Author Archives: firewithfire6

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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A color quilt of diamond shapes that converge in the middle of the image like a star. The colors produce concentric circles of mostly reds, pinks, and yellows.

So You Want to Organize with the Union Movement?: How to Get Started

[A pamphlet version of this post is available for download here.]

Recent cycles of crisis and protest have created an ever-growing number of radicalized youth and young adults. While there’s been wide variation in social movement activity year by year, since 2011 there’s been a significant upsurge.

As initial phases of intense agitation and involvement pass, many young people think about how to turn their change in political consciousness to a change in their life. The crests of heightened action are too intense emotionally to sustain indefinitely, and the troughs of demobilization are too long for a committed protestor to remain perpetually engaged.

The union movement is one place where you can build towards long-term radical change as part of a sustainable, consistent, and long-term commitment. Almost everyone who isn’t already rich has to work for a living. If that includes you, there’s a lot of people you can unite with against those few who profit off your labor.

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Talking to Your Coworkers about Socialism

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

As socialists we spend most of our time talking about socialism with other socialists, whether in our radical book groups or with our activist friends. When it comes time to talk to non-socialists about socialism, we often stumble as we apply our activist-talk to our neighbors and coworkers who aren’t part of the radical scene. Rather, we should adapt our conversational strategies to the needs of the current context and moment.

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A creamy white fabric is covered with a winding series of small flowers, leaves, stems growing from left to right. The design is colored in brown.

“Don’t run for executive board”: How to Take Over Your Union from the Bottom Up

[This post is part of my series on union organizational structures.]

Many workers today find themselves asking, “If unions in general are good, why does my union suck?” The member meetings are unbearably tedious, abuses and unsavory conditions are widespread at work, wages keep falling against inflation, health insurance premiums keep going up, and, worst of all, none of the union’s initiatives or campaigns seem to be helping. 

For many workers who are dissatisfied with their union, taking over the executive board appears like the logical way to make their unions better. They think that the union itself is a good thing and all that needs to be done is replace the bad leadership with good leadership. As common as this mindset is among union activists, it ignores a deeper and structural critique of why today’s unions are so dissatisfying in the first place. More often than not, such efforts to win union leadership end up perpetuating the very structures that are responsible for the dissatisfaction in the first place.

Unions have different structures and dimensions that are worth teasing apart and evaluating separately. What’s good about the union is the bringing together of workers to fight for better a better life. At its core, the union is democratic because workers are taken together as all having equal standing and voice. The union is militant because it’s based on workers taking action together. The union is radical because workers deciding and acting together in their own interests sets them apart from and against the overarching economic structures of society wherein workers merely exist to be squeezed by investors for profits.

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