This series includes all of my writings on various aspects of union organizational structures, from staff and officer positions to contract clauses to meetings.

• “Don’t run for executive board”: How to Take Over Your Union from the Bottom Up
  • Here I argue that the best way to create strong unions is to make them more democratic. The best way to make unions more democratic is to take over and exercise power through the grassroots structures of the union (like the member meetings, the steward networks, the Contract Action Teams) instead of taking over the formal authority of top executive positions.
• “Never give up the right to strike”: An Introduction to No-Strike Clauses
  • This post shows how no-strike clauses are a hindrance to the contemporary labor movement. I define no-strike clauses and show how they pacify workers, how earlier generations of unionists militantly resisted these clauses, and what union organizing can be like without them.
  • I’ve intended to write more posts on this topic as there’s so much more to say, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
• The Contradictions of Paid Staff in the Union Movement, Parts I, II, and III
  • In these posts I show how mainstream unions are structured in such a way that professionalized staff organizers come to have divergent interests from the rank-and-file workers who they supposedly represent. The staff organizers stands outside the workplace while the workers relate to each other and have the potential to take action inside the workplace. But unions don’t have to be divided against themselves, and rather, workers can create unions and organizing structures without staff organizers where the workers themselves are directly in charge of their own affairs and in leading the fight against capital.
• How to Plan and Facilitate Good Organizing Meetings
  • Unfortunately, many unions and grassroots orgs have meetings that are dull, overly technical in nature, and unattractive to new and potential members. This post is about creating meetings whose main purposes are to share skills, discuss issues, maximize participation (especially for newer people), and strengthen relationships between members. While my org no longer puts quite as much preparation time into planning these meetings as we used to (more because we’ve gotten better at it than because we don’t value it as much), we’ve been using this general framework for more than four years now and it continues to be extremely valuable for our organizing.