Activity

Organizers went from school to school attending as many school meetings as they could and blowing the debate about strategy wide open. Luskin recalls that they’d start by saying, “If any of you think the next contract is about a percentage-point raise, tell us, because we think we know it’s about t…

The list below represents the key postulates taken from the characteristic 1199 organizing “manual”—a handwritten, dated, single sheet of paper that hangs on the door or is pinned on the bulletin board of most 1199 organizers’ offices. It is often covered with coffee stains and marking-pen notes an…

On the other hand, janitors, for example, are low-wage workers and represent a tiny fraction of the overhead of the corporations whose buildings they clean. If the demand on the part of the union is also low, a mobilizing model with only a minority of workers and a handful of not very powerful comm…

The two movement-imposed costs are what he calls the concession cost, that is, how much it will cost a business to agree to the movement’s demands, measured against the disruption cost, or the ability of the movement to create highly effective actions against the target.

Luders’s concession and …

For example: A group of workers has identified “Sally” as the most influential rank-and-file person on their shift and in their work area. The organizer has successfully gotten Sally, in a one-on-one conversation, to explain that she is overwhelmed and frustrated by how much her employer automatica…