Eric Blanc’s new book is a helpful, very readable survey of worker-to-worker US trade union organising from early Covid to the peak of the 2024 Trump vs Harris presidential campaign. We Are The Union is rooted in interviews Blanc did with organisers and activists from ‘every union drive that went public in 2022—resulting in over two hundred interviews with worker leaders and over five hundred responses’.
The book focuses on the self-organisation of the working class and how that was facilitated. That is identifying the workplace issue around which you begin an organising, winning over the workers, fending off resistance from the boss, while keeping your job… It’s difficult. This is worker-to-worker organising.
Blanc’s research sought out the actual worker-to-worker organisers who did just that, and catalogued their experiences. These were often first-time activists who had just learned their own power. They learned in their own workplaces in workplace fights for practical wins, for their rights, or for union recognition – or simply more power. It’s well worth the read if you think worker rebellions are key to real political change.
Blanc pushes back on some of Kim Moody’s analysis of the US working class and its more immediate potential. He sees a longer fight with few shortcuts. This is because he views the current working and living conditions of US workers as significantly changed from the 1930s, in both negative and positive ways. He spends a good section of the book explaining how material changes from the high point of US union militancy, i.e. the 1930s, have reduced practical organising opportunities. He cites increased individual commute times, more individualised living arrangements, the shift away from large single shared factory floors. These factors make 1930s-style spontaneous militant minority activism less likely now.
While there is some truth here, Blanc does not explore how the more recent decline in living standards creates a new seedbed for explosions of worker militancy. He does acknowledge the influence of broader national politics. His interviewees also noted how recent changes make organising across diverse locations against the same employer feasible. These can be surprisingly effective in the right national political climate, often helping worker-organisers to get inspiration, learn techniques, get advice, and coordinate for their fights.
Social media and messaging apps are fundamental to socialising now and workplace organising. They enable workers to anticipate and circumvent the anti-union tactics. He notes some workers had little official advice or any solid link to traditional trade unions. Amazon Labor Union’s Chris Smalls, who he interviewed in April 2022, is an example. The former Staten Island Amazon workers used their workplace experience and own instincts as much as any advice. They made meals together as important as meetings together – something Marx would have applauded.
‘If you want to bring people together, you feed them… We made Thanksgiving several times through the year, and not just on Thanksgiving. We had potlucks, barbecues, bonfires… We rejoiced over food, and it wasn’t all rejoicing; it was more about conversations.’
This matters. Griping sessions, accidental unsupervised conversations about workplace changes, talking about how relationships are affected by race, or care responsibilities… They break individualism, prepare workers to think about each other as a collective and create tangible solidarity. Workers learn they have a stake in building power in their workplace and industry and community. That takes us beyond our narrow political circle or identity/community group. Workers come to an understanding of class in this way.
Most of those interviewed are young. Their organising experience is in their own workplace, informed by their own grievances and their own experience of building solidarity. The interviewees focus on the dialectic between what’s happening in their workplace struggle and the ‘revolution between the ears’. Frequently their experience shows that they need to grow the fight and get more participation across different workplaces and their industry. How do we spread this participation?
This is a role that full-time employees from a union headquarters can and do fulfill in Blanc’s fuzzy ‘how-to’. The office should be the ‘solidarity and support’. His intolerance for left nostalgia denies any cookie-cutter approach, whether between industries or between decades. In the 1930s, the involvement of workers as practical workplace fight leaders and as union recruiters was higher. The ratio of directly employed union staffers to members was much, much lower than now.
And it is a lower worker-to-union staffer ratio that should be most interesting to us today. The current high visibility of union struggle features close coordination between the more experienced and first-time trade union activists, to facilitate what Blanc calls ‘worker-to-worker organising’. He seems to be indicating there is something in this mix as effective and as it is cost-effective. His basic theory is that if a trade union HQ can foster more worker-to-worker organising, that HQ is doing its best work. Blanc spells this out quoting from ‘the bible’ of Jane McAlevey the Advice for Rookie Organisers,
“Tell workers it’s their union and then behave that way. Don’t do for workers what they can do.”
Current US trade union rates are abysmal in comparison to records actually set in the Red Scare 1950s. In 2024 only 10% (and currently 9.9%) of workers were members of a union despite the comparatively high news coverage around the organising successes at Amazon and Starbucks. Yet it should be remembered that in the heyday of US union militancy in the 1930s, membership rates nationally were at less than 3%. In the 1930s there was also a much more organised and focused political left deeply committed to winning with workers.
Blanc sees worker-to-worker unionism as an outgrowth and extension of this left-labor tradition, exemplified by unions like 1199 New England, National Nurses United, and UNITE-HERE. Both past and present approaches share a bottom-up ethos, but they tend to differ in practice concerning staff intensiveness.
He implies that today’s organising costs are forcing union HQs’ budgeting decisions to favour less controllable worker-to-worker organising (instead of hiring more directly controlled staff organisers). It may be smarter money. Events, however, will determine the success of worker-to-worker organising. ‘History,’ he warns menacingly, ‘will not look kindly on union officials who sleepwalked through the best opening for labour organising in generations.’ He may be right.
Many interviewees noted the significance of the Black Lives Matter protests: political moments remake individuals and remake expectations. Blanc states that ‘50 percent of my survey self-identified as radicals’. There is a surge in anti-capitalist sentiment among US trade union members and this is a high point historically since the McCarthy Era. Blanc recognises that there is something politically significant about this. Every worker has the potential to wake up fellow workers to the power workers hold in the class struggle at our workplaces.
The book urges readers to seize this moment of worker-to-worker activism and push for more union drives. ‘Start saying yes to all those who reach out for help – by leaning much more on rank and file leaders, by holding well-publicised mass trainings …and by seizing high-momentum openings to spread unionisation as widely as possible. In other words, the labour movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.’
His research seems to have given Blanc hope for political power shifting to a self-organising working class. The book’s grounded examples are refreshing. The immediacy is invigorating. Many are young, but they are so hopeful and ready for more. The book puts them first and denies ‘society’s contempt for the intelligence of working class people’. To those who have a revolutionary political position but reflexively see today’s trade unions like the Western scholar once saw the exotic East… Once inspiring. Full of lost glorious potential. Hopelessly ruined by corrupt unambitious leadership set in decrepit ways… This book is a useful antidote to defeatist pessimism.
The interviews show it is conditions that force workers to become rebels, as Covid did in this period, and Palestine does now. There are good ideas, good advice and hard-won experience. Whether you believe our work is to fan the flames of worker rebellion or to pour gasoline on the fire, read this book. Blanc makes the case that worker-to-worker organising is a necessary part of the path to deep political change. Socialists need to be more systematically and genuinely involved. ‘When millions of workers transform themselves from spectators to participants the impossible suddenly becomes possible.’
Eric Blanc’s WE ARE THE UNION is published by University of California Press and currently available in Ireland through Dubray Books. https://www.dubraybooks.ie/product/we-are-the-union-9780520394919
