Category: Organizing Labor
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What’s it going to take to get to mass strikes?
A strike led by activists can look energetic and inspiring, but it will rarely be durable. A strike led by leaders is slower to launch, harder to coordinate, and far more powerful because it rests on deeper relationships and trusts.
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Consumer Protection Workers Survived DOGE Attacks through Quick Mobilization
We knew the DOGE playbook and the importance of rapid mobilization. Within 24 hours of Musk’s tweet, union members were picketing in front of CFPB headquarters and alerting the public to the risk that DOGE would mishandle or misuse sensitive consumer and industry data maintained by the CFPB. We educated ourselves about our rights and obligations if given an illegal order from a…
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How civil service workers are fighting Newsom’s return to office order
As many employers have forced workers back into offices since declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over, California’s unionized public servants successfully bucked the trend, at least for now.
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18 Tips from a Veteran Union Organizer
Workers need bread, but they need roses too. Labor unions generally focus on negotiating wages, benefits, fair work rules, and safety. That’s all very essential. But one thing we often fail to do is acknowledge workers’ need for recognition. People have dreams and values, along with a desire to be respected and to connect to…
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To Build our Power, We Must First Understand our Employer’s Power
While many unions do corporate research to design organizing or contract campaigns, it’s usually just a staff project. The members, and even local leaders, are expected to take marching orders from the staff team. This approach is backwards, write the authors. Their model involves members in the research right from the start, all the way…
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Decades After Nike Promised Sweatshop Reforms, Workers in This Factory Were Still Fainting
Workers have fainted for years inside Cambodia’s garment factories, where more than 57,000 people now produce Nike goods. People at Nike’s suppliers fainted en masse in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to news reports at the time, part of a string of events in which thousands of Cambodians got sick, vomited or collapsed…
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What would a general strike in the US actually look like?
Calling for general strikes is a staple of the radical toolkit. (I’ve made questionable efforts to call two or three myself over the past half-century.) But why has the idea of such mass actions suddenly appeared on the lips of such a wide range of people? There are three principal reasons:
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How the Metal of NUMSA was Bent
Animating all of this is a bigger strategic rift between rival factions of Numsa and the broader federation. In 2018, SAFTU convened a working-class summit (WCS) where 147 organizations representing unions, social movements, and civics were present. The majority of delegates affirmed the need to form a new working-class party, but the question of when…
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How Unions Can Fight Back Against Deportations
The battle won’t be fought only in the courts. “We need to expand our base beyond the already converted,” Goodner says. “We need to go and talk to people, including Trump supporters, and win them over one by one, the same way organizers do when they organize a union. So we have a plan to…
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AI (so-called) is made possible by a hyper-exploited human workforce
These workers are the lifeblood of the burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Without them, products such as ChatGPT simply would not exist. That’s because the data they label helps AI systems “learn”. Self-driving cars, for example, rely on labelled video footage to distinguish pedestrians from road signs. Large language models such as ChatGPT rely on…
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