishment of an organizing committee—one that covers every shift and department—is one of the very first steps undertaken in any campaign.
Conversely, even when rank-and-file workers have taken the initiative, the near-certainty of employer resistance before, during, and after an NLRB election requires union activists to seek expert legal and financial help from an established union, even if this centralizes leadership and decision-making. That is exactly what has happened at Starbucks, where the SEIU has played an increasingly heavy-handed role in tandem with the corporation’s failure—after 20 months of “bargaining”—to actually sign a contract.
Moreover, when it comes to leveraging union power, some sectors of capital are still more important than others. The UAW “stand-up” strike in the fall of 2023 electrified millions, and not just workers, because they saw how inspiring a successful showdown with one of the nation’s most powerful corporations could be. Meanwhile, labor organizing theorists like Kim Moody, Ben Fong, and Peter Olney have argued that today, workers in the logistics industry—at Amazon, FedEx, Walmart, and other firms with big warehouse operations—occupy the strategic terrain once held by workers at the River Rouge and Flint plants in the 1930s auto industry or the trucking barns of Seattle and Minneapolis during the era of the Teamsters’ explosive growth.
Blanc agrees that logistics are a connecting tissue for today’s economy, but he argues that geographic dispersal and organizational decentralization have made it difficult to target, organize, and strike any truly vital node of commerce that would bring the whole logistics edifice to a standstill. And that’s even truer of the nation’s vast service/retail/hospitality sector. In response to those who say that most of organized labor’s efforts should be focused on logistics or other vital workplaces, he answers: Better to cast the organizing seeds as widely as possible and let a thousand workplace flowers bloom.
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But there are some risks involved in this strategy as well. Blanc’s proposal may well scatter labor energy and power. By itself, “hot shop” organizing—especially of a single workplace that is part of a larger multi-unit firm—is unlikely to generate much of a long-term payoff. Top management will target the union upstart, and even if it manages to survive, such a small group of organized workers is unlikely to have much bargaining power. In addition, without a larger organizing vision, those efforts to develop worker-to-worker organizing may end up directing most of their energy and resources toward a rather specific set of enterprises and occupations. As of late 2024, more than 5,000 workers had reached out to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, and in 2023 alone, this volunteer enterprise handed off 65 workplace campaigns—representing over 7,000 workers—to the more established unions. This was quite an achievement, but a large majority of these campaigns involved workers in academia, cultural institutions, upscale retail work, and healthcare, all of which employ a well-educated workforce comprising just 15 percent of all wage earners. Any initiative that leads to a union revival has to have something to say about the other 85 percent of the working population, most of whom are not now involved in any kind of union drive.
To fully succeed, worker-to-worker organizing will have to start racking up numbers much closer to those of the established unions targeting large workplaces. When the UAW won its NLRB election at Volkswagen, more than 4,300 workers became union members. Likewise, 2,500 joined the UAW after the successful organizing of Ultium Cells in Ohio and Tennessee, with another 1,200 brought in more recently at Ford’s Kentucky battery plant. At Corewell Health in Michigan, 10,000 nurses voted to join the Teamsters in November 2024 and the SEIU’s Committee on Interns and Residents organized nearly 4,000 hospital workers in January 2025 alone.
Blanc is right that worker-to-worker activism is essential, but it is not enough by itself. Nor is getting rid of Trump and his MAGA operatives. To win, we will need some combination of labor law reform, pressure on the big corporations from an all-out government offensive, a new set of bold union leaders, and, most important of all, the popular realization that the survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union movement.
Nelson LichtensteinTwitterNelson Lichtenstein is the editor, with Samir Sonti, of Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement From the 1950s to Today.