At the meeting, I talk about Good Boss/Bad Boss/Sad Boss as the kind of menu of tactics the company will draw from. I said some version of a thing I have now said thousands of times in meetings and house calls: Good Boss is when they buy off or try to buy off workers, with favors and fixes or even pay raises, to quell the anger that drives the organizing, to make it seem as though workers don’t need a union after all. Bad Boss is when they terrify or try to terrify workers through threats, like plant closure and rumors like “Wherever the union goes, Immigration follows,” so that fear overpowers the driving anger. Sad Boss is when they play the strange game of pretending to suffer a deep, personal heartbreak as the result of workers deciding to organize, in hopes that the workers’ anger will be confused or blunted by empathy for the boss.

There was some laughter at this last idea. There often is. Imagine John or Adam or another of the supervisors, I said, putting on a weepy, childish face. The laughter was nervous but rippled through the room as it was meant to. People looked at one another and scoffed and smiled. I had lifted this joke from Dario, who had, I imagine, lifted it from the more experienced organizers who’d trained him. It worked. The crack in the facade of the all-powerful bosses that had first appeared over the weekend of house visits now deepened. The atmosphere in the hall shifted as workers sat together in this collective levity, imagining these more puerile versions of their imperious bosses.