Worker-to-Worker Organizing Can Save the Labor Movement

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/worker-to-worker-organizing-can-save

An interview with Eric Blanc about his new book, "We Are the Union"
By Hamilton Nolan
Mar 03, 2025

The most direct way to turn around America’s crisis of inequality is to grow the labor movement, by organizing millions of new union members. But few unions today have the will—or the resources—to do large scale organizing, and the national political climate has just become more hostile. How, exactly, can we hope to get all of this organizing done?

That is the topic of “We Are the Union,” the new book by Eric Blanc, an activist and professor of Labor studies at Rutgers. Blanc’s book focuses on worker-to-worker organizing, a (wildly successful!) method of building and growing unions from the ground up, not from the top down. His insights are valuable not only for the labor movement, but for anyone interested in how to grow political movements without asking permission. I spoke to him about the math of organizing, success stories, and how workers can wield power under Trump. Our interview is below.

Hamilton Nolan: First of all, can you just break down the (financial and logistical) math that is the underlying rationale for worker-to-worker organizing being the best path towards mass growth of unions? Why is it so important to train workers for this work, rather than thinking we can just hire a bunch of professional organizers to do it?

Eric Blanc: What I try to show in the book is not just that worker-to-worker organizing is the best path forward for mass unionization, but that it’s the only path to unionize at the scale necessary to address the big structural crises we’re facing — Trumpism, economic inequality, climate change, militarism.