For those of us in and around the trade union movement, Eric Blanc’s new book is an important contribution. He builds on some of the best work out and then adds to it. In many ways, he takes us further than other writers who have been writing on labor.
What Blanc does well is he recognizes the overall failure of the trade union movement in its current manifestation and directly tries to address its limitations. Thankfully, he refuses to confine his thinking to the parameters acceptable to many established “leaders” who so forcefully project the status quo, as union density continues its slide in the private sector of the economy from about 34.5 percent of the non-agricultural workforce in the early 1950s to 5.9 percent in 2024. Even with the presence of public sector unionism, the overall union density in 2024 was 9.9 percent according to US Department of Labor.
He argues:
It is hard to overstate the stakes of turning labor into a powerful mass movement again. Inequality soars when organized labor is weak, because unions are ordinary people’s main tool to counter corporate greed. And if you look at most other dire social problems—racial injustice, climate change, right-wing authoritarianism, sky-high military spending—you’ll find that they too have deep roots into the power imbalance between workers and bosses.
Blanc recognizes the old ways simply do not work: he argues that for the union movement to regain its former power, there needs to be a massive increase in union density, and the current model of labor organizing, which is staff driven, is way too expensive for unions to implement. In other words, there’s no way in hell that the unions using traditional approaches will expand to the extent needed to regain their power.
His solution? What he calls “worker-to-worker” unionizing. In other words, instead of organizing being dependent upon staff members, as is the primary approach used today, he advocates that workers themselves organize their co-workers and other workers into unions. He argues that it is only this approach that can allow unions to scale upward to the levels needed to impact the various industries in which they are located. He describes what he means: “workers initiate and/or train an organizing drive, and they play a central role in determining its major decisions.”
And his worker-to-worker model can be utilized over larger a scale via sophisticated use of the new technology available today; in other words, accurately recognizing the dispersed nature of more and more workers over larger geographical spaces, the technology allows organizers to reach even the most dispersed workforce. I really think he’s on to something important here: I cannot remember any publication that I’ve read that has recognized the problem of geographic dispersal, which exists to an increasing extent over time, making it much more difficult to build collective solidarity in a single workplace. And with the increasing price of housing in this country, especially around the coasts, this problem is only going to get worse. Blanc definitely gets credit for understanding these processes.
And tied into this is the impressive scale and scope of his own research.
With the help of my research assistant, Jacob Robinson, I reached out to every union drive that was public in 2022—resulting in over two hundred interviews with worker leaders and over five hundred responses to my anonymous survey asking about their drives and personal backgrounds. To round out the picture, I interviewed over a hundred staff organizers and elected union officials, while also digging deep into the quantitative data on socio-economic shifts, organizing costs, and union staffing, both historically and today.
Using three workplace unionizing campaigns to illustrate his claims, Blanc supports his arguments by discussing each in depth: Burgerville, a Pacific Northwest food chain with about 40 stores; the Colectivo café in Milwaukee; and the News Guild, operating in a number of mainstream newspapers across the country. These are each worth reading, as he goes in depth about their organizing successes, including obtaining first contracts.
He also recounts the Starbucks campaign, and how that is seen as a big breakthrough in labor organizing.
He then decides that the key argument he wants to make is over the best way to organize: the staff-driven model or his worker-to-worker model. In my mind, he devastates the staff-driven model and shows his worker-to-worker model is preferable. And on p. 167, he lists several worker-to-worker victories and provides the (low) ratio of staff to workers in them.
His last section is on “driving forces” positively affecting increased unionization today, which he finds encouraging. He discusses government policies, digital resources, and the radicalization of youth today. First, he’s basically thinking of Joe Biden’s governmental policies, especially regarding the pro-worker National Labor Relations Board, never dreaming of Trump’s re-election and reversal of many of Biden’s policies. (I find this among the weakest part of the book: he never contemplated such a reversal, but his faith in governmental action, despite his historical claims, is not supported by the real world record.) The digital resources understanding is important. And, while I think there has been an upsurge in youth involvement if not radicalization over the last few years—especially around Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as climate change, the worsening economic situation in the country, sex and sexual identity issues, racial injustice, the threat of war, etc.—I think he gives it way too much weight. (I’m ready to be proven wrong on the latter!)
The fact is that some young people have gotten politically involved, and certainly many more than their fairly recent predecessors, so it looks like this huge wave of radicalized youth. But it seems to me to be largely confined to certain areas of the country, and certainly among more—for lack of a better word, “elite”—universities along the coasts, which generally have a history of radicalism, different than most with exceptions of some of the major state research universities such as at Ann Arbor and Madison. In other words, from my location in the Upper Midwest, I’m not seeing a lot of activism in most of the country.
That’s not saying nothing is going on or it cannot develop, but I’d argue we’re a lot closer to 1965 than to 1971, if you want a historical comparison.
The other thing is that even IF I’m wrong and there’s more going on than I see, there is no guarantee it will get channeled into unionization/labor actions. Unfortunately, labor in general has taken a tremendous beating in public opinion over the last 40+ years, and the AFL-CIO leadership—which claims to be leading the labor movement, and to which pundits agree—has been all but a tremendous failure since 1981. (See my 2017 article, “The Epic Failure of Labor Leadership in the United States, 1980-2017 and Continuing” at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol5/iss2/5/, which has been upgraded and will be republished later this year as “The Continuing Failure of the AFL-CIO Leadership.”)
And this provides a segue into my larger analysis of Blanc’s book: he does not go far enough! He doesn’t emphasize it the way I would, but he’s way too gentle on labor leaders than the record deserves. (These arguments will be detailed in my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Unions, Race and Popular Democracy.) In my opinion, we have not had a labor movement in the United States since the expulsion by CIO leaders—NOT McCarthy or reactionary politicians of both parties—of 11 “left-led” unions from the CIO in 1949/50; we have had only a trade union movement. The difference: a labor movement looks out for and advances the interests of all working people, where a trade union movement confines its interests, at best, to union members, sometimes at the expense of other workers.
Again, he doesn’t emphasize it the way I would, but if you read through his book carefully, you see there’s a lot of information that he provides that illustrates the escalating retreat of the trade union movement. Again and again, with only a few exceptions, he complains about lack of vision, lack of political will, refusal to mobilize members, refusal to mobilize resources, etc., etc. Shawn Fain of the UAW (autoworkers) gets credit for leading the 2023 “stand-up strike” to victory over GM, Ford and Stellantis, as the UAW leadership should get credit, but it covers up the general failure of much of the labor leadership to do much at all, especially their lack of organizing efforts. (Evidence of the latter after the publication of Blanc’s book: the all but total absence of AFL-CIO leadership, including that of most of its affiliated unions, in the fight-back against Trump; it’s been reprehensible, especially in light of their approximately 12 million members!)
There is no discussion of the type of trade unionism projected in US: he assumes the established “business unionism” is the only kind of trade unionism possible, when there have also been unions known as “social justice” ones in this country. (Actually, the UE—United Electrical, Machine and Radio Workers Union—and the ILWU, West Coast dockworkers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, remaining remnants of the left-led CIO unions, are exemplars today of this kind of unionism; arguably, some of the graduate student unions are heading toward this direction, although they probably vary in their intentionality.) My May 2025 article, “Looking Ahead: US Unions Must Look Beyond Themselves to Save Themselves,” on-line at https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol13/iss1/8/, is where this issue is discussed in depth.
But his biggest limitation to me is that while he imagines labor to be a “fighting social force” (my term), he does not show that it is nor does he discuss how to make it into one. While he seems in the earlier part of his book to have this larger vision, with labor fighting for social justice, etc., he soon collapses his book into a discussion of unionization in individual or connected workplaces, and the need for them to prepare to win their first contract. After that, crickets. Basically, in my terminology, he’s suggesting “radical,” member-driven business unionism, and I argue that is not a big enough vision or a viable way forward to re-establish a labor movement. And this generally means separate from other social forces.
His book is laser focused on developments in the United States; he doesn’t even believe there are things we can learn from workers in Canada or Mexico. But having a nationalist scope in a time of globalization seems a hindrance, not a help.
He ignores what can be learned from global analyses by scholars and workers’ struggles in other countries. I know there’s a lot to be learned from the KMU Labor Center of the Philippines and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. (See my 2021 book, Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States.) We need to understand that workers’ struggles in the US today are taking place in a global context—and they need to connect with other social forces to magnify labor’s and their respective power.
There’s one more issue that needs attention: who is he focusing upon? Basically, he’s focused on younger workers, many relatively recent from college or even graduation in basically small, service sector locations. He does not say anything that I saw about older, less educated workers, who are years out of high school, but who are struggling to survive economically while raising families and who are losing social resources due to desperate efforts to keep the US Empire afloat. Do these people not count since the ruling elite shut down their jobs so they could transfer production into formerly colonized or colonized countries in the on-going search for greater profits?
In short, a lot to be learned from We Are the Union, although I believe that the subtitle, “How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big” is a publicist’s fantasy. I hope people will buy it and read it critically; again, a lot to think about. However, I can’t wait until Blanc reads my forthcoming book and learns about the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee/United Packinghouse Workers of America; he’ll learn worker-to-worker organizing is not a new concept. He’ll learn about the importance of challenging white supremacy and racism or any form of oppression in union organizing fights. And he’ll learn that many business unions in general do not fight for social justice.
In short, while valuable, this study is limited. Let’s learn from it, but remember, workers taking self-initiative and organizing themselves and their co-workers is not fighting for social justice for anyone but themselves; a step forward, certainly, and should be expanded broadly, but in and of itself, is not revitalizing the US labor movement. If you want to build a fighting social force, you and your allies will have to do it; it will not be done by current union leaders.
[NOTE: I have been extremely critical of established labor organizations in this review; however, I know there are many good people dedicated to revitalizing and rebuilding a labor movement in the best ways possible: I hope these people will refuse to accept my negativity, knowing that the shoe does not fit in their respective cases!]