Tag Archives: union organizing

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The Big Break: General Strikes in the Past and Present

The term “general strike” is re-entering the vocabulary of more and more workers in the US today. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to coordinate their contracts to expire on May 1st, 2028 provided the initial impetus for this. Labor Notes, which hosts the largest union conference in the US and produces the labor movement’s most-read website, has published half a dozen articles over the last year about general strikes. Some union leaders, like Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants, have discussed and called for general strikes publicly in recent years. Trump’s lurch further right in his second term has emboldened many to call for a general strike to fight back. Even relatively mainstream political figures, such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, have recently called for a general strike amidst Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrant communities and federal occupations of major cities.

A general strike is a work stoppage in a city or region that halts the majority of its economic activity. Historian Jeremy Brecher notes three essential features of such strikes: “an expanding challenge to established authority in workplaces and beyond; a tendency for workers to take control of their own activity; and a widening solidarity and mutual support among different groups of working people.”

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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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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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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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“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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