Raising Expectations. Who in the world would give such a name to a book? An organizer, that’s who. At its core, this is a book about organizing. And organizing, at its core, is about raising expectations: about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their union. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.

Of course, there is much more to organizing, but everything else flows from raising expectations. In the normal course of human events, workers don’t expect much from their jobs, government, or unions, because the reality is they don’t get much. The job of the organizer is to fundamentally change this.

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.

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 of talented and trained young organizers to help a group of workers win the vote to form a union, then put them on planes to another election the next day. Meanwhile, the new union members, full of raised expectations about the changes their hard-won union would bring to their lives, would show up at their first meeting and ask, “Wow, where did everyone go?” This practice of “air dropping” organizers in for intense, time-limited campaigns is the very opposite of deep organizing.