There is no doubt that the “worker-to-worker organizing” model outlined by Eric Blanc in his new book, We Are the Union, is key to union organizing success. Since 2018, my organizing mentor Richard Bensinger, the former AFL-CIO organizing director who has since helped workers organize at companies ranging from Starbucks to Canada Goose, has been kicking off Inside Organizer School trainings by declaring that there are two components to every successful campaign: a strong, representative organizing committee within the workplace; and a hammer — the leverage to force a company to recognize workers’ right to organize. Blanc’s book provides a deep dive into aspects of the former: how workers can take the lead on building vibrant and dynamic union campaigns at their workplaces.

Blanc writes, “Three things in particular define the new model: 1) Workers have a decisive say on strategy, and 2) Workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union, and/or 3) Workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.” At times, this definition seems not only expansive but also paradoxical, encompassing everything from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)–affiliated Burgerville campaign in the Pacific Northwest to the new leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), who came to power through the efforts of a reform movement within the union. The terminology folds in just about every iteration of the recent labor upsurge, despite the significant differences between unions, campaigns, and approaches.

My own experiences as a union organizer — both as an external staff organizer on campaigns as varied as Tesla and Ben & Jerry’s, and as a salt at Starbucks, where I got a job as a barista to help start a union drive — have underscored the crucial importance of worker leadership, local autonomy, and harnessing the camaraderie of the workplace in order to withstand fierce union-busting campaigns. They have also highlighted the need for principled and strategic unions prepared to support worker-led organizing without attempting to control it, while helping win the right to organize through mobilizing the rest of the labor movement and the public around the fight.

Blanc’s book uses case studies to illustrate what worker-to-worker organizing can look like in different contexts and with varied levels of union support. At Colectivo Coffee, workers interviewed unions and found that the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would give them the backing to pursue their goal of organizing the entire company; at Burgerville, IWW members got jobs to help kick off a union campaign, then ended up filing for union elections and winning a first contract after other workers pushed to change tactics.

Blanc vividly captures what workers are seeking through unionizing. From Chipotle to Starbucks to Tesla, workers see unions as a path to improving their lives, transforming dead-end and alienating jobs into something better, and making the world a better place. Further, many workers who are passionate about issues ranging from trans liberation to a free Palestine to racial justice see the labor movement as a force that — unlike corporate virtue-signalers or government and nonprofit actors — brings all of these issues together, unites people around class and mobilizes against those responsible for systemic injustices, and is accountable to workers.

In Buffalo, I worked with data analysts at Tesla who wanted to unionize the company’s autopilot division. They were interested in organizing for many reasons, from the fact that they were so monitored (down to the keystroke) that it was often impossible to both meet productivity demands and take a bathroom break, to concerns about CEO Elon Musk’s increasing hostility toward trans workers and other marginalized groups. In choosing a union, they wanted an institution that would devote itself to fighting, while also providing them with the local autonomy that would ensure that Tesla workers were the ones making decisions about campaign and bargaining strategy and that the union did not become a “third party.”

As I write in my forthcoming book, Get on the Job and Organize: The Making of a New Labor Movement, the organizing committee was able to withstand Musk’s retaliatory union-busting actions, including the firing of almost forty workers the day after the campaign went public. But the campaign was stifled by top union leaders who were more interested in questions of credit, control, and jurisdiction than in supporting worker organizing. The new union that took over the campaign didn’t allow the workers to continue self-organizing.

Up to that point, the organizing committee’s internal operations — from managing the union Slack channel to running meetings to deciding on talking points for press conferences — were incredibly democratic and vibrant: workers were having organizing conversations at birthday parties and video game sessions, and coworkers were joining the union as a way to make friends in their often-alienating workplace. Had the labor movement truly embraced worker-to-worker organizing at Tesla, there would likely be a union fighting back against Musk’s actions from within his own company.

Blanc devotes the longest and most detailed case study in his book to Starbucks Workers United, the campaign that I helped launch by getting a job at a Buffalo café, recruiting a team of fellow salts, and coordinating our means of holding organizing conversations, moving the campaign as quickly as possible as we began approaching workplace leaders. His analysis of the campaign gets many things right, from the way that we tried to build camaraderie in the workplace to the original scale of the campaign (building union density in the coffee industry in Upstate New York) to the unforeseen nature of the campaign’s exponential growth in the winter of 2021–22.

Other details are less accurate. For example, we didn’t choose to “come out as salts” to our coworkers but were instead outed by union staffers trying to seize control of the campaign. Blanc takes many of the union staffers’ statements at face value, which obscures the more complicated nature of the campaign. In the end, we did not “end up having a union that trusted the workers enough to fund a campaign without trying to control it,” in the words of one of the Workers United staff Blanc quotes.

The question of balancing institutional support with worker control is a fundamental one for worker-to-worker organizing, and Starbucks Workers United is a case study both in how to achieve grassroots empowerment at scale and how unions are often threatened by that very empowerment.

Keeping David From Becoming Goliath

Unions’ approach to organizing often varies greatly by region or by local. We could not have launched the Starbucks campaign without the support of Workers United in Upstate New York and Vermont, where union leader Gary Bonadonna Jr gave us the necessary resources and support to run an experimental, industry-wide campaign without stifling the creativity, spontaneity, and freedom that the campaign needed to thrive.

As the campaign grew, however, the top leadership of Workers United and then of its parent union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), were unable to stop themselves from trying to gain control, to the detriment of the campaign. It demonized organizers, both workers and staff, who advocated for consumer boycotts, changes to bargaining strategy, or other deviations from what became the union’s official position. It simply didn’t understand that the union’s independence was a strength, both from the standpoint of organizing new workers and in terms of public messaging.

At a national gathering of Starbucks worker leaders in early 2023, a prominent Workers United leader told the rank-and-file members that “David vs. Goliath” made for a nice story. But, she continued, to be effective, you needed to fight Goliath with Goliath. Ignoring the fallacies of this argument (this biblical match-up led to Goliath’s defeat), it also underscores the extent to which union leadership often tries to squelch the individuality and chaotic nature of worker organizing in the interest of control and centralization.

Workers should not have to battle on two fronts to win the right to organize: employer opposition is more than enough of an obstacle. Unions must become better at giving worker-organizers and the unorthodox staff members who support them more freedom to run campaigns, while also committing to the pressure campaigns that will help win first contracts and curb corporate union busting. The very boycotts that Blanc notes helped bring Starbucks back to the bargaining table — the Cornell student activism that caused the university to kick Starbucks off campus and the Palestine solidarity movement that boycotted Starbucks after the company retaliated against the union for standing with Palestine — were met with hostility from the union’s top leadership. In order to scale the Starbucks Workers United model, we need unions that aren’t afraid of true worker power.

Throughout the book, Blanc mentions some of the limitations of the worker-to-worker model, which he writes “will almost always translate into a less tightly run ship.” Salting — the practice of getting a job to help launch a union campaign — can help resolve some of these contradictions. The greatest threat to any organizing campaign is employer opposition: many companies react quickly, by firing workers in retaliation for organizing in an effort to squash the drive before it has a chance to take hold. Speed is critically important in helping campaigns overcome the company’s reaction: historically, staff-intensive approaches like house-call blitzes have helped build organizing committees quickly, to limit the time that a company has to prepare their union-busting onslaught.

On just about every campaign I’ve ever worked on, workers had previously discussed organizing before getting in touch with a union. Sometimes there were prior attempts; often the idea was dismissed as unrealistic. Salting can help provide the needed urgency to turn a conversation into action and to move a campaign quickly.

The role of a salt is often a background one: mapping the workplace and identifying workplace leaders who can carry the campaign to victory, building relationships, and having organizing conversations that make coworkers believe organizing is possible. In other words, a salt can provide a spark that ignites interest that was already present in the workplace. Salting helps overcome corporate union-busting by increasing the likelihood that the campaign can stay underground until workers are ready to quickly begin building an organizing committee. Salting is an invaluable tactic that works across sectors and industries and that can be used to scale campaigns and help ensure victories.

While “autonomous salts” — motivated individuals who decide to take jobs in order to organize but aren’t connected with a union already — have helped kick off many organizing campaigns, undertaking this endeavor without the backing of a committed and strategic union can lead to stagnation and a lack of effectiveness. Choosing an achievable target, joining or recruiting a salt team, and receiving training on effective organizing (from sequencing campaigns to holding organizing conversations) all boost a salt’s chances of organizing their workplace.

Worker-to-worker organizing works best when workers are in collaboration with experienced organizers who can both weigh in with helpful advice and give workers the freedom to make independent decisions, like Richard Bensinger and Adam Obernauer at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Thus Blanc’s recommendation that a “young person looking to change the world” should be “getting a job at Amazon to help unionize it” is a good one. However, that person might be better served by looking beyond Amazon and identifying which unions offer the best support and training to salts and worker-organizers, including by committing to a genuine plan to bring the hammer down on the targeted corporation and win the right to organize.

Labor Law to the Rescue

In the book’s final chapters, Blanc credits several factors with helping propel the explosion of worker organizing. He writes that digital tools like Zoom and other online platforms have made it easier for workers and organizers to connect across geographies, explores the progressive attitudes of young workers he surveys, and analyzes government policies that helped create a tight labor market during the pandemic as well as the Biden administration’s attitudes toward labor.

Blanc is certainly correct that reactionaries in government can make it much more difficult to organize. However, when it comes to finding the hammer and forcing companies to respect the right to organize, the Biden administration didn’t provide magic leverage to bring Starbucks (or anyone else) to the bargaining table.

Blanc praises Jennifer Abruzzo and the Biden National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for allowing store-by-store elections at Starbucks (consistent with decades of legal precedent), increasing workplace access for worker-organizers during nonworking times, and advocating for stronger enforcement of the law. As someone who organized during their tenure, however, I saw many instances where the board allowed companies to get away with egregious actions. Abruzzo declined to pursue many unfair labor practices, including Musk’s mass firing of Buffalo Tesla workers. The regional director of the NLRB in Buffalo — who happened to be married to a corporate-side lawyer — consistently sided with companies, delaying Starbucks stores from filing for elections and declaring nearly a quarter of the bargaining unit at a local grocery store “management” despite all evidence to the contrary.

Despite his praise for Abruzzo and the board, Blanc correctly acknowledges that even the best-case scenario of an extremely labor-friendly NLRB would still lack the enforcement power to hold companies accountable, due to the extremely weak nature of US labor law. As Donald Trump’s NLRB and its new general counsel reverse what gains labor did make during the previous administration, looking beyond the board for leverage is more important than ever. As we’ve seen recently, companies from Starbucks to Barnes & Noble have proved to be susceptible to boycotts and other pressure campaigns, thanks largely to the public’s growing support for unions. Underscoring this point, Ben & Jerry’s set aside its past anti-union practices and agreed to voluntarily recognize the workers’ union — “Scoopers United” — because the company realized its customer base supported labor and that its social-justice marketing strategy was incompatible with union busting.

Like Blanc, I believe that the labor movement is the only way to meaningfully challenge the rising authoritarian and fascist tendencies within our government, our workplaces, and our society, and to create a more just, equitable, and free world. Blanc’s book, with its wealth of examples and worker voices, contains many crucial lessons that we can carry into this struggle — from the big picture, like encouraging unions to take risks and support organizing efforts that may not result in immediate contract victories but that have the potential to reshape the narrative around union organizing, to the smaller details, like the nuts-and-bolts of avoiding common campaign pitfalls. Few lessons could be more important in this moment.