Category Archives: Organizing

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.

Continue reading →

Don’t Blame Coworkers and Give Them Space to Say No

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

There are two standards that I hold myself to that have become absolutely central to everything I do in my union organizing. First, I never blame my coworkers for not being involved or not caring. Second, whenever I invite a coworker to get involved or to share their opinion, I want them to feel comfortable to decline or disagree.

This might seem counterintuitive. If the point of organizing is for more coworkers to be involved in making things better, isn’t it their fault if they don’t get involved and things remain bad? Similarly, shouldn’t I be finding more ways to get coworkers to say yes and agree rather than say no and disagree?

Continue reading →
A wide shot of the Niagara Falls horseshoe waterfall. The sun is shining and the water is as blue as the sky.

Anarchist Unionism: A Forgotten but Glorious History

[For more of my posts on anarchism visit this page. An abbreviated pamphlet version of this post is available for download and printing here. A computer voice reading of the blog post can be listened to in the player below.]

Why should we think about anarchist unionism?

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the push towards capitalist reforms in China, self-proclaimed Communist movements the world over have lost their main sponsors and sources of political inspiration and legitimacy. Subsequently, since the early 1990s anarchism has seen a resurgence within social movements in the US. Some movements, like the early anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street, have more foregrounded anarchist ideas, while all social movements have been touched by an increased number of anarchists within them, such as the abolitionist wing of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

The labor movement has long been a central part of social movements in the US, sometimes radical and sometimes not, but always touching the lives of millions of people and putting them into varying degrees of action for reform and occasionally towards revolution. While the US labor movement is at a historical nadir in terms of union membership density, the last decade has seen a broad uptick in strike activity and public support.

With this modest resurgence of both anarchism and union organizing, it’s strange that there’s very little overlap between the anarchist movement and the labor movement in the US today. There are very few anarchist-led organizations or prominent anarchists working within the labor movement, and the labor movement has very few prominent leaders or groupings of its own that identify with anarchism. 

From a historical vantage point this is unusual. In the early 20th century anarchism was at times the dominant leftist pole within the international labor movement, with anarchist-led labor federations claiming tens or hundreds of thousands of members and leading large strikes in countries on five continents. However, the repression and precipitous decline of anarchism as an international social movement from the 1930s – 1980s overlapped considerably with the successful assault on the labor movement in the US (and to a lesser degree in other countries) from the late 1940s – 2000s. These movements shriveled up and became increasingly isolated from each other over the second half of the 20th century. 

Continue reading →
The photo is a close up of a quilt of made up of concentric squares of browns, reds, and yellows. The fabric coloring gives the impression of diagonal bands of dark and light from top left to bottom right.

“Never Give Up the Right to Strike”: An Introduction to No-Strike Clauses

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

Years ago I came across the quote, the source now forgotten, “My philosophy of unions is simple: never give up the right to strike.” At the time I didn’t fully understand what that meant, but it stuck with me. Over the years of reading labor history and reflecting on my own workplace organizing I’ve gradually realized that that quote encapsulates much of what I now believe about unions.

One of the main ways workers give up the right to strike today is through their union contracts, 98% of which contain “no-strike clauses” forbidding workers from withholding their labor for the duration of the contract. No-strike clauses are usually written in expansive terms. For example, the no-strike clause in the union contract at my job elaborates that any slow down or alteration of or deviation from or interference with the work assignment is prohibited. This amounts to a near-blanket ban on worker direct action against their employer. 

Continue reading →

Critical Book Review: Power, Manipulation, and Burnout in Pitkin’s On the Line

On the Line: Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union (2022) by Daisy Pitkin is probably the most well-written book about the labor movement I’ve ever read. The book is an account of the author’s experience as a union organizer in the mid-2000s written as a long letter to the worker organizer she developed a close bond with, Alma. The characters are relatable, passionate, courageous, and draw you in. The author’s first-person organizing stories are interwoven with important union history to astutely draw out themes of labor struggle as true of capitalism of years past as they are today. An allegory of the moth’s desire to fly towards the light of a fire and to its own certain death illustrates the drive union organizers have to keep fighting bosses despite the self-destructive effects these fights have on their mental and social lives. If you like well-written books, you should read this book on these merits.

If you are looking for any kind of inspiration or positive model for what union organizing can be like, you should read a different book. On most pages Pitkin has a caring voice as a writer and a gentle touch as an organizer, but gentleness by itself is no protection from the machinations of personal and institutional power that subtly slice through the chapters. You almost forget how unseemly an image of union organizing this is because the storytelling is by turns electrifying, stirring, and heart-tugging. I’ll leave it to other reviewers to discuss the book’s positive aspects, and I’ll confine myself to the political message and meaning of the story for workers and organizers today.

Continue reading →