My writings here are a mix of short book reviews and longer commentaries with other thinkers and organizers.

• A Critical Survey of Left Unionisms: McAlevey, Burns, Moody, Syndicalism, Permeationism, and Relationship-Based Organizing
  • I review here what I take to be the main theories of left unionism being practiced today. In part I do this by reviewing the organizing ideas of prominent left labor authors Jane McAlevey, Joe Burns, and Kim Moody. I think it’s helpful for workplace organizers to be familiar with these ideas to be able to critically relate to them, taking what’s useful and rejecting what’s not. I end by showing how relationship-based organizing differs from these other union methodologies.
• Nolan’s The Hammer, Blanc’s We Are the Union, and the Question of Rank-and-File Leadership
  • I review Blanc’s We Are the Union about worker-to-worker organizing alongside Hamilton Nolan’s The Hammer that places an emphasis on winning the top leadership positions in the national unions and federations. I find Blanc’s more bottom-up approach to unions more insightful and inspiring than Nolan’s more top-down approach. Both books are well-written and worth reading, but what they made me reflect on is how little attention contemporary labor writers pay to the role of socialist cadre among the rank-and-file. I end by sketching out the pivotal and unique role that rank-and-file cadre have to play in firing up the labor movement.
• Mini-Review: Strike! by Jeremy Brecher
  • I assess and highly recommend Brecher’s sweeping history of US labor as told through the perspective of rank-and-file workers.
• Not My Union: The Workplace Politics of Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman
  • I discuss the writings of mid-20th century rank-and-file radicals Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman, comparing them favorably to big-name union presidents like Harry Bridges and Walter Reuther. Even though Bridges and Reuther claimed a progressive and even leftist politics, they became part of union officialdom that as often as not, especially as they got older, sided with the bosses against their own membership. In contrast, Weir and Glaberman articulate a shop-floor consciousness that I’ve found insightful and resonant with my own union organizing experience as a public education worker.
• The Contested Politics of Racial Capitalism in Taiwo and Kendi
  • With his widely read books Stamped from the Beginning (2017) and How to Be Antiracist (2019), Ibram X Kendi became the most prominent voice on race relations in the US. However, despite aligning himself politically with the rhetoric of anti-capitalism, Kendi’s actual positions and ideas place him squarely within the realm of liberal capitalism. Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò’s book Elite Capture covers many of the same historical figures that Kendi does, but Táíwò illuminates what it means to combine anti-racist politics with anti-capitalist economics.
• Critical Book Review: Power, Manipulation, and Burnout in Pitkin’s On the Line
  • On the Line (2022) by Daisy Pitkin is a first-hand account of her experiences organizing industrial laundries in Phoenix in the 2010s. While the writing is beautiful and the story is gripping, I found her actual organizing methods and politics to be deeply manipulative, harmful, and arrogant. My extremely critical take on this book contrasts sharply with the almost universally positive reviews the book received in the literary and labor press.