New Orleans       All organizers, union, political, or community, know that if you can get members and adherents to do the job of recruiting and persuasion to co-workers, other voters, or neighbors you have done your job well, and your chances of eventual success in the work have increased exponentially.  As collective institutions like churches, unions, scouts, veterans, and others continue to experience precipitous decline in modern life, the organizing problem just gets harder and harder, when organizers are tasked to revive and grow these organizations.  One often ignored problem that comes with diminished resources is how to get to scale as the challenges increase.

All of these questions were relevant in talking to Eric Blanc and reading his new book, We Are The Union:  How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.  The title is obviously a bit of sales and promotion, but given how desperate the current situation is, I can’t blame Blanc for doing his best to put his case forward.  Specifically, he’s interested in what it might take to see unions increase their membership and strength.  Looking at several case studies, he finds real hope in the organizing that was done not only at Starbucks and in some cases, Amazon, but by the News Guild and others in some local situations.  Coupling this with his own experience working with the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC), he argues the answer may be in looking at an organizing methodology that is based on a more autonomous system of worker-to-worker organizing, that is much less staff and organizer intensive than many current models.

It’s impossible to argue that getting to scale is not an issue in all labor organizing now.  Blanc helpfully cites union estimates that it costs between $3 and $5000 dollars to recruit new members for many unions.  As union density goes down, fewer members obviously mean less dues, and therefore less money for new organizing, especially since the members paying the bills also have interests in their existing workplaces and the votes, even in the most undemocratic unions, to hold leaders politically accountable.  Organizers cost money, so if new organizing depends solely on what organizers can do, then unions are racing to the bottom, even as they try to move upward and onward.  The best-case Blanc submits is Starbucks, where Workers United, their union, effectively used Starbucks workers to spread the gospel from store to store.  At the same, time he notes that after the first year, SEIU has put fifty organizers into the campaign, which obviously cost millions, and is hardly a model, unless you’re the largest union in the United States.

An organizing model, by definition, is something that can be easily replicated.  As inspiring and encouraging as the worker-to-worker prospect is for building unions, it is a long, long way from being something that can be duplicated easily.  Blanc admits that many of the success stories, like Starbucks and the News Guild occurred in workforces that were disproportionately young, social media savvy, and likely well-educated, typically at the college level.  Where it works, it works well, as evidenced by the 10,000 members the Guild has recruited, but can it be designed to work in many other, especially mass-based workplaces and service sector giants, like McDonalds or tech, none of us know?

With the NLRB cratering under Trump II and the tech overlords, media bosses, and most big business titans in ascendancy, the odds have now gotten even longer for success, as forces assemble to oppose workers on almost every level.  Unquestionably, a part of all organizing models has to be increasing the power and tools for workers to self-organize.  We need to get there as quickly as possible, if unions are going to survive in many places in the country and in new and emerging industries and workplaces.  Unfortunately, the road is long, and we’re nowhere close to where we need to be now.