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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…

One left-led union they discuss is also the subject of Howard Kimeldorf’s Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Kimeldorf analyzes the stark differences between two mostly male dockworkers’ unions, one on the East Coast and the other on the West Coast, th…

Most CIO organizing was based on a mass collective action, high-participation model anchored in deep worker solidarities and cooperative engagement in class struggle. Strikes, the kind that could shut down production—strikes in which most if not all workers walk off the job in a high-risk collectiv…

Today’s service worker has a radically different relationship to the consuming public than last century’s manufacturing worker had. People buying a car don’t meet and confer with the workers whose hands create it; they don’t walk up and down the assembly line insisting that a tweak this way or that…