Your Workplace is Instrumental for a Better Future. Here’s How.

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About This Episode

I sat down with assistant professor of labor studies and author of We Are the Union, Eric Blanc, to discuss: the euphoria and struggle of movement-building as a response to hopelessness, how mid-century suburban development undermined labor power, and why understanding (and wielding) economic leverage is critical.

• (05:22): The pushback against unions and why unions are essentially about democracy
• (08:55): How worker-to-worker organizing might be the best path forward against oligarchy
• (18:45): The story of Morrisha Jones and the importance of leverage
• (22:15): Why full employment in the economy should be a progressive priority
• (27:55): The obstacles that appear after a union’s been formed, but before a contract’s been reached
• (36:24): How “vibes” and culture play a role in building a movement
• (43:00): How unions can flourish beyond a manufacturing economy, and how the country’s structure has changed since the 1930s
• (47:20): The impact of suburbanization on labor power
• (01:01:33): The connection between social justice movements and broader organizing
• (01:19:32): How Europe’s move to the right, despite its union density, speaks to the future of the US
• (01:28:04): Tactical next steps and resources

RICH GIRL NATION IS HERE. GRAB YOUR COPY.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• Eric Blanc’s book, We Are the Union
• Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC)
• Workers Organizing Workers
• Secrets of a Successful Organizer
• Unite and Win
• Eric’s Substack: laborpolitics.com

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Transcript

Eric Blanc:

It is only in the context of uniting people around this immediate crisis that the vast majority of ’em are facing, which is the struggle to survive—it’s only in the context of that type of fight that you can actually win large numbers of people to a vision of solidarity, instead of scapegoating. When you talk to people’s material needs, it allows you to reach so far beyond your echo chamber that there’s just no other form of politics that can have that level of power.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m Katie Gatti Tassin and welcome back to The Money with Katie Show. Now, before you listen to this conversation, I wanted to tell you a little bit about why it felt like it was such a big aha moment for me now. A conversation that I have heard and participated in a lot this year is the idea of feeling helpless in the face of our economic and or political climate. You probably heard me gesture at a sense of hopelessness in our most recent Rich Girl Roundup. And then after we recorded that, I had this conversation with Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and author of the book, We Are The Union, How Worker-to=Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. And I also listened to Ezra Klein interview Ta-Nehisi Coates on his show, and I have to tell you, I feel better now.

Worker-to-worker organizing certainly is not perfect and I don’t want to suggest that it is, but it is one of the most practical and direct ways to both form real oppositional power structures and maybe more surprisingly, actually feel a sense of durable control and hope. The fact that organizing for better working conditions can have a broad sweep of positive consequences is why it felt like this discussion in particular was a good fit for our show, especially right now because it’s about using the economic system rather than being used by it to take back power in the face of feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. So enjoy.

Well, Eric, thanks for being here. I want to start with talking about just your background for a moment. What brought you to worker organizing?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, well first of all, thanks for having me on. And the background is essentially I was born into a labor family. Both my parents were union activists, and so I think in hindsight it was a bit of a matter of time, but they were smart about it. They didn’t drag me to too many meetings, so much so that the turning point for me, it was a really specific day actually.

I was 13 years old and my dad finally decided to try to encourage me to come to something and I remember being hesitant because King of the Hill, you remember the show, was on and I was going to miss it. And so he dragged me somewhat willingly, somewhat unwillingly to a picket line on the Oakland docks. I grew up in San Francisco, and so there was a picket to stop scab cargo. So this was cargo that got loaded by strike-breakers in Liverpool.

So there was a massive strike in England and we were blocking together with the workers in Oakland, this cargo from getting loaded in the Bay Area. And it just blew my mind. I went in ready to get home and it was so moving. There was just so much song and it was kind of cool. There was police, I thought was a little, are they going to arrest us, that type of thing. It was a little transgressive and I was sold honestly, for the rest of my life, I’ve been deeply involved in the labor movement. I ended up actually getting a job on the docks. So the first union I was ever a member of was the LWU, the Longshore Workers Union, and I’ve been organizing and supporting labor ever since.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So now you’re a professor of labor studies, correct?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. So the Bay, as you might know, is extremely expensive and I ended up going to grad school to try to find a new job, and I ended up becoming a professor of labor studies, researching unions and particularly researching new organizing since the beginning of the pandemic.

And that was, again, more on the side of organizing than academia, because I was a labor organizer for the Bernie campaign, and you can remember that moment at the first weeks of the pandemic, we had literally thousands of workers reaching out to labor organizers for the Bernie campaign just saying, how do we get PPE? How can we get our company to let us work from home or to give us hazard pay, whatever? And it was out of that project that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which is essentially an initiative to support workers self-organizing across the country, emerged. And this book I wrote came out of the questions from this really intense experience of how do you support large numbers of workers self-organizing when you don’t have a lot of staff?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, the book really I think takes for granted that unions are a good thing, that we should want more of them, and then argues from that core premise. And so for the skeptical listener, I want to take a step back and establish that fact in a more specific manner together. So what are the strongest proof points that you would point to that we have the unions create positive results for workers? Why is it better to have a union than not to have one? And is there any merit to the unintended consequences that you sometimes hear about?

Economists sometimes will talk about wage price spirals. That was a big talking point during the inflation of the early 2020s in which, well, when workers have too much power, when the labor market is too tight, then they can push for higher wages and then that’s going to lead to higher prices and so on and so forth. And so the implication there is basically worker power, even though you think you want this, and even though it sounds like a good thing actually has all these negative unintended consequences and therefore we should just stick with the status quo. So how do you talk to people who are coming to you with that sort of pushback?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And here’s some statistics. So let’s just start off just baseline level: Union workers make more than comparable workers, 13.5% more. It depends on the industry, but if you’re in a union, you’re going to make more for the exact same job than you would do without a union. So this is a basic fact. It’s one of the reasons workers want unions. It’s one of the basic reasons why bosses don’t want unions. It makes it easier to get fair wages, and that actually impacts all sorts of different issues. So for instance, combating racial and gender inequalities, unionized workplaces that pay gap, people of color and women, it’s significantly lower.

So if that is an issue you feel strongly about, unions are also historically and still one of the central mechanisms for combating that. Healthcare. Give another example. So 96% of private sector union workers have employer healthcare. So this is good healthcare provided by your employer, and that’s 69% if you’re not in a union. So healthcare, you can be far more likely to have good healthcare for unions.

And I would just say taking a step back, it’s not just these sort of bread and butter issues, there’s the question of climate change. All of the social science, for instance, shows that countries that have higher unionization have lower CO2 emissions because unions can push companies to act in a different way, act more ethically, act more responsibly, and even more centrally. I would say just on a core fundamental level, unions are about democracy, but just on a basic level, if you don’t have a union at your workplace, you are working essentially in a dictatorship for the vast majority of workers.

You go into a workplace, you have no say, not any meaningful say, you can get fired at will. And essentially for the place that you’re spending most of your waking life, you’re subjected to an authoritarian regime. And we just normalize that unions are way of injecting a basic level of democracy into this core institution of our society. And to me, this is always the question I really throw back at people when they’re skeptics and say, why shouldn’t we have some level of democracy in a workplace? And people normally don’t even think about this. They almost take it for granted. But I don’t think a strong case for authoritarianism anywhere, let alone at work.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So I want to try to outline the primary thesis of this book, and then I would love for you to refine it and elaborate on it. Since the late 20th century, at least, unions have relied on a staff-intensive means of expansion, which will always be limited in resources and therefore judicious about where they’re directing those resources and that these staff and these resources are extremely valuable, but they aren’t critical to labor organizing success and that given their just natural constraints, we need to shift how we think about the way forward, and you see that reasonable path forward that is going to offer the best chance of success as something called worker-to-worker organizing. So how is worker-to-worker organizing different from maybe what someone who joined a union 10 years ago might have experienced or what they might think of as the way that unions are formed?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good summary of the argument of the book. I would frame it one thing differently. I do actually think resources and staff support are critical. You need them. The harder question is how do you use that in a way that’s scalable? How can you use those resources in a way that you can organize tens of millions of workers? What we’re talking about, how do you get tens of millions of workers to be members of unions like we did a century ago?

And the argument in my book is essentially that you can’t do that through the predominant way that unions have been organized for the last 30, 40 years, which you have as best practice one staffer for every 100 workers you’re trying to organize and for basic reasons of money and time. There’s just no world in which you can hire enough staffers to organize enough workers that way.

So if the question becomes of scale and not just how you win a particular campaign, then you need to find a way for workers to take on a lot of the responsibilities that staff people normally do. So worker-to-worker organizing is essentially workers taking responsibility for things like strategizing. So it’s not just full-time staffers who come up with strategy; workers are initiating campaigns. It’s not just the union is deciding which targets to go after and then sending a staff to pass out flyers or to reach out or workers. Workers themselves are most often initiating campaigns and beginning the unionization on their own. Oftentimes, most of the time they end up connecting with established union, but that’s sort of down the road after they’ve already begun organizing.

And then the third is workers are training other workers on how to unionize in a standard traditional staff intensive way. Let’s say you were want to unionize, reach out to the union, you’re going to get a call back from a staffer who’s going to talk you through how to start organizing. Now, let’s say you work at a Starbucks, you’re going to get a call back from a worker who’s unionized their workplace, and they’re going to walk you through how they organize their workplace because it’s workers doing it and not staffers, it allows you to have a far wider impact. You can just organize far more workers this way.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Well, you say something at the end of the prologue, you say, “To defeat the billionaires and their political enablers, many more people will have to follow in their footsteps,” meaning the workers footsteps, the worker to worker, organizers, footsteps. And I actually think that this is a really critical point because I think when we talk about things like labor organizing or unions, your person who doesn’t know very much about this topic probably doesn’t really immediately see the connection between creeping authoritarianism and whether or not you’re in a union. Can you sketch the connection for me between worker to worker organizing and neutralizing the power that is currently concentrated in the hands of roughly a thousand Americans?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, the basic problem of this country is oligarchy, and it’s—that oligarchy is at this point indistinguishable from the authoritarian regime of Donald Trump. And the question then becomes how do you build enough power to stop that? That’s really what we’re talking about here. I don’t think that we need to sort of just fantasize what could happen.

We can look at other countries that recently have stopped authoritarianism and look at what they’ve done. So a good example here would be South Korea, in which just last year there was an attempted coup essentially from the Prime Minister to hold onto power, and the workers were organized enough there that they held a general strike and forced the government to back down and they were able to save democracy.

So getting to that level of power in which you could shut down the entire economy is something that we have to be building towards. Realistically, I think that there’s a very real possibility that Donald Trump will try to jerry rig the elections or not respect them. That seems almost inevitable at this point. So it becomes a question of like, well, who’s going to stop him? I don’t think there’s much evidence that the Democratic Party can or will do it.

And so we’re going to have to be able to create so much disruption. It’s such a high political cost to the ruling elites that for the stake of stability for the system, that they are going to push out Donald Trump and preserve some level of democracy. So that requires a level of power of workers of being able to shut down, companies being able to shut down cities. If you’re public sector worker, that can create enough of a crisis to stop that authoritarian push. And that has happened throughout history. It’s not wishful thinking. There has been general strikes in this country. There’s general strikes all across the world, but there’s no way of doing that without large numbers of workers unionizing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, I think when I think about this question, it does come down to power dynamics and who can exercise leverage, who understands how leverage works and has the mechanisms to exert their will over a system. Wasn’t there just a general strike in Italy for Palestine?

Eric Blanc:

Right, so this is another great example. So many of us have been horrified by the genocide, and it’s just on a personal level, heartbreaking. Every day I have a little kid and I just wake up every day and hear one atrocity after another, and it’s hard to not fall into despair. And one of the things that gives me hope is, yeah, as you mentioned, there was a general strike in Italy just earlier this week in which workers across the country shut down their country to demand that the government stop supporting this genocide. There’s no reason that couldn’t happen here. The obstacle is a level of organization and militancy of the labor movement. So that is one of the paths forward. And I would add just on the leverage piece, a lot of it is how you shut down the economy, but it’s also on the electoral front.

Electoral politics does matter, and we have good data on this. Even in this last election, union members voted 16 points higher for Kamala Harris than Trump compared to non-union workers. So you have a major boost of workers including in blue collar industries, voting against authoritarianism for the obvious reason that when you’re in a union, you learn some basic level of solidarity. What you learn through the process of being a union is that it’s the bosses who are at fault and not immigrants or trans kids who are causing you to not be able to get by.

And so it does create this basic level of solidarity, not all at the time, but much more than is otherwise the case. And so I did back of the napkin math on this, had there been 1 million more workers unionized under the Biden administration, it’s very likely that Donald Trump would’ve lost, because you would’ve had enough workers voting actually for their own interest against authoritarianism, instead of scapegoating, that Donald Trump would’ve lost. So I think that if the Democratic party, or frankly much of the union leadership was more serious about defeating Trumpism, they would be investing far more into new union organizing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That’s an interesting point too, because I feel like part of the narrative of the last election was that the Democrats lost the working class and that union leaders were starting to side with Donald Trump. I don’t actually know how true that is. It sounds like not very, it was a common narrative sticking point, I think, that unions swung right?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. There’s not much factual basis for that. So the data across the board show that wasn’t the case. The reason the narrative was that is that the Teamsters Union in particular, which had historically endorsed Democrats, has started cozying up to the Republicans. And so that gave this Republican party more of an ability to pretend like they’re on the side of workers.

And frankly, Trump is very smart. He understood that the Democrats have stopped talking about working class issues for decades. He understood that there’s a real pain amongst working class people of all backgrounds, not just white workers. And he spoke to that pain and it’s demagogic, it’s not real. All you have to do is look at what the Trump administration has done since coming into power. Nothing good for workers, nothing good for unions, nevertheless, at least rhetorically who’s able to speak to that. And it’s incumbent on unions to be able to articulate, I think a different vision, not just against Trumpism, but frankly of the establishment Democrats.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Totally, completely agree.

We will get right back to this conversation with Eric Blanc after a quick break.

I want to dig a little bit deeper into this concept of leverage. So I want to talk about a case study that you include in the book about a place called Burgerville and one Morrisha Jones. So this story really jumped out to me, and I want to know what you think it can teach us about how to wield leverage effectively what happened to Morrisha Jones?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, so Burgerville is a small to middle-sized fast food chain in the Pacific Northwest, about 1500 workers. They started unionizing in 2016. And in 2019, workers at one of the Burgerville stores filed for union elections. They went public. They announced that they were going to have a union. Election management immediately responded by indefinitely suspending 90% of the workers, essentially firing them.

And one of those was Morrisha Jones, who was a longtime worker. That meant she’d been working there over three years and she was eight months pregnant. And what that meant was that she wasn’t going to have the ability to get by immediately. The union very strategically highlighted that issue and said, this company, which had some sort of liberal rhetoric, kind of like Starbucks, if you want to imagine that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Totally.

Eric Blanc:

And said, “There’s a complete disconnect between what this company says it stands for and what it’s doing, because look at what Morrisha is suffering right now because of your disgusting union busting.” And they went public with it. They got it in the media and the day in which the local newspaper was going to publish a major sort of investigation into Morrisha and this union busting, the company folded.

They rehired all of the workers, and eventually the Burgerville workers won not just that union election, but a first contract making them the first fast food workers in the country to win a collective bargaining agreement.

So it shows you there that there is real leverage, particularly in the service sector of public shaming, connected to worker organizing because in the service sector, these companies have to sell their products and consumers have a huge amount of potential leverage not enough on their own to stop this from happening. You needed to have the internal organizing piece. Sometimes there’s a lot of calls online for boycotts that don’t really lead anywhere, but I think on the big strategic sense, we need more boycotts. We need strategic boycotts. This was a crucial tactic a hundred years ago, and it’s even more important now. And so I do think that part of the task of rebuilding a strong labor movement is having community members understand that they have a crucial central role to play in helping these workers win and that they have real leverage.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And I think it’s worth just highlighting here that what Burgerville was doing was illegal. fFiring workers because they’re attempting to organize is illegal. So calling attention to the shitty ethical side effects of that in the press is very strategic. But even in the broader sense here, it’s just always important to remind people, and remember when we talk about these things, that these companies are breaking the law. So this isn’t just like a, oh, well, it’s business and shit happens. And yeah, sometimes people get fired under circumstances that are personally inconvenient to them. But this was a story of illegality too.

I also think that there’s a bastardization of lefty economic politics that assumes people who identify with leftist economics just don’t want to work hard. Or you’ll hear this narrative often on the right that like, oh, well these people just want handouts. They’re just lazy. But I think something that jumped out at me in this book was that you referenced the facts that full employment is a goal that used to be on the progressive agenda and has kind of fallen off of it.

But you highlight that full employment is strategically very important for these things. Can you explain how maintaining full employment is connected with labor power and why actually wanting full employment in the economy should be a progressive priority?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, the pandemic really showed us how a tight labor market could boost worker power. And this is not a new phenomena. It just really has been case as long as capitalism’s been around, because if it’s easier to find a job, if you know, might be able to find another similar job to the one you currently have, you’re going to be far more likely to make demands upon your employer or to unionize. You can take the risk of unionizing, let’s say they try to fire you. Well, you can get another job down the street. So full unemployment was a historic demand of the left, and somehow it has gotten a little bit lost. It’s not as front and center that should be, frankly.

And part of the case I’m making is if look at what happened, since the pandemic, we had a historically tight labor market. People might remember there was these mass resignations where they call it quiet quitting all of this. And the result was that so many workers felt like, oh, I can tell the boss to fuck off. This is amazing. And there’s this quote I got, maybe people remember this. This guy Tim Gurner, he is this Australian multimillionaire real estate mogul. He was the guy who made some waves when he said to young people that they could buy houses if they stopped eating avocado toast. You might remember this debate over avocado toast.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, the OG, like the OG of millennial smear campaigns.

Eric Blanc:

Right, exactly. So this guy also had a very honest quote actually on full employment. So he was at a real estate summit.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I can already tell I’m going to hate this.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. He says unemployment needs to jump 40, 50% in my view. So this is September, 2023, as he’s saying this, we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. And so this is in some ways horrific, but it’s actually sort of nice to have the ruling class occasionally say publicly what they’re saying privately.

And so this is the case, is that when there’s full employment, workers feel more empowered, it’s easier for them to unionize, it’s easier for them to fight back. And I do think that that’s why we should bring back that demand. And I just want to address the concern you raised earlier, which is what about the unintended consequences of more worker power? And so this is one of the things that’s worth addressing in response to the pandemic.

There’s actually just very little merit to this argument because unfortunately workers are still not very powerful. So there’s just a lot of research been done on this that the major reasons for inflation after the pandemic were supply chain problems and frankly, company markups that they took advantage of that to raise prices. So it wasn’t empirically the case that worker power in this moment caused inflation. That being said, if workers do get a lot of power across an economy, in my opinion, would be a good problem to have. There are mechanisms to ensure that that doesn’t result in a sort of wage price spiral.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, really?

Eric Blanc:

And the answer there is not visionary or it’s not pie in the sky. It’s to do essentially what most of the northern European countries do, which is you have to have coordinated sectoral bargaining so you can tie unionization gains to productivity increases, and to make sure that essentially there’s not a spiral. This is the norm in so much of that part of the world. The problem here is just that we’re not strong enough to get to that type of industry-wide sectoral bargaining yet. That’s the direction we need to move and we need to be able to tell people when we get there, it’s not going to rise prices. It’s going to cut under profits and it’s going to make workers better.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

To kind of confirm or clarify here, am I correct in the assumption that you would be sectoral bargaining? That is the place that we need to be trying to get to?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, we need to move in the direction of sectoral bargaining for sure. One of the problems of our system in the US is you have to organize company by company, workplace by workplace. That makes it far harder to unionize. But then also it does create problems for companies that you could avoid their sectoral bargaining because if you raise wages at one company, it can put them at a disadvantage against others, which is why generally as a union, you need to try to organize the industry to take wages out of competition. So the direction we need to move is definitely sectoral bargaining, but the way to get there is through a lot of organizing, you’re not going to be able to just pass that through legislation and have it be a real thing.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Sure, okay. My understanding of this was that that was kind of like the Nirvana state here, that that’s where we’re trying to get to. And to clarify or to explain for folks who may not know what that means, it’s kind of the difference between say Starbucks workers organizing and forming a union and all baristas everywhere, being in a union together irrespective of their coffee shop employer. That would be a shift.

The prologue of this book opens with the story that tells how Starbucks baristas store by store became Starbucks Workers United, and you characterize their efforts as emblematic of this new form of unionizing. I’ve gotten involved this past year in labor organizing in Denver through the DSA Labor Committee, and we’ve been supporting the SBWU this summer because they’re getting ready to face off with corporate again. And it was interesting because once while tabling for signatures, I met somebody who used to work as a manager in the store, and she told me about how the workers in her store were unionizing and she wanted to participate, she wanted to join them, and she detailed the intimidation and kind of the fear campaign that she experienced, then the pressure to put it to a stop and how she really needed this job and how her boss would always be pulling her into these one-on-ones, and not threatening her, but kind of giving her the impression that if you don’t side with us to basically put a kibosh on this, you’re done.

And it’s just been fascinating. I think my experience working with SBWU through DSA really drove home for me that this is a two-step process. You can form a union without actually securing a contract, and you characterize that contract part, getting that first contract as exasperatingly difficult. So I kind of always thought about these two components as basically the same thing that if you achieve one than the other, one is more or less a given. But can you explain how this works in practice and what obstacles typically appear after the union has been formed, but before that first contract has been reached?

Eric Blanc:

The unfortunate reality is that labor law and the US is just completely broken. And the big way you see that is exactly as you mentioned, that you can win a union election and that doesn’t guarantee you that you’re actually going to have a collective bargaining agreement, which is the end goal really, of the unionization process.

So it is a two-step process, not legally it shouldn’t be, but just in practice because there’s almost no meaningful penalties for breaking the law. And so this is what you were alluding to before, is this companies routinely just the norm that they’re going to break the law because the cost for them to do so is so low. So you can fire workers, you can just trample upon basic rights that are codified into law, and you’re going to get a slap on the wrist. That’s it. So of course for a company, the incentive is to do that.

The leverage piece thing becomes super important. If you win a union election, the way you get the company to actually bargain with you is through power and pressure that you have to make the cost of continuing a business as usual, continuing to ignore the union, more expensive for them, then the cost of settling with you. So you need to force them to the table and workers do that.

The good news is that workers are winning contracts, but particularly at these big companies like Starbucks or Amazon, it just takes a lot longer to do so because you can imagine just the logistical difficulty of organizing 15,000 Starbucks stores, Amazon, just behemoths. So naturally it’s going to take longer at those companies, but the union busting piece is central to how they prevent that unionization from spreading. And I think at Starbucks it was probably worse than anywhere else. This is really just the worst union busting we’ve seen in a century.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, you write that Starbucks broke labor law more than 2000 times that we know about. And it goes back to what I said about the Burgerville case. It is unethical, but it’s also just straightforwardly illegal. I think what’s so striking to me too, pun intended, is how much people were really willing to put on the line. There were countless stories of single parents who are living paycheck to paycheck with virtually no security to fall back on who would say something to the effect of like, well, we have no choice. I know the risks, but organizing is the only way. This is the only way that anything is going to improve. And I think that there’s such a stunning degree of class consciousness and solidarity in this book that I just find extremely admirable and striking from the standpoint of I don’t encounter that often in other spaces, circles, intellectual traditions. This really stuck out to me as being unique.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, I think honestly, when writing this book was the best job I’ve ever had because I got to speak to workers for a year about them telling stories of just everyday heroism, and you’re right, it is unique. There’s something profoundly moving about people taking those collective risks or taking an individual risk on behalf of the collective. And it’s just so contrary to what we see broadcast about humanity where you just see the worst aspects of humanity on the news every day. That risk of putting your personal job on the line, oftentimes the rent of your family, healthcare of your family, this isn’t an easy thing to do, but for the sake of a collective project, that is really the untold story of heroism, that we just frankly would feel better about humanity in the world if we heard it every day. And that was one of the things I tried to do in the book is just tell some of these stories.

And honestly, I felt bad. The thing I felt most bad about in the book is not being able to include the story of every worker I interviewed. I ended interviewing 400 workers and I ended up being able to tell the story of a couple dozen, but frankly, almost every single one of those stories had the same basic heart to it, which was things were bad and I decided to take a risk. And even the workers who got fired, the amazing thing is none of them told me that they regretted it. All of them said I would do it again in a heartbeat. I learned so much. I just feel so much more confident as a person and I feel part of something bigger.

And at Starbucks, again, just to give that example, you just saw this over and over again where workers would get fired and continue to organize. I give this example of Lexi Rizzo who was a eight year company veteran. So she’d been working this, she was like a Starbucks lifer gets fired after organizing and she’s forced to apply for foods, times, and Medicaid. This is a serious personal blow to her, and instead of caving, she keeps on organizing. And I think she actually made a very amazing TikTok video, which folks might’ve seen or you can share, which I think what it’s a response to Howard Schultz. So Howard Schultz was the founder of Starbucks, and it’s this personal note to him like a dear Howard, and I think she calls him a heartless monster.

TikTok Video:

I have given every ounce of everything that I have to this company. There is no one that has worked with me that will not tell you that I do not love and care for this place and my partners, my customers. My heart is broken, and you know that you’re a heartless monster, and I don’t know how you sleep at night. I don’t know how you look at yourself in the mirror. You have hundreds of thousands of people giving everything that they have so that you can make another dollar, and then you treat us like we’re dirt. It’s disgusting what kind of a person you are, and everyone else is going to find out.

Eric Blanc:

There’s this level of the best people, frankly, on earth right now, the people who are risking the most, going up against some of the worst people, who are just craving profit seeking control seeking hacks. And so I do think that there’s something about that contradiction.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I think what you’re getting at here is that worker to worker organizing can be, as you put it in the book, just an ecstatic and liberating experience in a time period that otherwise makes people feel very hopeless and very powerless. If I had a dollar for every email I have received this year, that’s like I just don’t know what to do. I feel so powerless. And it’s frankly thrilling to exercise power in a way that feels very real intangible and formidable, especially in arenas where we have long believed.

To your point about the workplace essentially being a dictatorship, that the power differential was always stacked against us, and a theme in recent episodes of this show has been the impact of popular media and culture on these serious efforts for change. You write about how labor organizing began entering the mainstream in television shows. I think this culture and really the transgress that you alluded to in your first experience on a picket line that the aesthetic of radical politics is actually very critical for growing widespread support.

I think about this a lot with Chris Smalls and how he kind of became a labor icon because he was a bit of a fashion icon too. He was cool. People wanted to be like him. There was a very aspirational quality to transgressive leaders like that who are willing to put stuff on the line and go up against these billionaires and other oligarchic figures in society that people are just so accustomed to feeling like they can’t do anything about it. And so when there are normal people that step into that role, I think that the cultural impact of that, even if the individual striker action or whatever they’re doing in that moment, even if that particular thing does not pan out, you commented on the collective effervescence aspect and how all of this serves to build that feeling of momentum.

And I really think that this year has shown me how powerful culture and vibes are in building political coalitions. I do think that that is a really big part of that shift that we’re feeling this year is like these people are standing up to something that everyone desperately wants to see, take a hit.

Eric Blanc:

I mean, it’s so powerful to see someone like you stand up against the most powerful people on the planet earth and fight back. That is just something that is so rare. I guess it’s a little less rare than it used to be, but it is a beautiful thing to watch. And it’s funny because when I was first getting involved in the labor movement, there was nothing less cool than the labor movement. The labor movement was the most fuddy, duddy, boring, conservative movement you could think of. You wouldn’t even think of it as a movement. So if you were a young person thinking about changing the world, the last place you would look would be the labor movement.

And that’s not the case anymore because of these types of fights. So many more young people are looking at that, and I think that is partly because of these drives, but as you mentioned, part of it is changing the culture. To give some example, some of the workers who started unionizing at Trader Joe’s, one of the leaders of that started unionizing because she watched that show Superstore, and there’s a unionization plot in there, and it was the pandemic. She said she was binge watching it with her wife, and she said, oh, shit, I guess I could do that at Trader Joe’s. It normalizes fighting back and unionizing.

And the vibes are extremely important. I feel like our side, particularly in labor even left strategic people who are thinking about this, underestimate the importance of social media and vibes momentum because it can be very hardheaded, and that can seem a little bit light. It can seem like, oh, the serious people don’t have to worry about that. That’s what the Democratic party hacks do. It is just PR.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The consultants, and they’re so good at their jobs as we know, so effective.

Eric Blanc:

That’s the funny thing is that the problem is not that marketing per se is bad. You do need to figure out brand and things like that. The problem is that they are so bad at that. You can’t actually do that well if you aren’t authentic, if you don’t have something real to say to people. And so the way to cut through all of the noise of MAGA is by saying, look, the billionaires of the problem, we’re fighting back. And that is something I think that can appeal to large numbers of people who aren’t currently on the left, who aren’t already plugged in, but who viscerally understand that something’s wrong and they’re trying to figure out what to do.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So there’s a woman that you quote in the book who’s a worker organizer at Rivian, the electric vehicle company who makes these six figure EVs. She kind of speaks to this. She’s like, yeah, I’ve had so much fun organizing with my coworkers and building community with them, and this quote really stopped me in my tracks.

And I think that it really captures the essence of something I’ve heard so much this year. She said, “We need to get back to the basics where it’s not my family against the world.” And that really, really, I don’t know. I think that that spoke to this, even if people can’t name it, even if they don’t know what’s missing, I think there is a real hunger for solidarity and a real craving for not feeling as though you are individually competing in this dog-eat-dog neoliberal competition leads to innovation, et cetera type system where you really never feel like you can take a break.

And so in that context, putting a job on the line in order to do this, actually, it was very encouraging to me to read this and be like, oh, there is actually something in this for people. It’s very hard to be sure, but it’s not just a slog. It’s fulfilling people emotionally in a way that I think people are really hungry for.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s the exact reason why nobody I talked to, even those who were fired regretted it because they had built a level of community and a different sense of themselves through that process that they still had. That doesn’t go away. And I think there is a real loneliness epidemic in the world and in our country, and capitalism’s always been alienating, but it really has gotten far worse. You can trace it back to the seventies onwards neoliberalism. People are going to church less. They’re going to community centers less. They’re going to union meetings less.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, it’s the bowling alone thesis.

Eric Blanc:

Bowling alone. Exactly. But that’s right. That is just entirely the case. And it’s gotten supercharged now with social media further isolating people, the pandemic further isolating people. And part of the reason I think you have the unionization uptake after the pandemic was people wanted to find some way to connect. And I think that is a really hopeful thing is that it isn’t just sort of a death spiral towards further isolation and capital destruction of all of us, but there is a breaking point for a lot of people where they see something is wrong or they feel it, maybe they don’t even see it, and they just want to reach out to others and talk about it. And that’s essentially what unionizing it is. It’s talking to your coworkers about trying to make your job different. And it’s not, in many ways, more complicated than building that kind of level of trust.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Building that level of trust. Yeah. We talked a little bit about, and so far I feel like we’ve really focused on service industry jobs. Something that I’ve heard from folks in the past when I talk about this is, well, that was a good thing, or unions were effective when we had a manufacturing economy, an economy where we were creating goods, but now that we have a service economy, it’s not going to be the same or it’s not as effective. There’s really actually not often a cohesive or coherent argument for why that change would make all that big of a difference. But I am curious how the fact that we do primarily have a service economy now, how that influences your thinking on the role of unions and the methods that Union Busters now have at their disposal that may be different.

Eric Blanc:

The first thing I would say is the shift to the service economies across the advanced capitalist world. And nevertheless, there are countries like Sweden or Denmark that have overwhelming majorities of workers and unions. So there’s just basically as a proof of concept, no inherent contradiction between a service sector economy and high unionization rates. The difficulty becomes in a country like the United States, that it is harder to organize the service sector for a variety of reasons. Service sector jobs tend to be in smaller workplaces, more dispersed.

So if you just think about a Starbucks, for instance, a Starbucks has over 15,000 workplaces. Think about the logistical difficulty of organizing all of those workers spread out all over the country compared to, for instance, organizing one of the massive auto or steel plants in the 1930s where you could concentrate all of your energy on one big central target.

And if you could take out that central node, then you take out the whole company. And even at work, there’s a difference because on an assembly line, relatively small numbers of workers, even a minority of workers can decide to strike and shut down the whole thing. Whereas at the service sector, there isn’t the same level most of the time of just small groups of workers being able to shut everything down. Or even if you shut down one store, it’s just one store out of 15,000. So that gets back to the question of customer support, where you have to be able to leverage not just the strike, but also the customer, consumer, public side of organizing. And that’s harder. You have to do both of those things.

I do think that it’s possible, but yeah, the challenge is one of building that power, and I think worker organizing in the service sector becomes even more important because there’s no world in which you could sustain and spread a staff intensive organizing drive at an Amazon or Starbucks. There’s just not enough staff in which you could staff that up. And frankly, workers aren’t going to stick it out in a battle against a massive service sector company if they don’t feel ownership of that drive. The reason that workers are at Starbucks five years in now or three years in despite the union investing, despite the intimidation, is they feel that the union is theirs. And you need to have that sense of ownership for them to go through that long battle in the service sector.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We will get right back to this conversation after a quick break.

I want to go back in time a little bit because I think that the 1930s have taken on a mythic significance in the story of organized labor and kind of touched on already this manufacturing era of the US economy and how the services centric economy is going to present different challenges. How is the structure of the country today different than it was in the 1930s when unionizing efforts had their first real surge?

Eric Blanc:

The big difference that I talk about in the book is the decentralization of industry and housing that the core of the economy and the core of the working class in the 1930s really revolved around these huge workplaces, these massive factories. And then people lived next to the places they worked. And so you lived next to your coworkers, and that built in this sort of preexisting level of social cohesion. Obviously there was all sorts of divisions, racial, cultural, religious back then, but just on a baseline level, there was a level of connectedness to coworkers and feeling yourself to be part of a collective that is much harder today in which you have to commute 30, 40, 50 more minutes to your job. You’re not going to live next to your coworkers, you’re going to come back home and you don’t necessarily know your coworkers outside of work. And that means then that unionization needs to not only take on the boss like it did in the thirties, but you have to start from scratch.

And in many ways you have to build something that already existed in the thirties, which was a level of community. You didn’t have to do that as much in the thirties, and now you have to do that today in this new decentralized context, which is why one of the things we talk a lot about in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee for supporting new drives is socialize before you organize.

Oftentimes the first step towards organizing today is can you get folks together to grab beers afterwards? Can you do a potluck? Can you get people to play video games online? It’s actually a big thing that a lot of these drives have done, and you have to build that level of just getting to know each other and it’s on that basis that you can unionize.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, it was interesting to think about how suburbanization itself has weakened the labor movement, and that was a completely new concept for me personally, this idea that you used to just have this natural, because of the centralization of how close people lived to their workplaces and then by extension to one another, they were naturally running into one another. They were naturally forming relationships and sharing grievances, and they had regular occasion to complain about working conditions and be like, we should do something about this. And just how different that is, not just from a suburbanization standpoint, but honestly even from the shift to remote work, which I think has been in many ways a huge boon.

But at the same time, it does through this lens further entrenched that sense of atomization. Now you’re not even seeing your coworkers at work. You are actually just by yourself all the time. So not to put the tinfoil hat on, but there probably is somebody out there who has made the case that the suburbanization and building the country around cars and wanting to have everything be super spread out, that all of that was just very intentional in that respect.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a good question. The extent to which it was intentional versus an unintended consequence, but nevertheless, the result was a deep atomization of the working class, and that is still really the world in which we live it, in which working people have been atomized and don’t feel themselves somewhat automatically to be part of a broader class. Now, whether they took action in the past or politically with what they did with that, dependent on a lot of things, but today we just have to rebuild that level of connectedness. And I do think it’s harder with suburbanization.

The flip side, and maybe we can talk about this a little more, is the digital tools piece. It does have the potential of isolating people. On the other hand, it does also create sometimes a easier space for people to be able to connect. So a lot of union meetings, you can now have a Zoom call at Wednesday at eight after the kids are down or whatever, and it makes it easier for working people to be able to talk with their coworkers than if in the past five, 10 years ago, you would’ve had to drive somewhere pretty far to find your coworkers.

And the logistics of then connecting in some ways have become easier. So I think it’s a double-edged sword, but the isolation piece is just absolutely central and it’s an absolutely central challenge.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

No, I think you’re right. I think that it is important to look at that factor in its entirety and to not flatten the idea that the technology equals bad. I think that that was something that I got a lot out of your book and has actually been quite true to the little experience that I’ve had this year. Just the extent to which things get planned on Signal and how easily you can quickly with people. And when we’ve done actions with Austin DSA, someone down in Austin is like, Hey, have you gotten into the place yet? There is an ease with which you can support folks in other places as well. That is really encouraging.

But I think what this is all getting at too is that whether it’s 1930s or now, effective organizing is very context-specific. And there was a moment there in the 2020s where we entered a context that seemed much more promising. You highlight the pandemic. You’ve talked about the tight labor market, so that for a second there we had this very vigorous NLRB, we had the growth of digital tools, we had radicalized young people. How much of that today, as we sit here in September, 2025, how much of that do you think still holds true?

Eric Blanc:

The sad reality is that we are not going to see the massive unionization wave that turns everything around under Trump. There’s no world in which that’s going to happen because, well, somewhat for obvious reasons, the tight labor market is gone crashing the economy, and then also just the national Labor relations Board and labor law period is just MIA at best, if not being actively weaponized against workers. So it makes it much harder to unionize.

The dynamic is not all doom and gloom though. I want to lay that out. So the two other factors you mentioned, digital tools and new, the radicalization are still here. So digital tools, as you mentioned, just make it easier to connect. You don’t need to rely as much on relatively risk averse unions when you can start self-organizing via digital tools. So that’s still the case. So workers are still able to do that, and that makes it much easier to have this kind of bottom up organizing.

And then youth radicalization isn’t going anywhere either. So this is a generation of people, millennials, Gen Z, that lived through the Great Recession, went to Black Lives Matters protest, oftentimes voted for Bernie Sanders, sees themselves anti-capitalist of some sort or anti-corporate. And that milieu we’re talking about, tens of millions of people is waiting and looking right now for what to do.

And we’ve seen that explode when given an opportunity. So I live in New York City, those are the people who, for instance, have elected or electing Zohran Mamdani. It’s that same energy. The same people who are unionizing or who can continue to unionize now are the people who are out here volunteering to get Zohran elected. So that is a major source of hope because young people have always been, I think, at the forefront of successful labor movements and successful social movements.

And then the question becomes under Trump, how do you defeat authoritarianism? The first order of operations, if we’re going to rebuild a labor movement is we need to stop this country from becoming an authoritarian state. And that’s very much an open question right now, I don’t actually know what’s going to happen, but the way I see the role of the labor movement is here, as we mentioned before, is even if it’s for defensive struggles, you need this kind of bottom up worker organizing. If we’re going to move in the direction of a general strike, if we’re going to move in the direction of turning things around, you need a lot more people organizing at work. And it might be like what we’re seeing in the federal sector. So I’ve been supporting a lot of the federal workers fighting back. They’re doing the exact same type of organizing that I described in the book Worker to Worker organizing just to rebuild their unions that Trump has destroyed.

He unilaterally overnight is destroying these agencies, and it took away collective bargaining rights for over a million workers. And those workers have relied on the exact same organizing methods, this worker to worker connecting over digital tools, a lot of young radicalized workers to fight back in the federal sector. So it shows that even on these defensive battles, this is the model that can win. And I think we’re going to need much more of that. And I’m actually relatively optimistic that the level of overreach of the Trump administration is creating the conditions for real social explosion against the oligarchy. I don’t know if this is inevitable, but across the board, these policies are unpopular. And I think that there’s a potential there for a mass movement against oligarchy and authoritarianism, which right now are intertwined and that energy can spill into not only defeating Trump, but then defeating the companies that have capitulated to him entirely, and that I see have a real momentum that could lead into mass unionization if and when we’re able to get Trump out of office

Katie Gatti Tassin:

If and when the law firms, the universities, I think that it has been—and big media companies.

Eric Blanc:

Think about the inauguration. You have Elon Musk, Bezos, they’re all there.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

They’re all just lined up there, like little good boys in the front row waiting for daddy.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. So their punishment for their transgressions is that we need to unionize every single one of their workers.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, totally. I remember reading about Jennifer Abruzzo at the NLRB, and I was like, huh, well, I’m sure she got kicked out immediately. Let me go see who Trump put in charge. Mr. Teamsters. Looks like the person that he has replaced her with is someone, an attorney who formerly represented employers in labor law disputes. So I guess she’s still awaiting Senate confirmation from when I looked, but I was like, yeah, alright, well that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about his vision for that, or well, probably Steven Miller’s vision for that agency considering I think there’s an argument to be made that he’s really the one that’s making a lot of these decisions.

Definitely I don’t feel optimistic, but at the same time, I do think that what you’re laying out here, the case that’s basically like the stress test that is about to be and is currently underway in this country, it has the potential to create the momentum for something to actually change.

And there was a stat in your book that really jumped out at me, which is that despite these historically high levels of polarization in the United States, that 75% of American laborers are non-managerial wage earners. And that essentially uniting them around their very clearly shared economic interests is, this is my characterization now and I’m curious if you would agree with this. This feels like the only way forward to me at this point, uniting around the shared collective economic interest of the vast, vast majority of this country.

Eric Blanc:

100%. And one of the reasons for optimism, I think of looking at the last year is the extent to which the democratic base has rallied to that vision. The people who even four years ago, I can just think of family members or friends who were skeptical of Bernie and anti-Bernie Bro, this or whatever, now are going to the Bernie rallies with the AOC, like literally. And the Democratic Party establishment, neoliberal centrism is just so discredited that I think there’s an increased division amongst millions of people, tens of millions of people that the way forward, if you’re going to undermine the appeal of Trumpism and defeat, it is organizing working people around our united interests.

And that doesn’t mean that you have to throw immigrants or trans people or anybody under the bus, but it’s only in the context of uniting people around this immediate crisis that the vast majority of ’em are facing, which is the struggle to survive. It’s only in the context of that type of fight that you can actually win large numbers of people to a vision of solidarity instead of scapegoating.

So that’s true politically. We need someone articulating that vision in the 2028 Democratic primary, but it’s also true for unionization. This is the mechanism that which you are going to get the people who don’t necessarily see themselves on the left, who are right now unsure what’s going on. We’ve seen that unionization can bring those folks in. Just think about the 2018 teacher strikes. This is a good example. In 2018, there was a mass strike wave of red state educators, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, hundreds of thousands of teachers went on strike and about half of them had voted for Donald Trump. Nevertheless, they united with their coworkers to fight against Republican administrations and they built solidarity on that basis. And it was a transformative experience. So when you talk to people’s material needs, it allows you to reach so far beyond your echo chamber that there’s just no other form of politics that can have that level of power.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Right. There is such an emphasis, and again, I think one of my many critiques of the Democratic Party is that I think they have seeded so much ground to conservative framing of issues, that kind of right wing framing of everything has really won out. And so we’re only ever discussing things that Donald Trump deems important or that if we are talking about something that the left supposedly cares about, it is only in the terms that the right wants.

That thing discussed my go-to example for this immigration. Immigration has become a conversation about crime. Why? Because the right wing made it about crime. So now whenever we’re talking about immigration, we’re talking about it in terms of the legal system and retribution and punishment and et cetera.

The social issues have really been used as a cudgel and a wedge in this country in a way that has really distracted from the economic reality. And you’ve used the word scapegoating a few times. I think that that’s absolutely true.

There is a relatively minor anecdote in the book that illustrates the relationship between social justice movements and broader organizing threats to consolidated corporate power. It’s a leaked internal memo from Whole Foods Management that explains their decision to prevent employees from wearing any Black Lives Matter memorabilia. And they described it interestingly as opening the door for union activity. How are these two things related? Why might management view solidarity for Black Lives matter as an opening for organized labor?

Eric Blanc:

This goes back, I think, to the dictatorship question. Employers see the companies that they run as fiefdoms in which everyone just needs to obey no matter what. And so the idea that workers are going to make demands upon management around any issue is just completely beyond the pale for them. And so that’s why they were so scared of Black Lives Matter because once workers start asking for changes around Black Lives Matter or let’s say against sexual harassment, there’s a lot of similar things around me too. What’s going to stop them from making other demands? And so they’re not stupid.

They understand that relationship that no matter what fights workers are picking, that that has the risk of coalescing into unionization because all a union is workers collectively making commands on management essentially, right? That’s what a unionization drive is. And I do think that that’s important because we don’t need to see cultural issues and fights against racism or sexism as counter opposed to this class fight. I think that they can feed into each other. And that’s one of the things that I found in this survey I did. I reached out to every single union drive of 2022, so over 2000 drives, and I asked them, how did you get involved? What led you to want to unionize? And the number one movement that was cited amongst people who said that there was an external movement that inspired them to unionize was Black Lives Matter.

And so it gives you a sense that it was people who were radicalized through that started thinking about anti systemic politics, and then also was trying to figure out, well, how do we build power? It’s not enough just to go out into the streets. What is it going to do to actually turn around the system? And I think that the conclusion that a lot of them came to is, well, we need union power and we need to broad movement to fight for that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Right? I mean, I’ve been to protests this year and it’s a little bit like the collective effervescence that you hear people talk about in fundamentalist churches that you go and you feel really, I mean it is very moving. But there is also this other side of it, which is like you go home and it’s kind of like now what? And I think if you go to enough of those and have that experience enough times, it kind of gives you this false sense that, well, none of this is actually going to do anything. None of this is actually going to change anything.

And so I think that the feeling that a lot of people are looking for in protesting is actually to be found in labor organizing and organizing with the ability to withhold your labor from this economic system. We know that the only thing that matters to the people at the top is money and power. If you’re not doing something, if you’re not joining together that is threatening their money or their power, ultimately they’re just going to ignore you.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And the way I look at those big protests is those big protests are good for shaping the narrative that’s important. They can get media, so it’s important to do that. But primarily I see a big mass protest as a way to get people involved in the organizing. And that organizing isn’t just going to be telling people go to more protests, it’s going to be leaning into points of leverage where we actually can build power. So that’s going to be disrupting companies. It could be electoral, that’s another site. But if you’re not getting involved in an organization after going to a protest, I think that actually you are somewhat deluding yourself and making yourself feel like you’re doing your part when actually there’s so much more that needs to be done, it can be done.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

So something that was important to me about this conversation was that we didn’t leave people with the impression that this was some panacea. I think that there are real challenges even in places where unionization has been successful that is worth addressing head on. You briefly note that before, Shawn Fain, the UAW United Auto Workers, huge union, had become deeply corrupt. And I want to spend some time on the criticisms of unions as well, which is that well leaders become entrenched, they become greedy, they become lazy. This is a critique you hear often about unions that they just end up mirroring the corporate structures that they supposedly exist to oppose.

And I try to think about these types of questions in terms of incentives and systems. What is the structure incentivizing any individual person who is placed in a position of power to do? And it’s the reason why I look at systems like capitalism writ large, and I think, well, it doesn’t really matter if you remove everyone who currently holds power and replace them with nicer, better billionaires. It doesn’t matter if you “drain the swamp” and put a whole bunch of new people in there. Ultimately, the system itself is what will continue to create these outcomes that you don’t want. I’m curious how you think about this challenge. Is this something where you look at the current state of labor organizing and you go, that’s something to worry about 15 steps from now we’re so far from that becoming a problem that it’s not even worth talking about? Or how do you conceptualize or assimilate that story of the big entrenched unions of the late 20th century and early 21st century that essentially just kind of sat back, played defense, and really stopped working for working people?

Eric Blanc:

Everything you said is a real dilemma, and I don’t think there’s any utility in romanticizing the labor movement. I think the more you get involved in the labor movement, you also get more frustrated with it. And that’s just the way it goes.

And one of the central obstacles for making any of this happen still is that your average labor leader today is extremely risk averse, is more interested in sort of stabilizing their little fiefdom, even if the vast majority of workers are not in union. And even if that orientation is somewhat narrow, that’s going to be a dynamic no matter what under capitalism because the stronger your organization becomes, the more incentive you have to preserve it. So this is the nature of any sort of big organization is that the more you win, the more you have to lose. So that being said, there’s always going to be conservatizing pull, but it’s different than the structure of capitalism and the structure of capitalism, no matter who’s up top, it’s always going to be exploitative, the profit motive impels all companies to behave in a certain way.

But we just know from historic experience and just looking across the world that it’s not the case that all union leaders always behave the same way. So this is a crucial difference from the structural incentives of owners. So just look at Italy, just this week you had massive numbers of unions led by their leaderships in this case calling for general strike to stop a genocide. So you just can see that it’s not always the case that leaders are sort of corrupt and self-interested and all of that. It can be, but it’s not necessary. And I think that the sweet spot historically, including Italy and in this country, is frankly having leftists in union leadership, people who are fighting not just for kind of narrow economic interest or for their personal self-interest, but are fighting because they have a vision of a better world. And I think so many people get involved in the labor movement today for that reason.

And that’s historically been the importance of the left in the labor movement. It’s saying the labor movement unions on their own aren’t going to be able to create the world we need, but it’s a major part of that puzzle, and we need to build a working class movement that can overcome this oppression of capitalism. And when that’s your animating vision, it makes it easier to not fall prey to corruption. It makes it easier because you have an incentive structure, for instance, being part of an organization of socialists who are going to get mad at you if you start selling out. That’s a good thing to have. It’s a good thing to have that pressure of people sort of keeping you in check. I mean, remember why you got into this, or frankly voting you out of office if you stop living up to that mandate. So we see that even just today, the UAW, you can say that’s an example of corruption, but it’s also an example of the opposite. You can elect people in a union because unions are democratic, unlike companies. So this goes back to the difference, right?

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Eric Blanc:

You can elect out a leadership of a union. You cannot do that in a company. And so you can elect a Shawn Fain head of the union and the auto workers, who’s a fighter who comes out of the ranks and has a vision for better society and fighting for all working people. You cannot unfortunately elect Shawn Fain to be head of Amazon or any of the gm. That’s not going to happen. There’s no structure through which you could do that.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

We’ve talked a little bit about culture already, the aesthetics, the messaging, et cetera. God, I do think though in America, when I just talked to your average person on the street about this sort of thing, I think the deep deeply held red scare in this country is such a huge obstacle. I’m very struck by the role that McCarthyism played in weakening unions in that era, that fear of the communist boogeyman really undermined labor power. And it still feels to me like the dregs of McCarthyism still prevent us from having good basic, nice things.

So for example, the other day in the Atlantic, which is kind of like a classic neoliberal centrist magazine, I read someone who was with us earnestly claiming that Zohran Mamdani’s vision for New York City—which again as a reminder is like a free transit on buses, universal childcare, let’s have five public option grocery stores, just the basic social democracy stuff—was actual Marxism. And I think every American, whether they realize it or not, is raised with a very deep skepticism toward collective action that really puts the individual on a pedestal. And I think what we’re feeling right now in this fracturing that this country is undergoing is that core belief or that core unifying national ethos rubbing up against reality and then people not knowing how to respond to that or what to do with it. But it does feel like a really big, that element of our history, of our education system, of our national self-conception feels like a really, really big significant obstacle to me.

Eric Blanc:

It is an obstacle. And I would say that you’re right to stress the importance of McCarthyism. So particularly in the 1950s, part of the reason why unions subsequently became so corrupt was that the people who had frankly built the labor movement and turned it into a powerful movement for social change were mostly from the left communists socialists. And the government systematically kicked them out of union leadership, which then left the space for a bunch of grifters essentially.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Interesting.

Eric Blanc:

The amazing thing though about this moment we’re now is that that anti-communism has really diminished in its power. It’s not gone. And you can see the extent to which Donald Trump just systematically is accusing everybody, communist Barack Obama’s a communist, Iran’s a communist, like whoever, whatever.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

The idea of Barack Obama as a communist is so—king of bailouts for Wall Street banks being like, ah— yeah, how maoist of him.

Eric Blanc:

But it’s funny because that’s actually when the anti-communist smear became less relevant because they really went hard against Obama calling him a communist X, Y, Z. And then all of a sudden in the Democratic world, at least the Democratic base becomes so absurd. It’s such a slur, and it’s just so clearly stupid that creates the space then for the rise of a Bernie Sanders, because if they’re going to call you a socialist anyway, well maybe it’s not so bad. You know what I mean? If the Republicans hate it, maybe it’s not so bad.

And then B, turns out Sweden and Norway and these places have nice things. Why can’t we have that? And I think that for a lot of people, that’s what they imagined socialism to be. But that’s a huge step forward. We don’t need to get into huge debates right now about what the socialist future would look like and the difference between socialism and social democracy.

But the big point here is the most popular politician in the country is Bernie Sanders, who’s a democratic socialist in New York City. We are about to elect a democratic socialist mayor that’s going to happen. It speaks to the erosion, I think, of this anti-communism. And that is just a tremendous political opening for doing powerful left politics that we haven’t had, frankly for over a century.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I’m having a flashback now to the radical woke Marxist Kamala Harris, and she’s like, yes, my dear friend Liz Cheney and I are now going to come talk to you about kind of this amazing foreign policy in the Middle East.

In the 1930s, two thirds of factory workers lived and worked in just 3% of the nation’s land. We know they were densely packed together in working class neighborhoods. We know that this was very important. We’ve talked about how this made a really big difference. This context was critical in response to that wave of labor power. I learned in your book that companies then began splitting up and farming out different parts of the process to different parts of the country. So they recognized that this concentration of work and this concentration of the work itself was creating a vulnerability for them that was making them more susceptible to organizing.

And so anti-union manuals that were distributed suggested that businesses should build plants far apart from one another. So workers do not have occasion to meet one another offshoring to places with lower labor standards happen too.

I actually just read an interview with Shawn Fain where he was talking about how, after NAFTA, auto workers in Mexico make less money than they did before and after NAFTA, you see the way that these companies, they’re very slippery. They’re always looking for ways to get around anyone that’s going to try to make them do the right thing. So I think that what I’m thinking about is like, alright, let’s say this new method is effective. Let’s say that labor power really does experience a resurgence because we are in this unique moment. What is to prevent these companies from doing the same thing again, from offshoring even more jobs, from using even more automation.

And I think in my more cynical moments, I’m like, ah man, unions are never going to get us there. We actually, the only answer is a truly democratic economy. Fixing the power imbalance is great, but we really need workers to own the means of production. But in my more solution oriented and optimistic moments, I think that my hope for the future is one that you’ve outlined here, which is that worker organizing will make way for things like sectoral bargaining in the future.

And once you have sectoral bargaining, now you’re one step closer to worker ownership and that these things build on one another and that this is really just one step in that direction, not the end state. Because when I think about even what you said about how the profit motive will always impel these companies to behave in this way, that much like they chipped away at labor power in the 20th century, that another resurgence is it’s not like they’re going to be like, ah, alright, you got us. We’ll stop fucking around now and taking advantage of you.

Eric Blanc:

It’s a challenge. But think about again, the fact that so many countries in Europe have 60%, 70%, 80% union density. Those countries are still thriving, at least compared to the United States. Despite this high degree of unionization. It hasn’t been the case that their companies have just fled abroad every time. And part of the reason for that is political. The answer to your question, the short answer is that you do need to combine unionization with politics. The reason companies were able after the big wins of the 1930s to eventually move to the south wasn’t sort of just a natural law of capitalism, but it’s because the United States passed right to work laws and allowed politically the space for companies just to move wherever they want.

And there’s a lot of incentives in other countries of frankly, the government either giving carrots for companies to stay or sticks to prevent them from leaving. And I do think therefore part of the sweet spot is if you can build this worker power from below, it sets into motion the type of transformation of political consciousness that can also then be reflected in the political arena.

And so you do need to have it expressed in the political arena as well, and it’s been done in other countries, it can be done here. And if we can build that social democratic America, I do think that if and when we defeat Donald Trump, and I think I give it as a 50/50 shot at that, the lessons of this horrific experience that we’ve had have just hammered home to people, the centrality of the oligarchy question, the centrality of the economic question. And that makes mass unionization possible and necessary in which you could actually elect someone to represent the working class politically and in conjunction with the labor movement transform the world. I think that’s the goal. And it’s possible.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

I love that. Thank you. I needed that pep talk, especially the last couple of weeks. I don’t want to take us down too much of a rabbit hole here, but I can see somebody listening to this and hearing our references to Europe and these northern European countries that have had these great strides in organizing and they have far more worker power than we do here in the United States. And just, I mean, frankly, basic worker protections, I feel like it was kind of eye-opening to me to learn that at will employment is not a thing in other places.

But I think that the pushback that I could imagine getting there is like, yes, but the European economies, the EU is really struggling right now. They are falling behind. They have their own issues with essentially being ethno-monoculture type places that are really having a hard right reactionary swing to immigration.

And I think that someone could point to that and be like, Katie, it sounds like you’re saying, and I have said this explicitly, so I guess I’m directing this more at myself and just seeing what you think about it. It sounds like you’re saying that if we can build worker power and if we can achieve these even just modest levels of union density, and if people have economic stability and they feel like their lives are secure and they have solidarity, that these questions of like, is the immigrant taking my job? Is the transgender kid on my daughter’s freaking softball team that all of this will matter less and the economy will still be strong?

And I think if we’re looking at Europe as our guide, I think that they’ve done so much and done it better than the US has in terms of quality of life. But there’s also, I think a kind of obvious counter argument to be made there that they also are having this reactionary push against immigration and their economies aren’t as strong as the United States. So I’m curious how that strikes you.

Eric Blanc:

The reality is that European countries compared to the United States are still far better off on all those metrics you mentioned, but for the last 40 years have become more like the United States. So neoliberalism isn’t just a project in the us the same basic problems of erosion of welfare state and erosion of worker power have also happened in every single one of those countries that you mentioned. So the context through which scapegoating would become more relevant is there as well. Workers are less secure than they used to be. They’re better off than the US but they’re not comparing themselves to the us. They’re comparing themselves to their parents.

And so the answer there is the same as the answer here is if you rebuild worker power and rebuild a robust welfare state, which has been eroded by the European Union in decades of neo liberalism, if you can build that sense of stability, then yeah, people do stop scapegoating as much.

And you can see that in certain places of Europe where the left is stronger, that actually the far right has declined in its voting strength because you can prove and practice that there’s an alternative. You can look at parts of Belgium, you can look at parts of Denmark. You can see that where the left is able to put forward an alternative politics that the purchase of the far right becomes lower. But the same basic problem that we have here is there, which is that people are doing worse off. And in that context, scapegoating becomes viable. And just the last thing I would say on the economic sort of robustness, the US economy is doing better. I would say that the best the American economy has ever done was in the three decades after World War ii, in which our unionization rate was the highest, right?

So there’s no inherent contradiction between a robust economy and high unionization rates. Similarly, in those countries, the best that they’ve ever did was in the period where workers had more power than they have now, not less. And the reason for that is when you have a strong labor movement, especially when it’s on a sectoral basis, it can often force companies to innovate in a way that actually the incentives to genuinely innovate and raise productivity under our current system are low. You can make super profits by speculation all sorts of things, and unionization in that sense. And there’s a lot of empirical data around this is actually a mechanism to make the economy and even capitalism be more productive. But for that to happen, you need a very strong labor movement.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Can you sketch the connection for me between sectoral bargaining and innovation? I don’t know that I see the A to B there.

Eric Blanc:

Sure. So the basic mechanism here is that when you have a strong union movement that has an upward pressure on wages, so companies actually in order to outcompete some of their rivals have to find those extra profits in different areas. You can’t get it just through keeping wages low. And so the spur from below

Is that in order to be able to move forward, you have to find it in different terms of innovation. So maybe it’s a more labor saving production technique, maybe it’s a new product. But you can see in places like Sweden, especially when this worked really well, is that a strong labor movement actually takes out the least productive companies. So this is what it really looks like. In the best case scenario, the least productive companies, the companies that are really just skating by fall to competition, those unions through labor policies, the government, the workers get jobs at new companies and the least productive companies don’t get bailed out. They go under. And so unions as a way to sort of push out the least productive companies. But in order for that to happen, you need to have an active labor policy in which those workers are guaranteed new jobs, and which the government is providing real industrial policy to help capital move towards more strategic sectors. And in the US, we have the exact opposites, just there’s no planning. There’s huge incentives for making super profits off of things that don’t actually innovate, which is why our companies.

Stock buybacks, or our auto companies can’t compete with a lot of the rest of the world because frankly, they can just get by doing the same thing they’ve done and they haven’t had to innovate in the way that you might have to if the workers got paid more.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Oh, you’re right. And a lot of it seems like a fair bit of protectionism in place to create an artificial environment where they are competitive. You can’t buy Chinese EVs in the US or it’s like, I can’t remember, a hundred percent tariff. And that was, I think, under Biden. So that’s not a new thing. It’s like an order for the American made EVs to be competitive and for people to want to buy them. It’s like you can’t buy the luxury EV from BYD that costs $10,000. You have to buy the $30,000, $40,000 Tesla or what have you.

Eric Blanc:

We can look at China. China as all sorts of political problems, but they get this thing a lot more, right? Is that the government is actively helping shape the market towards innovation in a way that we could pair with a real sort of political democracy and union power. I think that’s going to be the vision forward.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah, it’s going to be interesting over the coming years, I think the first crack that you really saw was deep seek when that AI model came out and it was way better than what the US had, and everyone was like, oh, shit, we didn’t know. We were not familiar with their game in that respect. And I think that that was a real reckoning moment. It’ll be interesting as China continues to outcompete and out-innovate the US in these sectors where the US formerly considered their dominion, essentially impenetrable, how you are like Milton Friedman stan, free market capitalists, small government folks, how they react to that and how they continue to justify it, although I don’t even know that you could say that they are continuing to justify it. The US government just took a huge stake in, is it Intel? They are starting to intervene in some ways that are pretty obviously, capital B, capital G, Big Government moves. So I do think that this actually might be an arena where the rhetoric and the behavior is just completely disconnected.

Eric Blanc:

Look, we’ve had for decades in neoliberalism, people see the emperor has no clothes at this point, just the basic arguments have been shown to be empirically false and that alternatives are possible. And the right wing unfortunately has moved on that faster. That’s part of Trump’s appeal is actually trying to bring back forms of protectionism, forms of policies that frankly could be utilized in a not horrific way, but at this point are being leveraged in a horrific way. But I do think that it’s a good thing that people are challenging neoliberalism. It’s just a question of whether we can make that case from our side so it’s not monopolized by the far right.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Yeah. Well, there are a few quick and practical takeaways. Next steps that I want to touch on today. I think that there was a quote in your book that I’ve heard personally, which is, oh, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that I could form a union. I thought that I just had to join a workplace that already had one.

So a couple quick things. What is pre-majority unionism? You know that this approach can be a critical path for workers who are typically legally barred from formal organizing like corporate and gig workers. You talk about 1400 Google employees who have done this, the alphabet workers union who actually have not held or won a union election, if I’m understanding that correctly.

Eric Blanc:

Pre-majority unionism means that you start acting like a union even if you haven’t won a union election or have a contract. So yeah, you’re exactly right. And that is really important in a lot of industries in which it’s going to take a long time to win collective bargain agreement or which union elections aren’t a viable tactic in the short term, but it doesn’t mean you have to wait. You can start waging battles right now.

And I think about tech is a good example of places you might not be able to get all of your coworkers to sign up for union election, but you can get a significant number of your coworkers right now, for instance, fight against your management cozying up with Trump or working with ICE to terrorize undocumented immigrants. You can have those fight backs. And if you do that in a collective way, that’s pre-majority unionism.

If you’re building an organization, so it’s not just a one-off fight, but you’re able to continue, that’s a crucial way forward. And then more generally, to your point about unions can be formed, it’s not just that jobs happen to be a union job or not, but that any job, literally any job can become a union job if you decide to do that. And so my pitch here would be for folks to seriously consider organizing their workplace, especially if you’re feeling unclear about what to do right now at this moment of hoarder, building power with your coworkers is really one of the best things you can do to fight against not just Trumpism, but just the sort of indignities of capitalism.

And so you can start organizing. I would suggest you reach out to either a union or an organization like EWOC, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. You can go to workerorganizing.org. All you have to do is fill out quick form and within 72 hours, a worker organizer will get back to you and help you start building power with your coworkers. So that’s an easy step you can do right now.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

And in thinking about our listeners who are looking to find, I think that this is actually a big part of our audience, people who are looking to find more purpose in their lives, who are actually in a position of financial independence where they aren’t as concerned about their financial situation. You referenced an organizing tactic called salting throughout the book. How does salting work?

Eric Blanc:

Salting means you get a job at a company to help unionize it. And a hundred percent, there’s a major uptick in salting right now because of the reasons you described that people are looking to change the world, coming to understand that building worker power is the best way to do that. And so yeah, you can get a job at an Amazon, at a Starbucks, at an auto plant, or frankly at a Google or Twitter, whatever it is, you can go there and with support of people, and I’ll give you a plug for that, build the power necessary to change the world. So yeah, a hundred percent, people should become salt. If you’re trying to figure out what to do or if you have the possibility of getting a new job. There’s a lot of campaigns that right now would be very eager to have you join. So for folks who want to become salts, I’d recommend going to workersorganizingworkers.org, which is a new project to scale up salting. And so you can go there, we’ll help train you and get you support. So workers, organizing workers if you want to become a salt.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Finally, throughout the book, you mentioned the book Secrets of a Successful Organizer. Is that a good place to start for someone who might be closing out this episode going, man, I’m actually super interested in what it would look like to organize my workplace.

Eric Blanc:

Secrets for a Successful Organizer is great. I would give another tip specifically that’s a book for anybody, but including people who are already members of unions. If you want to book an easy and even shorter, like the 10 things you need to know to build a union, I would get Unite and Win, which is actually an EWOC pamphlet. It’s very simple, straightforward, here are the steps you need to take to organize. I think that’s a really good entry point for just figuring out how to start organizing. And a shameless plug I’ll give is also, I write a lot about this on my Substack, which is laborpolitics.com. There’s a lot of just basic tips and stories, frankly, about people like your listeners doing exactly this building power from the bottom up. So yeah, laborpolitics.com.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining me today. It was awesome. It was really, really fun.

Eric Blanc:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate all your work.

Katie Gatti Tassin:

That is all for this week, and we will see you next Wednesday for an episode all about mini retirements. So I guess we’re kind of keeping on this work and career vibe for the show and how you can take one every few years. This was a really lovely chat and I’m excited for you to hear it.

Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.