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As time went on we learned just how nervous workers were about meeting with their religious leaders to ask them for support. They might stand up to their boss at work by putting on a union button, which union organizers invariably think is the scariest thing a worker can do, yet they struggle to mu…

An example might help illustrate the point. In a workplace organizing campaign, often the first workers an organizer meets are those who might be termed the “loudmouths.” They talk back to the boss—but they talk back to everyone else as well. Inexperienced organizers often mistakenly identify them …

Many of the newly trained organizers were not committed to deep organizing. They were ordered to take shortcuts of all kinds, because organizing is too slow—a refrain they heard often from Tom Woodruff, the organizing czar at SEIU and, later, Change to Win. Often a national union would send a team …

Whole-worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives, one beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another when they punch out at the end of their shift. The pressing concerns that bear down on them every day are not divided into two …

Raising Expectations. Who in the world would give such a name to a book? An organizer, that’s who. At its core, this is a book about organizing. And organizing, at its core, is about raising expectations: about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; ho…