We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big makes a case for how to overcome business-as-usual in both corporate America and organised labour.

While the union system in the US differs from ours in South Africa, many of the principles outlined in this article can be helpful, especially in building new and smaller unions (ed).

From the United States to South Africa, labour’s decline over the past half century has devastated working-class communities, undermined democracy, and deepened the grip of big business over our work lives, our political system, and our planet. To turn this around, we need tens of millions more people forming, joining, and transforming unions.

By analysing the recent US unionisation surge and telling the stories of worker organisers, my forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big makes a case for how to overcome business-as-usual in both corporate America and organised labour. My argument is simple: a new unionisation model is necessary because the only way to build power at scale is by relying less on paid, full-time organisers and more on workers. Staff-intensive organising is often very effective, training people to lead their co-workers in the struggle. But it costs too much to grow widely. The good news is that recent struggles in the US have built off rank-and-file-oriented traditions to develop a scalable approach to worker power capable of driving exponential union growth and changing the world. 

Bottom-up spirit

Though economic and political contexts diverge across countries, many of the core dilemmas of building widespread working-class power remain similar internationally. As United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explained, “[w]e don’t win by telling workers what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.” 

Reviving the bottom-up spirit that enabled US unions to make their big breakthrough in the 1930s, worker-to-worker initiatives from 2021 onwards have shown how this can be done in our sprawled-out, suburbanised society. And they have done it in cafes, auto plants, newspapers, universities, and beyond. Labour’s most astute opponents have clearly identified the threat posed by this growth in worker-to-worker organising. Littler Mendelson, the country’s most notorious union-busting firm, sounded the alarm in a 2022 report: 

There has been a shift in how people are organising together to petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organising movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labour organisation to assist them in their pursuit to be represented.

Easy, cheap and scalable

Reviving the bottom-up spirit that enabled US unions to make their big breakthrough in the 1930s, worker-to-worker initiatives from 2021 onwards have done it in cafes, auto plants, newspapers, universities, and beyond.

Lamenting that “the ability to encourage activism has never been easier,” the report stressed that this “is especially true with the younger workforce … [that is] more progressive thinking.” Because digital tools have dramatically lowered communication costs, it’s now easier for rank-and-filers to initiate organising drives and to get trained by other workers nationally. Social media enables employees to “begin organising on their own in a grass-roots fashion … [and] allows local organisers to use the collective knowledge of the best organisers around the country.”  

One of worker-to-worker unionism’s key merits is that it’s relatively cheap and, therefore, scalable — that is, there’s no inherent limit to its scope. Scalability is a somewhat cold and technocratic term, normally used more by corporations than their challengers. But here it refers to something simple, visceral, and righteous: building an organised mass movement of ordinary people taking back control over their lives and their workplaces.  

Workplaces have changed

Epochal economic changes have made scalability particularly challenging. At the time of US labour’s meteoric rise in the late 1930s, workers lived in dense, work-adjacent communities. The economy revolved around large, centrally located establishments like steel and auto factories. Employers were no less viciously anti-union back then, but organisers could focus their limited resources on a relative handful of big, geographically concentrated targets. That is no longer the case.  

America’s top private employer, Walmart, has 4,600 stores, averaging a few hundred employees each, that are scattered across the country. Other top private employers — Home Depot, Starbucks, Kroger, FedEx, Target, UPS, and Amazon — also have huge numbers of dispersed workplaces. Workers usually live many miles away from work and from each other. The same is true within the much-expanded ‘care economy’, which by its nature must have schools, hospitals, and nonprofits dotted across the nation to provide services to local populations.  

It’s no longer possible to write, as one author did in 1939, that “today in the United States, people and industry are highly centralised within a relatively small fraction of the nation’s total area.” Because of decades of decentralisation, building worker power at scale and widely enough to win is significantly more difficult. 

Organisers are effective but expensive

The problem with staff-intensive organising isn’t that it is ineffective. As countless workers can attest from personal experience, at its best, heavily-staffed organising can empower its participants and it can win major concessions. Indeed, worker-to-worker unionism is largely a development and expansion of its most rank-and-file-oriented traditions. But in all its different forms, a staff-heavy approach suffers from one basic limitation: it’s incredibly expensive. 

Up against intense employer opposition and weak labour laws, current best practice in the US is to hire at least one staffer for every one hundred workers to be organised. And it routinely costs over $3,000 today to unionise one worker, a dramatic increase from the roughly $88 dollars (inflation adjusted) that it took to unionise each steel worker in the 1930s. 

Worker-to-worker organising

Fortunately, a new model exists — one that builds off, but also qualitatively transforms, the best practices of rank-and-file-oriented labour organising.  

The idea that workers should organise other workers is hardly a new one. Though many union drives fail to put this axiom into practice, since the late 1980s it’s been a basic principle of labour strategy. It is reflected in tactics like building strong organising committees tasked with holding one-on-one conversations with co-workers. To quote UNITE-HERE’s unofficial motto, “The organiser organises the committee, and the committee organises the workers.” 

Building off this foundation, worker-to-worker unionism gives rank and filers responsibility for key tasks usually reserved for paid, full-time organisers. Increased reliance on workers can take numerous forms, ranging from low-level responsibilities like creating a drive’s visual logo to ambitious duties like running its social media efforts or researching the company. My book — based on over 200 interviews and a survey of 500 worker leaders — shows that three things in particular define the new model:  

1. Workers have a decisive say on strategy; 
2. Workers begin organising before receiving guidance from a parent union and/or 
3. Workers train and guide other workers in organising methods.  

In other words, workers initiate an organising drive or train other workers (or both), and they play a central role in determining the campaign’s major decisions. 

The upshot is that worker-to-worker efforts are generally cheaper and easier to spread widely. Worker organisers can more consistently become strategy-making generals, not only foot soldiers, as is the case in many (though not all) heavily staffed efforts. Because the gaps in power, experience, and authority between workers tend to be narrower than between workers and full-time organisers, worker-to-worker organising also tends to be more democratic.  

And its reach can extend beyond the local level. With the rise of digital tools, it’s now possible for workers to reach out to, coordinate with, and train other workers anywhere in the country. This is not a minor development since companies and working-class communities have sprawled out so much over the past century. 

It’s worth underscoring that the new model does not consist of passively waiting around for workers to spontaneously rise up. Worker-to-worker unionism leans heavily on proactive tactics like seeding drives through mass online trainings and digital tools, and workers using personal networks or cold calling. It also proactively spreads unionisation via ‘salting’ — encouraging organisers to take jobs at strategic workplaces with the goal of unionising them. 

Unlike many previous cases for grassroots unionism, my core criticism of staff-heavy approaches — that they’re too costly to scale — does not suggest that full-time organisers and union resources are relatively unimportant. Unions should be investing far more in organising.  

Capacity and accumulated experience are crucial. Staff are generally an essential vehicle to transmit both. But most unions use this correct general argument to justify their specific (staff heavy) division of labour, without seriously probing the potential to scale up by deploying experienced full-timers and union resources in a new way. The case studies in We Are the Union suggest that workers can and should do more than they’re normally asked — or allowed — to do. 

Eric Blanc is an Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, the director of the Worker-to-Worker Collaborative, and the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. The book will be published by the University of California Press in 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.