Worker-to-Worker Organizing Can Save the Labor Movement

An interview with Eric Blanc about his new book, "We Are the Union"

Mar 03, 2025

The most direct way to turn around America’s crisis of inequality is to grow the labor movement, by organizing millions of new union members. But few unions today have the will—or the resources—to do large scale organizing, and the national political climate has just become more hostile. How, exactly, can we hope to get all of this organizing done?

That is the topic of “We Are the Union,” the new book by Eric Blanc, an activist and professor of Labor studies at Rutgers. Blanc’s book focuses on worker-to-worker organizing, a (wildly successful!) method of building and growing unions from the ground up, not from the top down. His insights are valuable not only for the labor movement, but for anyone interested in how to grow political movements without asking permission. I spoke to him about the math of organizing, success stories, and how workers can wield power under Trump. Our interview is below.

Hamilton Nolan: First of all, can you just break down the (financial and logistical) math that is the underlying rationale for worker-to-worker organizing being the best path towards mass growth of unions? Why is it so important to train workers for this work, rather than thinking we can just hire a bunch of professional organizers to do it?

Eric Blanc: What I try to show in the book is not just that worker-to-worker organizing is the best path forward for mass unionization, but that it’s the only path to unionize at the scale necessary to address the big structural crises we’re facing — Trumpism, economic inequality, climate change, militarism.

The problem with staff-intensive organizing — in which you try to have at least 1 staffer for every 100 workers you’re trying to unionize — is basically that it’s too costly to scale up. That form of organizing at its best can be really effective for the workers involved and it can win some significant battles; but it just can’t involve a wide enough number of workers to win the unionization war.

And this same basic scale dilemma is no less true for the big defensive struggles that labor now faces against Trump. None of the federal employee unions, for example, has anywhere near enough full-time organizers to launch a massive nationwide fightback through staff-intensive means. The only way to build power at the scale necessary is through worker-to-worker structures like the new Federal Unionists Network.

For the book, I crunched the existing data on organizing financial costs, and I found that on average it costs $3,016 to unionize every new worker through traditional means. (This is an approximation that varies depending on occupation and employer opposition, but it generally tracks with what union leaders told me in countless interviews, and it also tracks with other scholars’ estimates.) The upshot is that even if we could get the US labor movement to adopt the very ambitious practice of using 30% of its total liquid assets — $13.4 billion — on new external organizing, this would only get the labor movement back to the union density levels of ten years ago, i.e. eleven percent.

And even if financial cost weren’t an issue, you’d still have the obstacle of time costs. Big labor breakthroughs tend to come in spurts, when large numbers of workers are suddenly interested in or open to organizing. We saw a glimpse of what that looked like in the first half of 2022 at Starbucks, when you had two new union elections being filed daily. There’s just no way that Starbucks Workers United would have been able to support such a large number of drives through staff-intensive means — especially since Starbucks, like most other major companies today, is spread out into a ton of small stores scattered all over the country.

So at Starbucks they had to rely primarily on having workers training other workers and on distributing the tools and knowledge for workers to start self-organizing. A staff-intensive campaign would never have been able to have scaled like that; it takes a long time to effectively train new staffers, to get them to know the company, to have them win workers’ trust and all the rest. In contrast, workers who have recently organized their own shops already know the company and they can lean on their fresh organizing experience to support workers all over the country through Zoom calls and online trainings.

Your book has a ton of great stories about successful worker-driven organizing campaigns. Can you briefly tell us about one or two that you think illustrate the potential of this approach?

Blanc: Starbucks Workers United is definitely the most high profile example of this new model. Even once Workers United and SEIU [SBWU’s parent unions] started putting real resources towards the efforts — and it was critically important that they did — workers maintained central ownership of the effort, not just concerning workplace tactics but also on the overall campaign strategy. And they’ve now succeeded in forcing one of the largest corporations in the world to the bargaining table, after overcoming over two years of the most intense and widespread union busting offensives in modern American history. The company did its best to terrorize these baristas into giving up, but the workers stubbornly persevered. And I’m optimistic they’ll get a good first contract soon.

It’s also worth noting that the fact that Starbucks workers haven’t yet won a first contract isn’t (contrary to what a bunch of skeptics claim) a knock against worker-to-worker organizing — it just reflects the basic fact that it takes a long time to bring a massive corporation like Starbucks (or Amazon) to the table. It took 30 years to unionize General Motors and Ford! And it's not as if a staff-intensive campaign at today’s mega-corporations would have been more effective. In fact, one of the reasons most contemporary unions haven’t even attempted to unionize the biggest private employers precisely because such an ambitious task — organizing so many workers at so many spread out workplaces — is logistically unfeasible through a staff-intensive model.

If people want proof that worker-to-worker organizing can win first contracts, including against intense employer opposition, all you have to do is look at the NewsGuild, which has unionized over 11,000 journalists since 2017 and which has won well over a 100 first contracts in this time. The Guild’s Member Organizer Program is explicitly based on the premise that every worker leader can and should be trained up to take on every responsibility normally done by staffers. It’s an incredibly effective approach that I think most other unions could adopt, which is why the book describes in detail how exactly the Guild systematically trains up and supports such a large number of worker organizers. It doesn’t happen spontaneously or automatically, it takes a lot of vision and effort and digital tools to scale up this degree of worker leadership.

As you detail, Starbucks Workers United and the NewsGuild have been incredibly successful running a version of this model. It's always bothered me that it hasn't been widely replicated. Why don't you think more unions have picked up this model and run with it, at scale? What's the holdup?

Blanc: Honestly, I think the basic problem is just that most unions aren’t doing new organizing, period. So it’s not the case that most unions are testing out and debating different organizing models; mostly they’re just stuck in the same old narrow routines of servicing existing members and occasionally lobbying politicians.

Among those unions that do try to bring in new members, I think a big part of the problem is inertia and risk aversion. All sorts of organizing assumptions and structures have crystallized over the past 40 years of labor retreat, making it hard to pivot now that something bigger and better is possible in so many different industries.

And, finally, I think part of the issue is that unions are exceedingly afraid of losing. They’re not wrong that loosening their grip over organizing will probably mean that a higher percent of drives lose, since workers are generally willing to take more risks and since worker organizers may not always be as tactically savvy as an experienced full-time staffer. But even if labor started to win only 40 or 50 percent of its attempted drives — as opposed to the current (far-too-high) win rate of over 70 percent — we could still unionize a far higher total numbers of workers if labor were to start running five or ten times the numbers of drives it currently does, by making a major financial investment in worker-to-worker organizing.

Your first book was about the wave of teacher's strikes that began in 2018. In a way, both of your books are about labor action that starts from and is driven by the grassroots, rather than from the leadership above. I'm thinking about that in context of what's happening right now--particularly the decimation of the federal workforce, and the pretty lackluster response from public sector unions up to this point. What advice would you give to unionized federal workers who want to fight back right now?

Blanc: First, don’t wait for top union officials to lead. What we saw in 2018 was that when large numbers of rank-and-file workers (and local union presidents) took the initiative for risky, ambitious actions, then eventually the big union apparatuses came around and lent their support. But there’s just no reason to expect that the call to battle is going to first come from above — most top union officials are just too risk-averse.

And, second, don’t let yourself be paralyzed by fear. In 2018, hundreds of thousands of teachers went on illegal strikes against Republican administrations — it was scary, but ultimately nobody was retaliated against for participating, and the workers came out on top.

I get why so many federal workers today are still reluctant to stick their necks out, since they’re professionally trained to stay clear of politics and since Musk seems so eager to fire anybody. But the reality is that trying to keep your head down is also an incredibly risky move at this moment, for precisely the same reason: Musk’s wrecking ball operation is so extreme and so widespread that doing nothing means there’s a good chance your job could still end up being cut. And unless Musk is stopped through mass action and public backlash, even if you somehow manage to hold onto your job, there’s a good chance it’ll become unbearably miserable. Given that there are big risks no matter what you do, why not take the path of publicly defending the services to which you’ve dedicated your life and upon which so many Americans depend?

Along those lines, any federal worker or community supporter interested in fighting back against Musk should sign up on the website go.savepublicservices.com to join a new rapid response campaign against federal layoffs and to save our services. I think this campaign has the potential to go viral. And frankly we need some contagious unruly action ASAP to defeat Musk, or to at least constrain him.

Both of us have written books about how scaling up unions is the path out of America's current predicament. So let me ask you what people ask me: How optimistic are you that organized labor can make any progress on this while Trump is in charge?

Blanc: There’s an obvious reason for pessimism: most unions remain stuck in business as usual, even in the face of an authoritarian power grab that threatens to unleash a bosses’ offensive in all industries. So far, at least, most unions have remained remarkably flatfooted.

But as I mentioned before, unions can be pressured from below into taking action. And, more broadly, I think the dominant overall feature of this period is volatility, more so than across-the-board political reaction. Working people are dissatisfied with elites and with the status quo. Political winds can shift very quickly. So given that we have no clear idea of what’s going to happen over the coming period, I think it’s more fruitful to emphasize the hopeful side of the coin, since progressives these days are excessively gloomy and since hopeful factors point in the direction of collective action rather than political resignation or hibernation.

Right after November’s presidential election, I co-wrote a piece with labor researcher Chris Bohner on seven reasons why labor’s momentum can continue even under Trump. To sum up: Trump promised but can’t deliver meaningful economic progress to working people (only unions can); unions can still grow under Republican administrations (unions grew more under Bush than under Obama); unions have massive, mostly-untapped financial war chests; unions continue to be exceptionally popular; union reform efforts are spreading; young workers are left-leaning and labor-pilled; workers and unions have a huge amount of potential disruptive power through strikes; and Republicans may overplay their hand — a dynamic that certainly seems to be the case so far.

So while there’s certainly a real possibility we just get steamrolled by the Trump-Musk-Bezos oligarchy, I think there’s also a real possibility that labor can keep up its momentum under the new administration, beginning by stopping DOGE. The federal workers movement is already giving a glimpse of labor’s potential to take its rightful place as the last and best hope against Trumpism. Once people see that resistance is not futile, huge numbers of workers and community supporters can get mobilized and organized through these battles to save our services and to save our last vestiges of democracy.

That said, I think it’s very unlikely that we’re going to massively increase union density numbers over the next four years, since a lot of biggest battles are going to be defensive and since most union officials will likely use the excuse of Trump being in office to continue underfunding new organizing. But if labor can win (or at least fight to a draw) a lot of these anti-Trump battles, and if it can succeed in helping maintain enough democratic functioning in our country to enable us to vote out Republicans in 2026 and 2028, then that’ll put our movement in a much better position to go on the offensive when the political terrain becomes more favorable.

I imagine private sector unionization might be a real slog over the next four years if the NLRB is kneecapped, but it doesn’t follow from this that we should pump the brakes on new unionization efforts. If Starbucks gets a first contract, that’s going to open up huge opportunities for union growth among the over 200,000 still-not-unionized baristas and it’ll make it much easier to unionize similar companies like Whole Foods — where workers just last month won a historic victory in Philly, despite taking place under the Trump administration, and despite being subjected to intense union busting. I’m excited that DSA is launching an ambitious new salting program to get people into strategic workplaces (here’s the sign up form if you’re interested). And there’s more than enough money in labor’s coffers to scale up both defensive and offensive struggles. Moreover, ambitious union struggles around economic dignity are likely going to be crucial for exposing the emptiness of Trump’s populist rhetoric.

Big organizing initiatives — whether they’re offensive or defensive — can keep up labor’s current momentum; train thousands of new young workplace organizers; fuel union reform movements; and develop the organizing muscle and structures necessary to seize more favorable openings when they arise.

I’m not such a fan of making political predictions, because I think it’s more helpful to look at this from an organizing standpoint: to get people into motion, you have to project some level of justified hope and a credible plan to win. That, in turn, becomes to a certain extent a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you’ve convinced yourself that nothing can be done, then you’re never going to jump into the fight. While I’ve definitely also had bouts of despair recently, ultimately I think that doing nothing is morally irresponsible — and politically unjustifiable — at this pivotal moment in history.

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