To turn around its decline and build enough power to defeat Trumpism, organized labor needs, among other things, a vigorous culture of debate. So I was happy to receive a thoughtful review of my new book We Are the Union from Peter Olney, one of our country’s sharpest union organizers. He argues that worker-to-worker unionism is only a relatively small piece of a much bigger strategic arsenal and suggests that serious labor organizing should concentrate on the most economically powerful workers. In response, I’ll try to show here that Olney downplays the recent successes of worker-to-worker organizing, overlooks key strategic sectors beyond manufacturing and logistics, and minimizes the essential role of worker-to-worker organizing in scaling up union power.
Downplaying the new model
Olney writes that my book’s argument “is hardly revolutionary or at odds with most of the historic practice of organizing.” There’s some truth to this, and I say so explicitly in the book, in which I write that “I’m definitely not the first person to make the case that putting workers into the driver’s seat is the key to building a powerful mass labor movement. … We Are the Union makes a new case for an old strategy.”
But beyond glossing over the fact that staff-intensive organizing has been the norm from the 1950s up through the present, Olney elides the key point: putting major resources into worker-to-worker organizing would be a “revolution” in the practice of today’s labor movement. And to help make that urgently needed transformation happen, my book attempts to 1) articulate the concrete mechanisms, structures, and tactics of wide-scale worker-led organizing in today’s economic conditions and 2) articulate a rigorous case for why only this type of organizing has the potential to win widely enough to transform America. And those two contributions are new.
Although my book focuses on the question of scaling up workers’ power, Olney’s response has little to say about this issue of scale. His response is focused on the tactics necessary to win specific campaigns, while my argument focuses on the model (division of labor) and methods (mass seeding, trainings, etc.) necessary to win widely. Olney thus confusingly references “Blanc’s point that staffing ratios, while not unimportant, are not determinative.” But my book’s point is that staffing ratios are determinative—if the question is how we can potentially unionize tens of millions.
Scaling up
In that sense, I disagree with Olney’s downplaying of worker-to-worker unionism, which he says is just “one piece of a much larger analytical framework for success in organizing.” To bolster this claim he points to other tactics needed to win union campaigns, such as having strong organizing committees, talented staff, alliances with unionized workers, and roots in communities. I agree with all these tactics, and I explicitly advocate for each over the course of the book. (That said, Olney ignores the huge amount of evidence that community ties have declined across the board in the US since the 1960s, including among people of color. Community support is more important than ever, but it’ll take a lot of bottom-up organizing and persuasion to leverage it.)
But Olney’s listed tactics are for winning battles; they don’t directly address my question of how we inspire and lead enough battles to win the unionization war. To transform America, that’s the key question we need to find answers to. As I write in the book:
While improving the tactical quality of union campaigns is crucial, it isn’t enough on its own to organize a sufficiently large number of workers for systemic change. To win the unionization war, the harder question is how to exponentially increase the quantity of unionization battles.
Olney seems to expect that scale will come relatively automatically from improved tactics for winning specific campaigns. But I show in the book why—due to exorbitant time and money costs—if good tactics continue to be paired with a staff-intensive model, labor can’t scale up. In that sense, the staffing-resource dilemma is primary.
It’s also the case that the mechanisms for scaling up via worker-to-worker organizing are the least understood and implemented within organized labor, which is why my book focuses on addressing this missing link. For example, when the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won its union election in April 2022 at JFK8, almost 1,000 Amazon workers reached out to ask for organizing help in the following days and weeks. Unfortunately, the ALU had neither the capacity nor organizing vision to onboard these workers; failing to initiate any mass training to absorb them—let alone to establish a systematic distributed organizing program like the NewsGuild’s Member Organizer Program—ALU missed an unprecedented opportunity for scaling up.
But it’s not just independent efforts that have failed to seize moments for scaling. Despite their deep pockets, established unions have done little to scale up recent union election victories at major chains like Peet’s, Apple, Chipotle, and Whole Foods. Most consequential of all, organized labor has continued to fail to scale up by leveraging its billions in financial assets to spark countless new drives in strategic industries via wide-scale salting and mass worker-to-worker seeding. As I write in the book, “Why not use labor’s access to a huge amount of voter data to call or knock the doors of every voter who works at Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx to generate leads for ambitious national unionization campaigns at these companies?” Without these types of initiatives to dramatically grow grassroots unionism, good campaign tactics and good strategic targets won’t be enough to defeat Trump, Musk, and Bezos.
Which sectors are strategic?
I agree with Olney that some workers have more power than others and that this is a crucial question to keep in mind when assessing which companies and industries to orient to. In fact, I argue this explicitly and repeatedly in the book and I am very involved in building up DSA’s new Workers Organizing Workers salting program which is squarely focused on boosting organizing at key targets, including logistics and manufacturing.
But in our decentralized political economy, when thinking about where to concentrate our energies, we can’t only ask which workers are most economically powerful. We also need to ask: Which workers are most socially powerful? Social power refers to the ability to galvanize the public and to shape politics. For example, federal workers and teachers have a particularly high degree of social power because of the services they provide. By leaning on such community leverage, teachers have been key to successful labor militancy for the past decade, despite their lack of economic might. And federal workers, at the heart of today’s fight against Trumpist authoritarianism and austerity, will have to do the same.
Even economically powerful workers can lose without sufficient social power. From the 1870s through the early 1930s, for example, manufacturing workers in the US kept on losing most of their biggest strikes and unionization drives, in large part because state repression was strong enough to overcome their economic leverage. It was only after factory workers began receiving unprecedented public and government support under the New Deal that they unionized America’s mass production industries.
Finally, there’s a third strategic criteria worth considering: What sectors can grow the labor movement today? This relates both to direct union recruitment and, no less importantly, to inspiring others to self-organize. Starbucks Workers United not only has organized over 570 stores, unionized over 11,000 workers, and trained many thousands of new worker leaders, but it has been a key inspiration to hundreds of thousands of workers across the economy—including, as I show in the book, in auto manufacturing plants like Yangfeng in Missouri.
Keeping all three of these criteria in mind is key for making smart decisions about targets. It’s not an easy task today, since not all three factors line up in the same industrial sector like they did in the 1930s. But only through such an approach can we avoid, on the one hand, a hyper-concentrated strategy that fails to spark or inspire other key layers of working people, and, on the other, the tendency of some unions to only chase after the quickest way to add dues-payers to their rolls. Effective strategy in today’s conditions must be flexible enough to incorporate a wider range of targets than only the most economically powerful workers.
Downplaying successes
Have recent worker-to-worker campaigns demonstrated a high degree of power? Aiming to encourage labor to focus on more economically powerful workers, Olney fails to acknowledge that each of the campaign case studies I profile did demonstrate real leverage by overcoming scorched-earth union busting and winning first contracts (Burgerville, Colectivo, NewsGuild), or forcing a recalcitrant management to the bargaining table (Starbucks). He writes that “despite Starbucks’ willingness to sit down and negotiate, there is no deal in sight.” It’s true that they have not yet won a first contract, but is it really accurate to suggest that Starbucks workers lack economic power? If every single Starbucks store in the US went out on an indefinite strike tomorrow, that would cut off hundreds of millions in profits and create huge pressure on corporate to settle.
The obstacle here is primarily one of scale: with only about five percent of Starbucks stores organized, a strike of currently unionized stores on its own is insufficient to cut off huge profits—which is why the union has also simultaneously leveraged as much outside support and brand damage as possible, and why it remains intensely and successfully focused on continuing to increase the number of unionized stores.
This scale dilemma is posed in almost all of today’s largest corporations, Amazon included, where one will have to organize a large number of worksites to force management to the table. Finding and pressing on chokepoints wouldn’t resolve the scale dilemma at Amazon, since, as Nantina Vgontzas’s research has shown, management can relatively easily reroute around specific warehouses or other nodes paralyzed by economic militancy.
Modern chokepoints
Workplace chokepoints are not irrelevant, but tapping them in today’s conditions generally requires organizing more workers, more widely. Moreover, I noted in the book that there are key chokepoints beyond those in manufacturing and logistics. For instance, tech workers who run the central operating systems of major corporations and the government have immense power to paralyze production and distribution, as Elon Musk’s DOGE has recently demonstrated to the country. You don’t need to be a blue-collar worker to have real power.
I do agree with the importance—but not the exclusive strategic primacy—of manufacturing and logistics workers. Throughout We Are the Union, I highlight the 2023 Big 3 auto strike, the work of the reformed United Auto Workers, and I drafted a whole chapter on the Mercedes workers’ union drive in Alabama. But I had to scrap it after they lost in May 2024, since the book only included case studies of campaigns that overcame strong employer opposition.
Defeats like those at Mercedes, unfortunately, have remained the norm ever since neoliberal globalization dramatically undercut manufacturing workers’ self-confidence and clout from the late 1970s onwards—particularly via the demobilizing threat of capital flight. Deep structural obstacles like globalization surely have had more of an overall inhibiting impact than the one factor Olney points to: leftists not thinking much about manufacturing once it moved South.
While it always makes sense to target strategic sectors, this doesn’t mean only logistics and manufacturing workers have enough power to win. And that’s very good news, because the overwhelming majority of American workers—about 85 percent—do not work in either of those two industries. If we’re going to unionize tens of millions of workers, we need a strategy that can speak to all of them.