Lessons on Scale Organizing from Siemens Workers United

Workers at the Siemens Mobility manufacturing plant in Sacramento, California lost their March 2025 bid to form a union by a vote of 838 to 538. While the results dashed our hopes to transform what it is like to work at Siemens, this joint campaign between International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1245 and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers (IBB) gave us a rare example of the kind of organizing the labor movement so urgently needs if it is to reverse the decline of union membership in the private sector.

Since 2019, only 98 out of 13,580 union drives that made it to a vote on union representation were trying to organize more than 1,000 workers; that’s 0.7%. Only 1.5% of representation elections since 2014 have involved more than 500 workers, and most of these have been in healthcare and higher education. 

As a member of the organizing committee, I observed both the strengths and challenges of this campaign. Siemens Workers United demonstrated the labor movement’s potential to come together across unions and organize strategic large-scale workplaces. But we confronted a tough campaign in which Siemens relied on typical employer tactics to thwart our efforts: threats of relocation and loss of benefits, and direct retaliation against union activists. Overcoming employers’ union-busting in the future, and the fear and division it sows, will require pairing the labor movement’s coalitional power with a stronger workplace structure of worker organizers who can lead jobsite actions that demonstrate the power we have as workers when we organize.

Taxpayer Subsidized Low-Road Employment

The Biden-era economic agenda featured significant investment in passenger rail as part of a broader reinvigoration of green manufacturing in the United States. Siemens Mobility Rolling Stock was and is set up to reap gigantic profits from these state-led investments: it has a $7.3 billion contract with Amtrak to build new locomotives and coaches, a Brightline contract to build high speed trains, and a spot on the short list of competitors for California’s high speed rail contract. Until 2023, Sacramento was Siemens’ only rolling stock factory in North America, which meant that during this campaign, Sacramento workers were producing the vast majority of profits for Siemens Mobility Rolling Stock North America. In 2023 Siemens Mobility opened a second rolling stock facility in Lexington, North Carolina. Soon, Siemens will open a third facility in Homestead, New York for the production of high speed rails. 

In North America, Siemens Mobility Rolling Stock has its headquarters in Sacramento and employs approximately 2,600 people at this plant. Close to 1,600 work directly in production; the rest are in engineering, management, administration, and human resources. At the time I was hired in 2023, the starting wage at the plant was $17.50 per hour, which was $2.50 less than fast food workers would make in California only a few months later. While taking home these low wages—a poor match for Sacramento’s cost of living—we produced multimillion-dollar trains. 

I worked in the locomotive final assembly department, finishing the production of $10 million locomotives; three out of the five locomotives we made every month were for Amtrak. After the union campaign started, Siemens did raise only the starting-level wages to $20, which added insult to injury for my many veteran coworkers, some of whom had worked there 14-plus years and seen their wages rise to only $24 though bi-annual “merit” reviews. These reviews were based more on the favoritism of department managers than the quality of an individual’s work.

To maintain this low-wage business model, Siemens Mobility relies heavily on new immigrant workers with limited labor market opportunities, resulting in a workforce that reflects the region’s various waves of immigration. Many of the long-time workers across the plant had migrated to Sacramento from Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam, while newly hired workers were predominantly Afghan refugees and Filipinos. In the plant, these ethnic and racial divisions played out in highly segmented departments, because Siemens’ hiring practices relied heavily on word of mouth and the hiring decisions of frontline managers that came from the shop floor. Latinos were concentrated in the paint department while Hmong, Filipino, and Vietnamese workers were concentrated in subassembly. 

These divisions and the overall size of the Siemens workforce created very high barriers to organizing a union, which had thwarted earlier short-lived efforts by Siemens workers with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and IBEW. Despite these obstacles, workers in early 2023 decided that they had had enough of the low pay and the indignity of managerial favoritism and undertook what to date has been the most successful campaign at Siemens Mobility in Sacramento. 

Lessons for Organizing Large Workplaces

Worker Organizers are Irreplaceable

This campaign’s major challenge was simply the size of the bargaining unit. When we reached workers face-to-face at home during door-knocking blitzes, a supermajority of workers supported unionization. Where organizing committee members and salts were present, we built strong majority support in their departments, but were unable to spread that support and build out a strong organizing committee on a plantwide basis. (“Salts” take jobs at a workplace to help unionize it.) In this context, workers not reached directly at work or at home learned about the campaign from Siemens, and were easily scared by usual talking points threatening plant closure and loss of benefits. 

For example, towards the end of my time working at Siemens, I coordinated weekly charting meetings in the parking lot with coworkers whom I assessed for organic leadership qualities. We had a clear goal of getting 70% of the 75 people in our department to sign cards saying they would support unionizing; these cards were official documents that would be submitted to the National Labor Relations Board. Over a six-week period of focused effort, six of us from five different ethnic backgrounds moved our department from 40% card-signers to 64% card-signers. 

I had invited one of the workers to offsite union and organizing committee meetings many times, and he almost always had a conflict with his kid’s basketball schedule. However, once we started meeting at work and ran efficient charting meetings with a clear goal, he became a regular participant. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to keep the momentum going with this group after I left Siemens, or hand it off to staff organizers who could only meet offsite. My takeaway is that inside worker organizers are irreplaceable in large workplaces, and this can only be achieved by developing workplace leaders into organizers, even when they are not organic leaders, and/or salting.

Taking the importance of worker organizers seriously requires unions to commit time and financial resources into methodically developing workers into organizers, and/or planting salts in a majority of strategic departments. Financially, this could require resources to support salts at scale, and through the life of the campaign. It could also take the form of subsidizing worker-leaders’ time—expanding their capacity for the campaign by enabling them to quit a second job or turn down extra overtime—as GMB has done in Coventry, England.

Moreover, it takes more than one or two worker organizers to support organizing in large facilities. These workplaces intentionally atomize workers and discourage building relationships across departments. While worker organizers at Siemens were largely successful at building support in their own departments, I was much less successful at building support in other departments, despite having a job where I moved around the facility freely. Jobs where you move around are largely advantageous for worker organizers and I would still advocate that they be targeted; however, you tend to build shallower relationships across the plant. This means that initial assessments of potential organic leaders are often difficult and wrong, even in your home department. After moving to a job where I stayed in my home department all day and focused my organizing, I found much more success more quickly in moving my department to sign cards. 

When we can’t reach workers at work, we must meet them in their community

While strong committee building and rigorous social mapping (aided by inside organizers) should be one response to the challenges of large workplaces, this can be a slow process that proceeds in fits and starts. One opportunity we missed at Siemens was using the lulls in committee building to make stronger pushes to reach workers in the spaces where they gathered in their many different ethnic communities–Afghan, Hmong, Filipino, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Black, white, and Latine. In workplaces of this size, we must take up the daunting challenge of mapping the key institutions and places where workers congregate outside of the facility, and workers’ existing relationships with those institutions, so we can organize in those places. This organizing is critical to both reaching workers in a safer setting and building the courage to stand up to the boss’ fear tactics once workers know their community has their back. 

We need the full force of the entire labor movement

In taking on Siemens Mobility, IBB and IBEW 1245 had the foresight to understand that they probably wouldn’t get very far taking on Siemens alone. Building their close coordination was no easy feat, because the two unions operate differently and have different organizing cultures. While both belong to traditional craft union internationals, 1245 is a professional and industrial local that has more single-employer contracts than a typical IBEW local, and has organizing stewards that have risen from the ranks. IBB, on the other hand, is more of a traditional multi-employer craft union steeped in the organizing culture of the building trades. Without the committed leadership of key organizers in both unions, it seems unlikely that they could have developed the kind of solidarity required to overcome these differences and undertake this joint campaign together. 

In addition, the local and state labor movement rallied wholeheartedly in support of this campaign, with the California Labor Federation and the Sacramento Central Labor Council playing significant roles in bringing together organizers from across the labor movement at crucial times. First they helped pull together organizers from member unions for a door-knocking blitz in March 2024 and then in a GOTV blitz before the election in 2025. With 1,600 workers in the bargaining unit, it’s not likely this campaign would have made it to election without these massive mobilization efforts. The ability of the labor movement as a whole to rally around strategic targets is a major asset that we need to draw on when organizing large workplaces like Siemens. 

Future Organizing

Siemens Workers United demonstrated the power of focused coalitional work in the labor movement, achieving what less than 1% of campaigns in this country have: getting to an election at a workplace with more than 1,000 workers. It also showed that to win at large workplaces, we have to more fully combine coalitional work with organizing committee building and structure testing, as outlined by Jane McAlevey. This involves identifying organic leaders, recruiting organic leaders to worker-led organizing committees, and running these committees through repeated structure tests—actions with clear participation goals that enable organizers to measure the strength of a campaign—until they are ready to withstand the election boss fight.

McAlevey recommends that organizing committees be able to move 70% of their co-workers to participate in structure tests. This becomes challenging in bargaining units that top 1,000 workers at a single site (or in the case of Amazon, which has hundreds of these facilities across the country). To begin with, consider the widely accepted idea that an organizing committee strong enough to get this level of participation needs one member for every 10 workers. 

At Siemens, the bargaining unit at the time of election was 1,600 people; this means we would have needed an organizing committee of 160 people. We asked organizing committee members to go to a weekly meeting, spend an hour-plus mapping out departments to identify organic leaders, assign tasks for the next week, and chart where every person stands. It’s hard to envision finding 160 people willing to make this commitment.

However, if we combine the strong external leverage and coalitional focus of the labor movement with a developed and structure-tested organizing committee able to mobilize 30-50% of strategically positioned workers in direct action, there is a viable path to victory when thousands of workers are organizing at once. Veteran organizer Gene Bruskin detailed one example of this in his account of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ win against the notoriously anti-union Smithfield meatpacking plant in North Carolina, published in Labor Power and Strategy (PM Press, 2023; affiliate link). From this perspective, there are two modifications to the strategies of 70% supermajority and 1:10 organizing committee ratio that are worth experimenting with in large workplaces.

30–50% in on-site structure tests

First, if we execute a strategy based on organizing and testing 30–50% in on-site structure tests (rather than 70%), it is more important than ever to correctly identify which departments and workers are able to disrupt production more than other departments and workers, as the Smithfield campaign showed. Find those chokepoints—and organize them first and in majority numbers. At the early stages in organizing, the impact of any disruption is less important for its ability to affect the company’s bottom line; what’s important is demonstrating to workers the potential power we have if we organize—an effect retired ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney calls “the feather in Dumbo’s cap.” 

Anecdotally, towards the end of the Siemens campaign I would hear from workers on the phone that they knew we weren’t getting our fair share from the company, but they were not convinced that collectively they had the power to win a better deal than we already had by unionizing. Without having experienced their collective power through direct action at work, they found the company’s threats to cut benefits like flexible paid time off and generous overtime more convincing than my personal anecdotes of direct action getting the goods.

A more developed organizing committee structure

Second, we need to aim for a much more developed organizing committee structure than the 1:10 ratio provides. Many unions already recognize this in their contract campaigns by distinguishing between bargaining committees and contract action teams. Bargaining committees attend contract negotiations and lead the work of developing union proposals and evaluating employer offers. Contract action teams connect bargaining committees with the union membership, bringing information and feedback and mobilizing for any actions needed to back up the team at the negotiating table. 

Similarly, communication action networks could flank the work of organizing committees. Communication action networks could be tasked with communicating as comprehensively as possible across the entire worksite, at a 1:10 ratio, so the union drive can spread its message widely; interpret what the employer is doing and counter its lies; and methodically move and track the level of worker participation in structure tests. 

Organizing committees could be a smaller group of leaders who meet regularly and use this information to take stock of the campaign and plan next steps at a tactical and strategic level. Each organizing committee member could talk regularly with five communication team members to keep information flowing and keep the map of support updated. This layered structure gives more people opportunities to participate at a level that feels comfortable and provides a rationale for new ratios to evaluate the strength of union structures at the workplace.

We do not have the luxury of lingering in discouragement over this loss or misinterpreting these results: the stakes are too high. IBB and IBEW 1245 had the correct analysis when taking on this campaign, and they faced the challenge head on despite the risk. They need to be applauded for their efforts, and more unions need to step up and dare to win at scale as they have done. 

We need to win not just one small shop, but the kinds of workplaces that can reverse the tide of the declining union density. We need victories that don’t just change the lives of workers in one workplace, but entire labor markets. Now more than ever we need to take on employers at the commanding heights of the economy where workers can leverage their collective power to help build a more democratic economy and society.

Featured image by Kimmie Dearest

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence’s Bookshop. Purchases made through our bookshop support our movement media work.