Episode 49 - Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral

Reinventing Solidarity

As innovative new union organizing campaigns have taken off around the country in recent years, Rutgers labor scholar Eric Blanc argues that we can see the emergence of a new organizing model that has the potential to meet the moment. He calls it "worker-to-worker organizing," a concept he explored in his Winter 2024 New Labor Forum article "Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral" and in his forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press). New Labor Forum editor-at-large Micah Uetricht spoke to Blanc about the model's constituent parts, the role of young workers' increasingly progressive and pro-labor sentiments in the current moment of labor upsurge, and why worker-to-worker organizing can scale up in a way he says the "staff-intensive" model can't.