Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral
NLF Highlights for May 2024
At a moment of dark news across the globe, the American labor movement has recently been, in a refreshing change, a bright spot. We find ourselves at a moment of growing public support for unions, recent high-profile victories by unions like the United Auto Workers in their “stand-up strike” against the Big 3 automakers, and a number of innovative new organizing campaigns across a wide range of corporations and industries in the United States.
The latter is the topic of our new episode of our podcast Reinventing Solidarity, as Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc discusses his Winter 2024 New Labor Forum article “Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral,” drawn from research for his forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, with NLF editor-at-large Micah Uetricht. Blanc argues that the worker-to-worker model allows workers to train each other and gives them tools to start organizing on their own, rather than relying on expensive and unscaleable staff-heavy union organizing models.
At the same time that new opportunities are opening for labor, we find ourselves in a serious crisis for immigrants and refugees at the US-Mexico border. We have two pieces in our forthcoming spring 2024 issue focused on this crisis: “The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America Has Fueled Historic Numbers of Asylum Seekers” by longtime Democracy Now! cohost Juan Gonzalez, and an interview by NLF associate editor Kitty Weiss Krupat with Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute.
- Reinventing Solidarity Episode 49 – Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral
- Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral– by Eric Blanc, New Labor Forum
- The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America– by Juan González, New Labor Forum
- Today’s Immigration Crisis: A Broken Asylum System An Interview with Muzaffar Chishti – By Kitty Weiss Krupat
As innovative new union organizing campaigns have taken off around the country in recent years, Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that we can see the emergence of a new organizing model that has the potential to meet the moment. He calls it “worker-to-worker organizing,” a concept he explored in his Winter 2024 New Labor Forum article “Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral” and in his forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press). New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to Blanc about the model’s constituent parts, the role of young workers’ increasingly progressive and pro-labor sentiments in the current moment of labor upsurge, and why worker-to-worker organizing can scale up in a way he says the “staff-intensive” model can’t.
Listen here: SLU.CUNY.EDU/PODCAST
Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral
Eric Blanc, New Labor Forum
Young, radicalized, digitally coordinated workers have initiated and driven forward many of the highest profile strikes and union drives of recent years. From the red state teachers’ walkouts to union wins at Starbucks and Amazon, rank-and-file organizers have begun challenging business as usual not only within corporate America, but also within organized labor.
The Current Migrant Crisis: How U.S. Policy Toward Latin America
Juan González, New Labor Forum
The U.S. immigration crisis has reached a new boiling point. Apprehensions by federal agents of people crossing the U.S. Southern border are at a near record high. For the past year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers have appeared in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Denver, many of them dispatched northward in buses by the governors of Texas and Florida . . .
Today’s Immigration Crisis: A Broken Asylum System An Interview with Muzaffar Chishti
Kitty Weiss Krupat, New Labor Forum
In 2023, a record-breaking year for immigration, the number of asylum seekers crossing the border nearly doubled from the previous year. Right now, the sheer numbers of people converging at the Mexico-U.S. border—more than 300,000 in December 2023 alone—has become a crisis in the minds of most Americans and a touchstone in the 2024 presidential election. In December 2023 —and again in January 2024—Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute sat down to discuss the border crisis with NLF Associate Editor Kitty Krupat. What follows is an edited excerpt of their conversations.
