Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. If we are surprised at what these people accomplished, our surprise may be a commentary on the angle of vision from which we view them. That same angle of vision may make it difficult to see that of the gifts they brought to the making of the movement, courage may have been the least.

Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom

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 might make a better ride. But parents picking their kids up from school often meet with the people who spend more waking hours with their kids than they do: the educators who are helping their children prepare intellectually and socially for adulthood. And parents participate in the educators’ production process, attending meetings and volunteering in the classroom. Similarly, nurses and other health-care workers charged with repairing the victim of a car crash are in constant contact with the family, who are also allowed in the workplace, that is, the patient’s hospital room. The case studies in the following chapters are filled with evidence that these mostly female, multiracial service workers are as capable of building powerful organizations as they are of building a child’s mind or rebuilding a patient’s body. In fact, they are among the only workers today engaging in production-shuttering strikes. Their organic ties to the broader community form the potential strategic wedge needed to leverage the kind of power American workers haven’t had for decades.

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 collective action—were routine, and were evidence that workers themselves were the primary agents of their own liberation. “Left” organizers, those associated with various socialist and radical factions, flocked to the CIO because of the principal of inclusion, of uniting all workers across ethnicity, gender, race, skill level, and every other working-class division. The AFL had had a long, complicated history not just of excluding semi- and unskilled workers, and Black workers, but also of having taken positions against European and then Asian immigration, and very narrowly limiting the union struggle to wages and working conditions.

The CIO’s left organizers were intensely committed to recruiting and building power across the many “isms” and other divisions among the working class, and they had to develop special methods to do it. Jack O’Dell, an organizer for the CIO and later for the civil rights movement, recalls their success: “I grew up in Detroit, and when people asked you, ‘What union are you in?’ the guys didn’t even say their union; they just said, ‘the CIO.’ Especially black workers, because the CIO would take on racism.”

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, that developed during the same period, the era of the CIO. On the East Coast, where workers and their leaders fought chiefly for money and other material gains, official corruption became legendary; bribes served to buy off the Eastern unions for decades. On the West Coast, where the unions fought for control of production, that is, for the right to negotiate rules governing safety, hours, and similar issues, bribes didn’t work: Money wasn’t what these workers were looking for. The West Coast’s Wobbly-inclined base produced a leader, Harry Bridges, who was openly a socialist. Bridges and the West Coast workers routinely engaged in strikes; they had to; their demands were substantial and the employers weren’t easy to beat. Kimeldorf concludes that the endless class struggle in which the West Coast workers engaged resulted in high-quality contracts that cemented a high level of participation, active membership, and a strong relationship between the rank and file and the union leaders. He demonstrates that this left-wing leadership showed superior skill in every aspect of running a union, and notes that members routinely reelected socialists to leadership positions, even though their own politics were not uniformly left-wing, but instead quite diverse.

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 automatically takes from her paycheck each month to pick up the cost of an expensive family health-care plan. But she still hesitates when asked if she is willing to “join up with her coworkers to form a union by signing this membership card.” Sally knows that signing the card is a big decision. In the United States, employers routinely fire workers for taking such actions, or punish them in other ways. A good organizer understands this, and at this point will say something like, “So, Sally, I want to be clear about what I am hearing. You are good with the boss continuing to charge you $440.00 per month, deducted from your paycheck, just to keep your kids healthy and you healthy enough to show up for work, for the rest of your life?”

The best organizers in the CIO tradition call the moment that follows “the long uncomfortable silence,” because the organizer is trained to say nothing until the worker responds—and that can take several long minutes of dead silence between two people sitting face-to-face. The organizer respects that silence and waits it out, because the decision Sally is being asked to make is huge, and must be treated that way. Sally is not being lied to, she is not being promised anything, she is not being manipulated, and she is being advised that the employer will take swift and direct action against her and her coworkers. She is having a discussion about going on strike. This is worker agency. An axiom of organizers is that every good organizing conversation makes everyone at least a little uncomfortable. And it’s a conversation that must be had. All other actions come from this one.

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 disruption costs are central to my overall analysis about power. I build on Luders’s thesis, situated in the social movement theory literature, by unpacking it and showing that it can function as a tool for power analysis in workplace and nonworkplace settings. It makes sense that he drew on labor literature to arrive at his framework, because the same framework is routine in successful, high-stakes union negotiations. When I was a labor negotiator, we called Luders’s concession costs the cost of settlement. And what he calls disruption costs we called the ability to create a crisis for the employer.62 The two are always seen in relation to each other. I am using Luders’s “concession costs” as a broader “power required” variable in this book’s discussion of relative success (and relative defeat) in the new millennium. Success in any fight or any contestation waged by movement activists across sectors absolutely requires making an accurate assessment of Luders’s concession costs before the fight begins. Movement actors can and must reasonably predict the concession costs in advance; otherwise, they enter the fight without knowing which strategies to deploy. As Luders says, different economic actors are unequally vulnerable and concession costs are not static—they are variable and contingent on the ability of actors to force disruption costs.

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 community allies can “win.” This is a typical Justice for Janitors campaign model, and too few people understand that it can’t simply be exported to other sectors, especially not to higher-wage sectors where wage and benefit costs alone are literally 60 to 70 percent of the employer’s overall expenses, for example teachers with public pensions or nursing home workers with classic defined-benefit pensions. In the mobilizing approach used in the far lower-cost Justice for Janitors model, essentially all the employer needs is the union’s guarantee that it will negotiate a “trigger agreement,” meaning that the small wage increase for the workers—fifty cents or one dollar per hour—won’t take effect until the union succeeds at getting all cleaning contractors in the area to agree to the same terms. Such a settlement is very inexpensive to the corporation, taken as a ratio of cost to overall expenses (concession costs). It’s considerably easier to shift even a conservative, anti-union corporate owner to the practical business decision to settle these low-cost workers’ demands. I argue that little real power is built by this version of mobilizing. Although the union expands its membership and some janitors get a raise, it is not a life-altering change, and the process develops few real worker leaders, or none. Equally significant, such a fight rarely develops new organic community leaders—those involved are generally already involved, already pro-union priests and pro-union self-selecting activist types. They have not been recruited or trained systematically, and, so, this approach is not an organizing approach in the community, it is a mobilizing approach in and outside the workplace and isn’t expanding the worker army.

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 and is called, simply, “Advice for Rookie Organizers.”

1. Get close to the workers, stay close to the workers.
2. Tell workers it’s their union and then behave that way.
3. Don’t do for workers what they can do.
4. The union is not a fee for service; it is the collective experience of workers in struggle.
5. The union’s function is to assist workers in making a positive change in their lives.
6. Workers are made of clay, not glass.
7. Don’t be afraid to ask workers to build their own union.
8. Don’t be afraid to confront them when they don’t.
9. Don’t spend your time organizing workers who are already organizing themselves, go to the biggest worst.
10. The working class builds cells for its own defense, identify them and recruit their leaders.
11. Anger is there before you are—channel it, don’t defuse it.
12. Channeled anger builds a fighting organization.
13. Workers know the risks, don’t lie to them.
14. Every worker is showtime—communicate energy, excitement, urgency and confidence.
15. There is enough oppression in workers’ lives not to be oppressed by organizers.
16. Organizers talk too much. Most of what you say is forgotten.
17. Communicate to workers that there is no salvation beyond their own power.
18. Workers united can beat the boss. You have to believe that and so do they.
19. Don’t underestimate the workers.
20. We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.

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 the future of public education as we know it: that’s what’s on the table.”48 If the labor movement’s instinct has been to reduce demands in order to sound reasonable, the new CTU took the opposite approach: They led every meeting with school-based discussions of billionaires, banks, and racism. (Note to other teachers’ unions: they got reelected.) Mass political education of the existing base was their primary focus. Along with all of CTU’s leaders, they were creating a sense of urgency, a burning platform, and framing the choice ahead in very clear and unambiguous language. They were being as mindful with semantics as 1199NE.

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, the third-generation family CEO at Smithfield, met with a senior official of the UFCW shortly after the NLRB ruling and made a personal promise in writing not to break the law as union and company headed into the second round.