Labor’s decline over the past half century has devastated working-class communities, undermined democracy, and deepened the grip of big business over our work lives, our political system, and our planet. To turn this around, we need tens of millions more people forming, joining, and transforming unions.
By analyzing the recent US unionization surge and telling the stories of worker organizers, my forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025) makes a case for how to overcome business-as-usual in both corporate America and organized labor. My argument is simple: A new unionization model is necessary because the only way to build power at scale is by relying less on paid, full-time organizers and more on workers. Though staff-intensive organizing is often very effective, and often does a great job at training people to lead their co-workers in struggle, it costs too much to grow widely. The good news is that recent struggles have built off rank-and-file-oriented traditions to develop a scalable approach to worker power capable of driving exponential union growth and changing the world.
As United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain explained, “[w]e don't win by telling workers what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves."
Reviving the bottom-up spirit that enabled US unions to make their big breakthrough in the 1930s, worker-to-worker initiatives from 2021 onwards — at cafes, auto plants, newspapers, universities, and beyond — have shown how this can be done in our sprawled out, suburbanized society. Labor’s most astute opponents have clearly identified the threat posed by this growth in worker-to-worker organizing. Littler Mendelson, the country’s most notorious union-busting firm, sounded the alarm in a 2022 report:
"There has been a shift in how people are organizing together to petition for representation. What was once a top-down approach, whereby the union would seek out a group of individuals, has flipped entirely. Now, individuals are banding together to form grassroots organizing movements where individual employees are the ones to invite the labor organization to assist them in their pursuit to be represented."
Lamenting that “the ability to encourage activism has never been easier,” the report stressed that this “is especially true with the younger workforce … [that is] more progressive thinking.” Because digital tools have dramatically lowered communication costs, it’s now easier for rank-and-filers to initiate organizing drives and to get trained by other workers nationally. As Littler Mendelson noted, social media enables employees to “begin organizing on their own in a grass-roots fashion … [and] allows local organizers to use the collective knowledge of the best organizers around the country.”
One of worker-to-worker unionism’s key merits is that it’s relatively cheap and, therefore, scalable — that is, there’s no inherent limit to its scope. Scalability is a somewhat cold and technocratic term, normally used more by corporations than their challengers. But here it refers to something simple, visceral, and righteous: building an organized mass movement of ordinary people taking back control over their lives and their workplaces.
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Epochal economic changes have made scalability particularly challenging. At the time of US labor’s meteoric rise in the late 1930s, workers lived in dense, work-adjacent communities. The economy revolved around large, centrally located establishments like steel and auto factories. Employers were no less viciously anti-union back then, but organizers could focus their limited resources on a relative handful of big, geographically concentrated targets. That’s no longer the case.
America’s top private employer Walmart, has 4,600 stores, averaging a few hundred employees each that are scattered across the country. Other top private employers — Home Depot, Starbucks, Kroger, FedEx, Target, UPS, Amazon — also have huge numbers of dispersed workplaces. Workers usually live many miles away from work and from each other. The same is true within the much-expanded “care economy,” which by its nature must have schools, hospitals, and nonprofits dotted across the nation to provide services to local populations.
It’s no longer possible to write, as one author did in 1939, that “the most obvious remark we could make at this time is that today in the United States people and industry are highly centralized within a relatively small fraction of the nation’s total area.” Because of decades of decentralization, building worker power at scale — at the widest scope necessary to win — is significantly more difficult.
The problem with staff-intensive organizing isn’t that it is ineffective. As countless workers can attest from personal experience, at its best, heavily-staffed organizing can empower its participants and it can win major concessions. Indeed, worker-to-worker unionism is largely a development and expansion of its most rank-and-file-oriented traditions. But in all its different forms a staff-heavy approach suffers from one basic limitation: it’s incredibly expensive.
Up against intense employer opposition and weak labor laws, current best practice is to hire at least one staffer for every hundred workers to be organized. And it routinely costs over $3,000 today to unionize one worker, a dramatic increase from the roughly $88 dollars (inflation adjusted) that it took to unionize each steel worker in the 1930s.
Fortunately, a new model exists — one that builds off, but also qualitatively transforms, the best practices of rank-and-file oriented labor organizing.
The idea that workers should organize other workers is hardly a new one. Though many union drives fail to put this axiom into practice, since the late 1980s it’s been a basic principle of labor strategy. It is reflected in tactics like building strong organizing committees tasked with holding one-on-one conversations with co-workers. To quote UNITE-HERE’s unofficial motto, “the organizer organizes the committee, and the committee organizes the workers.”
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Building off this foundation, worker-to-worker unionism gives rank and filers responsibility for key tasks usually reserved for paid, full-time staffer organizers. Increased reliance on workers can take numerous forms ranging in scope from low-level responsibilities like creating a drive’s visual logo to ambitious duties like running its social media efforts or researching the company. My book — based on over 200 interviews and a survey of 500 worker leaders — shows that three things in particular define the new model:
1) Workers have a decisive say on strategy, and 2) workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union, and/or 3) workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.
In other words, workers initiate an organizing drive or train other workers (or both) and they play a central role in determining the campaign’s major decisions.
The upshot is that worker-to-worker efforts are generally cheaper and easier to spread widely. Worker organizers can more consistently become strategy-making generals, not only foot soldiers, as is the case in many (though not all) heavily staffed efforts. Because the gaps in power, experience, and authority between workers tends to be narrower than between workers and full-time organizers, worker-to-worker organizing also tends to be more democratic.
This approach is similar to the type of bottom-up unionism that was common in the US before WWII. At least one component sets it apart: its reach can extend beyond a local level. With the rise of digital tools, it’s now possible for workers to reach out to, coordinate with, and train other workers anywhere in the country. This is not a minor development since companies and working-class communities have sprawled out so much over the past century.
It’s worth underscoring that the new model does not consist of passively waiting around for workers to spontaneously rise up. Worker-to-worker unionism leans heavily on proactive tactics like seeding drives through mass online trainings and digital tools, and by having workers reach out to other workers in a given company or industry via personal networks or cold calling. It also proactively spreads unionization via “salting” — encouraging organizers to take jobs at strategic workplaces with the goal of unionizing them.
Unlike many previous cases for grassroots unionism, my core criticism of staff-heavy approaches — that they’re too costly to scale — does not suggest that full-time organizers and union resources are relatively unimportant. Unions should be investing far more in organizing.
Capacity and accumulated experience are crucial. Staff are generally an essential vehicle to transmit both. Here’s the problem: most unions use this correct general argument to justify their specific (staff heavy) division of labor without seriously probing the potential to scale up by deploying experienced full-timers and union resources in a new way. The case studies of unionization efforts examined in We Are the Union suggest that workers can and should do more than they’re normally asked — or allowed — to do.
