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.