Overview

A riveting account of labor's bottom-up resurgence, providing a roadmap for workers, unions, and social movements to win widely. After decades of union decline and rising inequality, an inspiring wave of workplace organizing—from Starbucks stores to Amazon warehouses to southern auto factories—has thrust unionization into the national spotlight. By analyzing this surge and telling the stories of the courageous workers driving it forward, We Are the Union makes a case for how to overcome business as usual in both corporate America and organized labor. Eric Blanc shows that recent struggles have developed a new organizing model, worker-to-worker unionism, which builds scalable power by giving rank-and-filers an unprecedented degree of leadership. Through digital tools and ambitious campaigns, young worker leaders are turning the labor movement back into a movement—and they're winning. Rigorously researched and compellingly written, We Are the Union illustrates how this new grassroots approach can exponentially grow the power of working people to overcome economic exploitation, racial injustice, and authoritarianism at work and beyond.

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9780520394919

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Reviews

“In this wired age, the opportunities are boundless for worker-to-worker communication, building power directly in the workplace.  Blanc well summarizes how powerful these tools are and the opportunity they present to build union power from the ground up.” * Power at Work Blog * ""A compelling case not only for organizing millions more workers into the labor movement but for doing it in a way that could help them build power in their unions and in their workplaces."" * Jacobin * ""Nearly 60% of workers in America say they would support having a union where they work, yet only 11% have one. This thoughtful book uses recent organizing at Starbucks and other companies to discuss ways to close that gap. The central thesis is that to get to the necessary scale existing unions need to invest far more resources in supporting organizing led by workers themselves."" * World Wide Work * ""We owe a debt of gratitude to Eric Blanc for We Are the Union, and for his continuing outspoken activism in support of labor organizing. . . . We Are the Union gives us rich stories of worker-initiated organizing, in many cases leading to dramatic victories."" * Convergence *

Author Information

Eric Blanc is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, and director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative.

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