Activity

In campaigns to help workers form new unions where none exist, the full-time staff of the union determines how union resources will be used, as there is not yet a local union run by rank-and-file workers. The staff at this stage, therefore, plays an outsize role in encouraging or discouraging worke…

The union in those years could gently be characterized as inept. Its leadership seemed to have missed Reagan’s election and big business’s clarion call to wipe unions out of the private sector through union busting, trade deals, automation, and plant relocation to nonunion states. Joseph Luter III,…

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…