Author Archives: firewithfire6

A grainy white and black photo of a bridge being built over a wide river. Long metal arches are being built between concrete pylons.

Building Organizing Networks through 1-on-1 Conversations

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

For those who get really involved in union activism or political activism, there are different ways that such activists use their time. There are what I call the “floater” activists. Floaters go to all the meetings, go to all the protests and rallies, and spend a lot of time socializing with other activists. I call them floaters because they float around to everything, but this floating happens without being social rooted or having deeper political designs. Floaters will often think they have the most influence on social change because they do everything and go to everything, but I think this detracts from a more grounded approach that is more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to the floaters, there are the activist “builders.” There are two things that builders do: 1) they build and cohere networks of people who are affected by a problem, and 2) they organize these networks in a particular direction to address that problem.

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Three butterflies with black and white spotted wings fly through the air against a clear blue sky.

Organizing Conversations for Union Contract Campaigns

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations. A pamphlet version of this post is available for download here.]

No other US institution gives workers as much agency over the terms of their own life and livelihood as a union contract campaign. The fortunes of the entire labor movement are recorded in the language of thousands of settled contracts year after year.

For most rank-and-file workers in recent decades, sadly these have not been contests we’ve fared well in as wages have stagnated and inequality has grown. At its most dreadful, a contract campaign is a long procession of bureaucratic bickering and deflating concessions.

But when workers get organized and unite around a common purpose, they become an unstoppable force. The campaign transforms into a vessel for realizing collective ambitions, passions, and values. The power of workers to win their demands is carried forward by the trust and solidarity that exists in the relationships between them. To go from weakness to strength, workers need to talk with each other.

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A white tern with a black top of its head is pictured flying left-to-right, with its wings stretched out in front and its head tilted slightly down, as if scanning the ground below.

The Question for an Organizer Is What the Wing Is for a Bird

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

“You can get all your ideas across just by asking questions, and at the same time you help people to grow and not form a dependency on you. To me it’s just a more successful way of getting ideas across.” – Myles Horton in conversation with Paolo Freire in the book We Make the Road by Walking.

Myles Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and developed a model of popular education that played an important role in stimulating the bottom-up leadership of both the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s civil rights movement. Horton paid close attention to crafting and wielding questions as an essential tool of grassroots organizing.

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Nolan’s The Hammer, Blanc’s We Are the Union, and the Question of Rank-and-File Leadership

“A union is a great way to meet new people, and argue with them,” writes Hamilton Nolan in his 2024 book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Nolan rightfully emphasizes the value of workplace democracy and its many opportunities for constructive argument in building a union movement to fight capitalism.

Books and blogs are also great ways for organizers to interact with lots of people, and argue with them. Democracy, or more accurately in this context, a productive discourse of back and forth, exploration, and experimentation is something the labor movement doesn’t have nearly enough of. Partly this is due to a dearth of good writing about strategy in the labor movement today.

Nolan’s The Hammer and Eric Blanc’s 2025 book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big are well-written and carefully argued. In this way they are exactly the kind of books that we need more of to create a culture of informed and healthy debate on the labor left.

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The cover of the 50th anniversary edition of Jeremy Brecher's book Strike! The title is emblazoned in bold red letters across a black and yellow image of a workers facing off against soldiers in front of big mills.

Mini-Review: Jeremy Brecher’s Strike!

Of all the sweeping US labor histories out there, Jeremy Brecher’s Strike! is the best one I’ve read. It balances dramatic story-telling with political analysis in exactly the right proportion. It carries you through all of the major periods of mass strikes, including the late 19th century insurrectionary strikes, the post-World War I and II labor uprisings, the 1930s general strikes and sit-down strikes, and the wildcats of the 1960s and 70s. In between these eruptions he teases out the longer trends that tie this history together.

Also unique for a labor book of this scope, Brecher tells the story more from the vantage point of the rank-and-file. The decisions and actions of union leaders are noted where they are important, but Brecher avoids the lionization of union officials that pollutes so much otherwise decent labor history. He repeatedly elevates the voices of the rank-and-file struggling without or even against their formal leaders. This is not only a political choice but is also good and accurate historiography, as unions in the US have always been riven with these tensions and divisions which more often than not gets glossed over.

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