Whole-worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives, one beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another when they punch out at the end of their shift. The pressing concerns that bear down on them every day are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which is of concern to unions. At the end of each shift workers go home, through streets that are sometimes violent, past their kids’ crumbling schools, to their often substandard housing, where the tap water is likely unsafe.

Whole-worker organizing seeks to engage “whole workers” in the betterment of their lives. To keep them consistently acting in their self interest, while constantly expanding their vision of who that self interest includes, from their immediate peers in their unit, to their shift, their workplace, their street, their kids’ school, their community, their watershed, their nation and their world.