We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big

Eric Blanc has written a vitally important book that addresses head on some of the thorniest questions facing the labor movement and, particularly, movement organizers today.

Of the many challenges that the labor movement faces, both in the United States and around the world, one of the most fundamental is the numbers problem. U.S. union density—the percentage of non-agricultural workers who are part of unions—has been declining for over 70 years, and union membership has been declining in absolute numbers consistently since 1981. This is part of a broader, more global trend; but virtually nowhere has this decline been more severe than in the United States, where fewer than one in ten workers is a union member today.

There has been considerable debate among both scholars and practitioners about the causes of this decline, as well as equally heated debate on what to do about it. That is where Blanc’s We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big comes in.

Over the past four decades, a dominant approach has emerged among those who think about and do organizing, and it has two dimensions. First, in terms of workplace organizing, there is a focus on “deep organizing,” carefully mapping workplaces, building committees, running structure tests, and assessing workers, all according to carefully laid out strategies almost invariably guided by paid professional union staff. And second, beyond the workplace, there is a focus on “corporate campaigns” to target company shareholders and brand image and otherwise find ways to exert leverage on companies to pressure them to recognize and bargain with unions. There is also a political dimension to this external part, in terms of lobbying for labor law reform but also creating new policy regimes to deal with hard-to-organize groups like domestic workers, gig workers, home health aides, and the like.

Blanc notes that there is nothing inherently wrong with these approaches, although of course there are better and worse versions of them. The main problem he sees is that they are all incredibly costly. And that is largely because these approaches are all very staff-heavy. As he points out, data from the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, the main U.S. labor federation) suggest that it can cost upwards of $3,000 per worker to organize a workplace with this staff-heavy approach, where the rule of thumb is one staffer for every hundred workers.

Even though union assets have grown considerably in recent years despite membership decline, Blanc argues that the costs are such that these organizing approaches are simply not scalable to a level that would be necessary to start making a dent in membership decline. To get a sense of the scale involved, in recent years there has been an uptick in organizing, such that unions have managed to organize around 100,000 members per year, which is far above the norm in recent decades. But density has continued to decline because the denominator—that is, the size of the labor force—has continued to grow faster than union membership. To start reversing the trend of union density decline, unions would have to start organizing something more along the lines of 1,000,000 members a year—an order of magnitude greater than the current level.

The crux of the problem, according to Blanc’s analysis, is a trade-off between numbers and engagement. He describes an ecosystem characterized by organizations that are either “rooted but small” (think, a local grassroots community organization) or “thin but big” (think, a large nonprofit advocacy organization like the Sierra Club, or a large rally like the recent nationwide “No Kings” protests). But neither of these models is capable of generating the combination of large numbers and engaged members necessary to organize millions of workers.

What then is the solution? While not a panacea, Blanc argues that labor must embrace what he calls “worker-to-worker” organizing as an essential part of any realistic growth strategy. Simply put, this is a model where workers themselves take on many of the tasks in an organizing drive that would usually be handled by staff. In particular, he identifies three key criteria (p. 40): (1) workers have a decisive say on strategy; (2) workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union; and (3) workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.

This worker-to-worker model is not new. Indeed, it is at the core of how labor first established itself in the 1930s. But it goes against the current staff-heavy conventional wisdom. This worker-to-worker model, Blanc argues, is essential because it is the only realistic way to be able to organize at scale. The worker-to-worker model is both cheap enough and portable enough to scale up quickly.

Blanc makes his case largely through interviews of over 200 worker leaders derived from a dataset he developed of all union drives in the United States that went public in 2022. This helps to mitigate some selection bias problems that often plague discussions of union revitalization, where researchers will often cherry-pick cases that illustrate the points they wanted to make beforehand.

The organizers’ stories form the core of the book. In their own voices, we hear the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and how organizing changed their lives and their workplaces. But, as inspiring as many of these stories may be, this is decidedly not simply a feel-good roll call of organizing victories. We see the difference that the worker-to-worker model makes. We see the importance of social media, but specifically worker-generated and -controlled social media. We see how workers use technology to connect across distances, but also how they connect in their workplaces in new ways. And we also see workers struggling with what to do when the initial outburst of energy and momentum subsides, as we have seen most recently with the unionization campaign at Starbucks. The stories are indeed compelling, but they are far more than just stories.

With We Are the Union, Blanc has crafted a clear, compelling, rigorously researched, and exceptionally well written argument for worker-to-worker organizing. One does not have to agree with everything he writes, but one does have to engage with his argument in order to have a serious debate on the future of the labor movement. It can be hard to look straight at the many challenges that labor faces today and not throw one’s hands up in despair, but Blanc maintains a sober perspective, all while making a convincing case that what he proposes, while insufficient on its own, is a necessary component of any revitalization plan that stands a chance of working.

Blanc’s argument is compelling, especially as it embodies many of the key ideas about worker self-activity that built the labor movement as we know it in the first place. But I still felt uneasy about some aspects of the model, or at least the reality of how it has been practiced. Most notably, at least as laid out in the book, it seems to be limited to certain types of workers, specifically those with at least a college education. This is the revolt of the downwardly mobile, college-educated working class that first fueled the Occupy movement, then the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, and now the new wave of organizing that forms the subject matter of Blanc’s book. But is it possible to spread this model outside that bubble? Can the worker-to-worker organizing model work for home health aides? What about warehouse workers beyond Amazon?

This of course raises the question of sectoral distribution. Almost all the cases Blanc discusses are in food service, retail, media, education, and of course Amazon. But is it possible to build a new labor movement out of baristas, retail workers, and graduate student workers? Without romanticizing some notion of “real” blue-collar workers or diminishing the importance of the work these groups of workers do, it is impossible to ignore the fact that there are critical sectors of the economy missing from Blanc’s story, most notably manufacturing. As we have seen in recent years, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has had a tough time organizing manufacturing in the South, and beyond the UAW there has not been much else in that sector. There has been a good amount of organizing in health care, but to what extent has the worker-to-worker organizing model been part of that? The 2024 victory of 10,000 Corewell nurses in Michigan, one of the largest single union election victories in U.S. history, would likely count as an important example of worker-to-worker organizing, but are there other campaigns beyond that?

The broader question is that of how portable the model Blanc proposes really is. Is it limited to certain types of workers in certain sectors of the economy? This seeming limitation of worker-to-worker organizing is surprising when viewed in historical perspective, as it is the type of organizing that truck drivers, dockworkers, autoworkers, textile workers, and more used to build the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s. But here, as Blanc points out, part of the problem lies in a spatial and legal fragmentation of the working class that has destroyed the community and occupational links that made that previous wave of organizing possible. Workers no longer live close to each other, and webs of subcontracting and employee misclassification make it hard for workers to organize as part of the same unit, even if they have the same de facto employer.

There is no easy answer to the question of the model’s limitations, and it is clear in the book that Blanc is acutely aware of these limitations. But, as he points out, there are even more severe limitations to other organizing models currently in use. Given the scale and scope of the challenges facing labor today, Blanc’s call to put renewed faith in the ability of workers themselves to rebuild their movement could be an approach worth building on.