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One thing that struck me over and over in Vegas and almost everywhere else I worked for unions: workers want to make things better so badly that they are willing again and again to set aside frustration and anger stemming from past bad experiences with unions if you offer them a plan to win that ma…

The Desert Springs contract had now expired. This was a big deal. Under US labor law, when a contract expires, four dangerous things happen: workers can strike; the employer can lock workers out; the employer can stop collecting union membership dues from the workers’ paychecks; and the “permanent …

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 …