Episode 301 – Worker to Worker Unionism with Eric Blanc

[00:00:42] Steve Grumbine: All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. We’re back into the unions, folks. Because, let’s just be fair, you’ve watched students at encampments around the country showing up to fight back against the genocide and the politics didn’t listen. You’ve watched kids. You’ve watched people. You’ve watched pals. 

You’ve watched everyone go in the streets, try to get attention. They haven’t done it. They have not made changes. They’re still going steady-strong with a full funding of the genocide in Gaza right now. And I’m like, okay, so where do we look? Where do we turn? How do we make change in a system that doesn’t want to be changed? 

 A system that doesn’t have in-system mechanisms that allow us to have agency to make the kind of changes, worker -led, people-led kind of changes. And so I have long since been putting my hope and my faith, if you will, into the labor movement, which is trying to come back. Trying to revitalize itself. 

We’ve seen blips and spurts across the country. We’ve seen Amazon workers. We’ve seen John Deere. We’ve seen teachers. We’ve seen all kinds of different movements of labor to show that there is a movement right now. UAW with Shawn Fain – you’ve seen that movement. You’ve seen labor saying, Hey. Don’t forget about us. 

We’re still here. But the tactics of the past have been business unions. Labor unions that are really about the business floor. Really not class struggle. Not worker lead.. They tend to have that top-down strategy. And folks, if you’ve ever been a part of a top-down strategy-type union, you’ve probably not been terribly thrilled by it. 

You haven’t seen the kind of results over the years. And so this is why my guest today is so exciting. Eric Blanc, who is an author – we’ll talk about his book here in a moment – but he’s also the director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative. Co-founder of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University. Author of the Substack, Labor Politics. And author of the forthcoming monograph – We Are the Union, How Worker to Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, 

UC [University of California] Press 2025. Without further ado, I want to just say hello to my guest, Eric Blanc. Welcome to the show, sir. 

[00:03:10] Eric Blanc: Thanks so much for having me on. 

[00:03:11] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely. You know, you are like the guy that I’m looking to for some hope here, man. I’ve read some of your work out there on Jacobin and some of the other interesting things you’ve written regarding worker-to-worker organizing. 

And I think that, you know, when I hear people talk about, Hey, it’s got to be grassroots. Hey, it’s got to be the people. Hey, the union can’t be beyond the people. The laborers. You got to stay in step with them. And to see you talking about worker-to-worker kind of grassroots organizing is inspiring. 

And, I was wondering, maybe you could talk a little bit about that.  

[00:03:49] Eric Blanc: Yeah. The reality that we are in really bleak times. And I agree with you that labor movement is, for me, the major source of hope and potential for turning things around. And the good news, it’s not just sort of pie in the sky, but the labor movement actually does have momentum. It has been growing. 

It has been winning. Not to the scale that we need it to. But we can see since 2020, in particular, you know, really the rebirth of a bottom-up, grassroots- style organizing but in the 21st century, you know? So it’s, in many ways, like the 1930s when labor movement made its big breakthrough with the sort of grassroots momentum. But it’s calibrated for our new reality. 

So it uses a lot of digital tools. It’s not just hard industry. You know, we’ve seen, uh, auto workers and Amazon workers. But we’ve also seen graduate students. We’ve seen Starbucks workers and journalists. We’ve seen doctors organizing. So it’s really across the board. Across the economy. And the thing driving it forward is workers taking the initiative to organize their co-workers without having to wait for an established union to come in and, sort of, give them resources off the bat. 

Oftentimes, these drives start from below and then, many times, they’ll connect with the union down the road because they want legal support and things like this. But it’s really workers driving it forward and it’s workers training other workers across the country. So in Starbucks, you know, you might remember they won one shop in Buffalo. And then it set off a chain reaction, an explosion. And they didn’t have enough staff to train, like you would do in a standard model, 

workers across the country. So they had to let workers training over zoom other workers, all across the US , how to win and organize. And so you see this real effervescence of unionism. We’ve seen it revitalizing unions like United Auto Workers. And this, I think, poses the way forward. Unfortunately, most unions are not invested in this model, yet.  

Most unions aren’t trying to put real resources into new organizing. What happens to this movement really remains to be seen. It’s an open question whether the labor movement will seize this movement and, kind of, get pressured into seizing this movement from below before it’s too late. 

[00:06:00] Steve Grumbine: You know, I talked to folks from the AFL-CIO in Vermont, and these guys are straight-up ready to fight, man. They’re they’re renegades and they’ve got a a real can-do spirit. And I’ve spoken to several members, and it gave me a lot of hope. But I’ve also talked to Joe Burns, who’s the author of Class Struggle Unionism. 

And it seems like, in order for unions to really have the kind of impact they need, they need to be beyond their own workplace. It needs to be larger than that one small spot. And yet, we jump up too far ahead . . . It’s like – it sounds good in theory, that’s how we’d like it to be, but it’s got to start somewhere. 

And that’s what I think is interesting about the stuff that you’ve written. I don’t really think I understand fully what it means when you say worker to worker. Because I know amongst, you know, activists, we talk to each other. We use various pieces of social media – chat programs, et cetera – to communicate. And maybe we go out and we do an action. Or maybe we go out and do a protest or a march or, you know, something else. What does it mean to do worker to worker unions? Cause, let’s be fair, the difference between a worker in a job and an activist is that a worker can get fired. A worker without a union, just trying to start one up, doing it person to person, runs a great risk because we’re much stronger as a fist than we are as a finger. And we’ve dealt with a lot of people in this world that are soloists. That are, you know, just sort of, I don’t want to say self-aggrandizing, but they can’t imagine working in solidarity. 

How does a worker to worker organizing tactic work?  

[00:07:42] Eric Blanc: Sure. So, yeah, let’s get into it. The first thing, maybe to help clarify, is to compare it to what the dominant model is right now, which I call staff-intensive unionism. And staff-intensive unionism it’s sort of a catch all term, but what it has in common in all of the different iterations is that it requires a lot of paid staff to help a union drive move forward. 

 The norm for unions these days is to pay for one staffer for every 100 workers that you want to unionize. And so it’s a really, really expensive, and staff heavy model. So a worker-to-worker unionism, at its core, is moving away from that model and finding ways for workers to do a lot of the tasks that normally and still prevalently are done by staff.  

 So, for instance, instead of having a staff full-time organizer training a drive – which is the norm as I mentioned before, the Starbucks Drive, but then, also, we’ve seen this across the US , not just Starbucks, but we’ve seen it with a lot of these different workers -to-worker drives – will have workers training other workers. Because one of the crucial things in organizing is there’s skills involved. 

It’s a high risk situation, as you mentioned. People can get fired. And it’s not obvious. It’s not just intuitive. How do you get a majority of your co-workers on board? So there’s a lot of accumulated experience over the last decades and more, about the tactics needed to win an effective union fight. 

You know, things like mapping out your workplace. Identifying leaders. How to have one-on-one conversations. How to prepare your co-workers for what the boss is going to do. How you have an escalating campaign. How do you test your level of support? And so the question is, how do we pass on those type of skills to enough workers so that we can reverse the decline of the labor movement?  

So staff-intensive unionism does this by hiring staffers and then trying to have staff people train workers. And I think, in fairness, at its best, that can work. It’s not ideal, but a good staff organizer can train workers to then organize their co-workers. 

The problem is there’s just not enough staff and not enough money to do this for millions of workers. That’s my main criticism of this model. You just can’t get the type of mass movement we need by relying on staff. Even the best staff. So what worker-to- worker unionism does is three things, in particular. 

One of them I already mentioned is that workers are training other workers. So you’re not relying on staff to train a new drive that wants to organize. Workers are doing that. Another thing is that workers are self-organizing before they affiliate with a union. 

So what we see all across the economy right now is workers taking the lead to start talking to their co-workers. Start moving towards things like petitions – trying to get a majority of co-workers on board. And then only after they’ve cohered themselves, then they reach out to a union rather than vice versa. 

And so it changes the whole dynamic because the union hasn’t had to, sort of, pay for a bunch of staff to get it off the ground. And then, also, the relationship between the workers and the union is more of a partnership. It’s not a relationship of deference and of just relying on the established union. 

There’s a real partnership that happens when workers take the lead and have more agency. And then the third and final thing is that unlike in a lot of staff-intensive campaigns in worker to worker drives, they have a decision making over the whole course of the effort. And this is something that’s often not the case in union drives. 

Oftentimes, it’s, sort of, full-time organizers are making a lot of the crucial decisions about the big questions of the campaign. And worker to worker drives, workers, themselves, are deciding. What do we do? What is the political stances we’re going to take? What are the tactical stances we’re going to take to win? 

And just to give one example – ties back to what we were saying before – the Starbucks campaign. One of the crucial turning points that helped them make a big breakthrough that forced Starbucks to come to the bargaining table earlier this year, was the union came out for very strong stance around Palestine and solidarity with Gaza. 

And it created this knockoff effect that ended up leading to a mass boycott that hurt Starbucks to the tune of 11 billion dollars. And there’s just no way that if workers hadn’t been in the driving seat of this campaign, that they would have done such a risky thing very early on, just very soon after October 7th, to take the initiative to stand very clearly in solidarity with Palestine. 

And so it shows you again, workers, when they have full democracy, full strategic say, over the campaign, it leads them to take bigger risks. Be more militant. And this is, on the whole, a very different model from staff-intensive unionism. And it’s one that I think can scale by the millions. 

[00:12:19] Steve Grumbine: So let me just ask this question. So if I’m looking at individuals like a multi-level marketing kind of thing, you know, uh, I tell two people, and so forth, that is shown to be useful outside of this kind of construct – Is that kind of what you’re talking about within the workspace and how would that play out? 

I mean, obviously, you have to be somewhat cautious because boss is listening in, and so forth. How do you, without the protection of a union, do this within a corporate structure?  

[00:12:55] Eric Blanc: Sure. I mean, all good organizing, and I think this is what you’re getting at, all good workplace organizing is fundamentally worker to worker. Which is to say that the people who are best positioned to win over other workers to understanding the need for collective organization and the union, are not folks outside of the company. 

It’s not staff organizers that they can support. It’s people who are in the trenches. Who are there on the shop floor. Who are there at the office. Who are there at the factory with you -, because they’re experiencing it. And so, yeah, the role of worker organizers, fundamentally, is to talk with other co-workers about what the problems are at work. To identify what are the things that are making them angry.  

What are their fears? Cause, a lot of times, people complain about jobs. This is the norm. If anybody whose ever worked price complained about the job, that’s not really an exception. But then most people don’t think there’s anything you can do about it except for quit. 

And so what organizers do, when they’re worker organizers, is they talk through these issues with their co-workers and they say, Hey, but look. If you tried to go as an individual to the boss and ask for a raise, what happened? Right? Or what do you think would happen? Most people say, yeah, I don’t think I would get anything or, I tried and they just, sort of, ignored me. 

And what an organizer says is, well, what if we all go, you know? What if we all say we need a raise, or we need better working conditions, or we need more regular scheduling? Could they ignore us all? That’s the fundamental conversation that drives unionization, over and over and over again. And workers have to do that with their co-workers. 

There’s no one else who can really do that. So that’s the heart of unionism. It’s always been the heart of unionism. and I think that the recent efforts across the country are, kind of, showing how effective that remains. 

[00:14:39] Steve Grumbine: Let me ask you this. You know, within the space that we see today, obviously there’s a, I think it’s, more prevalent than ever, the bystander syndrome. The, you know, Hey, somebody else is going to take care of it. I don’t have to do this. And I think we see this in life right outside of the workplace, but I know I see it in activism. 

Lots and lots of, activists sitting on the sidelines watching the few do the stuff that the many need to really be chipping in and helping with. How do you prevent bystander syndrome within this kind of environment?  

[00:15:18] Eric Blanc: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, that’s the fundamental question, right? The fundamental question is how do we, as organizers, help activate a majority of our co-workers or a majority of the working class?  

Like, that’s the $64,000 question. And in some ways obviously, it’s difficult for the real reasons. Not least of which is the fact that, particularly at work, when you organize you’re taking a real risk. 

So, look, it’s understandable why, if your family’s depending on you – you, you got to pay rent, you got to not lose your healthcare, and all the things like this – that you’re going to think twice before signing a union card if you think it’s going to lead you to get fired, right? And that type of risk is real . 

So I think that the bystander syndrome, particularly when we look at the workplace, let’s just leave it to that question for now, it’s fundamentally a question of fear. There’s very few workers who don’t want improvements at their job. And even, there’s very few workers who wouldn’t want to see a union. 

All of the polls are, sort of, off the charts for unions these days. But there’s a real fear factor because labor law doesn’t protect in a very meaningful way the right to unionize in this country. So what do you do given that circumstance? Well, part of it is you need core organizers. You know, people who maybe are out there listening, to take the initiative. 

You can’t just wait for other people. So it does require folks who feel very strongly about the issues and feel very strongly about , maybe, just the changes that need to happen at work. You need people to take the initiative. But it can’t just stop there. Stick with them. By definition, a union is a unity of a majority of your co-workers. 

And so the steps that you take to get your co-workers to stop being spectators and to jump into the fray is first you have to start talking to them. You meet up for coffee, or talk to them after work, or talk to them on your lunch break. And you try to find out what are the issues that, at your work, are widely felt and are deeply felt? 

Because different people might have different concerns. Maybe it’s like the manager was really mean to you personally, but other people haven’t had the experience. What you need to do if you’re going to try to get a majority of people to become active participants, is you need to find the issues that are widely felt so that a majority of workers feel strongly about but that are, sort of, deeply felt that they would be willing, potentially, to take a risk on. 

Right? And so that might be something like, yeah, we need better healthcare. We need them to provide better, or cheaper, healthcare at work because my family, right now, is struggling to survive and we need to stop paying these insane co-pays. Maybe that’s a widely felt issue. And so then the question becomes, okay, we know what the issues are; 

we know what we need to see change. And then you have to talk through with your co-workers – what could be done collectively? And the problem – this is, the “Catch 22” of organizing – is workers don’t necessarily feel their own power. People feel atomized.  

 People feel nothing can change. And so the way you start to shift that perception is by baby steps. You don’t start all at once – we’re gonna try to go on strike. You do something. Can we, at our workplace – what if we all wore a sticker the same day saying we deserve a raise? If – maybe you’re – if you’re working at a public-facing coffee shop, or something like that. Or what if we just all, collectively, signed a letter to management asking for these changes? You don’t have to talk about union, but let’s see if we can get all of our co-workers, or a majority of our co-workers, to sign a letter, or sign a petition to management, to the corporate, asking for these changes. So you can take these baby steps that get people to see that they’re not alone and that their co-workers will go with them if they take that step. And by doing this sort of escalating campaign where you go from the littlest ask to a middle ask to the, eventually, something as ambitious as going on strike. 

That’s the process through which people who even are hesitant at first can have the confidence that if they take an action, that they’re not going to be sort of left hanging. That actually it’s going to be part of something bigger. And so we’ve seen that happen over and over and over again. 

That’s basically what the process of unionization looks and feels like, and it takes a lot of work. I think part of the difficulty is the process of this type of deep organizing is very labor-intensive. It’s not like you just post something online and then – bam – people come out. It requires a lot of work. 

And I think the tradition of activists in the US , frankly, is a lot of people, like, putting hot takes online and don’t necessarily have the patience for this, sort of, deeper organizing. But, ultimately, it’s this deeper form of organizing that builds real power. 

[00:19:50] Steve Grumbine: That’s really incredibly well said. I want to take you to an article that you wrote, right after the UAW’s defeated at the Mercedes plant at Alabama. you made a very, I don’t know if it’s controversial, but it may sound controversial that they got crushed. But if labor wants to win big, it can’t be afraid to lose big. 

So it’s kind of like the whole “scared money, don’t make money” approach that the capitalists say. But from a labor perspective, you got to kind of fight fire with fires, what I’m hearing you say there. Can you elaborate on that?  

[00:20:22] Eric Blanc: Sure. So as I mentioned before, labor law in this country is broken. And that’s part of the reason why most unions are very hesitant towards taking the initiative around new organizing. And so the norm for unions today, sort of established unions, is to be very, very, very, risk averse.  

And part of what that means is they will, generally, only take on campaigns and union drives that they know from the get-go, or that they assess from very early on, will have a very high likelihood of succeeding. And so, you know, we have good data on this because the government tracks union win rates. 

If you go back even just to [the] 1970s, unions won about half of the drives that they launched. You know, you have to run an election and they lost about half the elections. Ironically, it sounds maybe counterintuitive, but as the number of union elections has declined. So since the 80s, just support for new organizing and support from established unions to try to grow . . . 

really . . . bottom line – it’s just tanked. As unions are investing less and less in organizing, their win rates are actually going up. So even though they’re running far fewer campaigns, you know, like a fifth of the campaigns of the 1970s, they’re winning these far more often. 

So the win rate of unions these days is like 70, 80%. And so you might ask, well, that seems . . . that doesn’t make sense. You know, why are they running fewer elections, but they’re winning more of them? Well, the reason is that they’re choosing easier targets and that they’re only, sort of, going forward with campaigns once they’ve met a whole series of benchmarks that makes it very likely that they will win. 

The problem is that there’s all sorts of workers who don’t fit into these sort of narrow frameworks for what the union believes is necessary. So just to give it a concrete example, so many of the recent drives we’ve seen that have captured the imagination of other workers across the country – Starbucks, Amazon, taking on these big corporations. Most unions up until the last year or two were extremely scared 

to even try to organize these big corporations because they’re so powerful. But nevertheless, there’s a higher risk factor. You’re not guaranteed success when you go after the biggest companies, but workers from below are taking these risks and sometimes they’re going to lose. So they, they lost in Alabama, as you mentioned, in the UAW at Mercedes because they went up against the entire ruling class of Alabama. 

And so there’s no guarantee that when you fight, you win. But the only way that you’re going to win for millions of workers is if you’re willing to take on more fights. And that’s the spirit that the movements always have. Movements, take risks, movements, sort of, jump into battle without being guaranteed success ahead of time. 

And the reality is, even if unions were to start losing more frequently than they did in the past. Let’s say they go back to losing half of the drives. If they ran, if they initiated 10 times the number of union elections – even if they lost half of them – that would constitute a massive increase in union organizing. 

So that’s, essentially . . . The way forward is, you know, we need to be prepared to lose more frequently. But we need to, simultaneously, organize way more. We need to be organizing about 10 times the amount that labor unions are currently organizing. And that combination is how you’re going to get millions and millions of workers to unionize. 

[00:23:41] Steve Grumbine: Well said again.  

intermission 

[00:23:43] Steve Grumbine: So you know, I want to go back to the deeper organizing concept. I believe very strongly that agitprop has a place. I think it’s a very important part of shifting the way class based propaganda. How do you see this playing out? 

I see some value in shocking people to make them pay attention to something that previously, maybe, they scrolled right past. That said, I do hear you and I want to understand more. When you say, because I understand the patience required, although I don’t always have it, I am very curious. 

What does that mean? The deeper organizing. Because obviously what you’re talking about is less hot takes, more person to person. The real struggle of why aren’t you into this? I would like to hear you talk much more about that.  

[00:24:55] Eric Blanc: And I agree with you. I don’t actually mean to counterpose 

the kind of public agitation. And I actually think, and I have a lot of interesting data on this in the book I just wrote, that social media today because it’s in the absence of, sort of other spheres for, like there’s no public square in most cities, right? 

We live in a situation in which, unfortunately, social media is one of the few avenues we have for spreading the word. So I actually think that is crucial. And part of the reason the labor movement uptick is going on is that the stories of unions and workers fighting back, kind of gone viral online, and that’s created more enthusiasm. 

But the question, though, is . . . It’s not like whether you should do one or the other . . . but how do we combine this type of, sort of, agitation and the overall excitement we have around labor, or other issues, and that kind of agitprop with how do we channel that energy into power? To me, that’s the question. 

Cause, as you indicated earlier, there can be all sorts of issues in which people agree with us, but we’re not able to force those in power to meet our demands. And so there’s a gap there, right? It’s not enough just to have people agree with you. And so, how do you channel people’s desire for change into power? 

Well, historically, and still today, it’s through organization. And so, you can’t do that individually. It’s just, almost by definition, just your power as an individual under the system is very limited. But workers collectively do have power. And so, the obvious example of that are strikes. So we saw Boeing workers right now are on strike. 

They actually just rejected a contract yesterday, even though it gave them pretty significant wage increases, but because they’ve seen their power on strike, they want even more and they deserve even more. And so the reality is because every institution depends on our labor, whether it’s a public sector, private sector, that gives workers this tremendous amount of potential power. 

You can’t tap that power unless you have an organization. And organization is not just, sort of, like an abstract term. It’s something really concrete. It’s, structures in which a majority of people can make decisions collectively. Uh, so workers can go on strike. It can make demands on their bosses. And to get to that type of structure, it’s not enough just to have people agree. 

You need to do deep organizing. And so deep organizing is fundamentally based off of one-on-one, conversations. It’s about building relationships of trust. It’s about, sort of, building solidarity. And so it’s not just conversations. But it’s, sort of, rebuilding a fabric of solidarity and community so that the difference between a unionized workplace and an un-unionized one is that at an unionized workplace, people are atomized. People . . . “keep your head down.” Uh, you just work and then you go home. And at a unionized workplace, you know your co-workers, you know if one of them has an issue, you’re going to be ready to fight back from them. And you know that, collectively, you’re part of something bigger. It’s not just you against the world. 

It’s you and your co-workers and the broader class that you’re part of against the billionaires. And so deep organizing is the mechanism through which that sort of latent power of working people becomes real. And you can’t do that just through a social media post. Social media posts and ads can help people think they might need a union, but then you actually need to go out and build it. 

[00:28:23] Steve Grumbine: You know, it’s very well said again. I keep feeling like I’m repeating that, but you are stating exactly what I’m looking for. I’m curious, you said, Hey, maybe we just put a sticker on as an act of solidarity and try and organize people to do that simple task. You know, when it comes to some of the nonprofit work and the organizing work to spread messages, something as simple as hitting like, and retweet is something that I see the establishment 

do very well. Like, it’s almost amazing to see how orchestrated they are and being able to, simultaneously, snap their fingers and all of a sudden . . . I imagine it’s all these paid consultants, and stuff like that, that are being paid to do this, so they do it and it’s no problem. But I am curious, how do you get people to take that first step? 

Because, I mean, like literally waking the dead. It’s like bringing Lazarus out of the tomb to try to get people to do basic solidarity shares or solidarity work out there.  What are your thoughts on that? How do you make that first step? Is it all about building trust? I mean, if you’re an organization, you’d like to believe you have it. 

But what are your thoughts there? 

[00:29:33] Eric Blanc: Yeah. You know, good organizing is context specific. So what I’ll say here is that it does depend on where you’re at. So you’re going to have to use different tactics. So depending on the state of how angry your co-workers are, how scared they are, there’s not like a, magic bullet that’s going to activate people everywhere. 

But there is sort of a toolbox that we know of that we have for how you activate folks. I mentioned some of them. Some of it is one-on-one conversations. You know, you’d be surprised about how far that would go. Something that could be as simple as setting up a spreadsheet amongst your co-workers to find out how much each person’s getting paid. 

And then you can compare, right? And you’d be surprised how often there’s disparities and how often people are getting underpaid. And that’s a way of seeing yourself as part of a collective. And then, when you see these disparities, then you can say, Oh, wow. Why don’t we do something about this together? 

Another common tactic to, kind of, get things moving is not even explicitly political or organizing focused. It’s just, can you organize a social event? Could you get your co-workers to all come to picnic or to go to the bar after work? Or even get on a Zoom call to play some game, right? That stuff might seem, sort of, like a side part, maybe, you know, not urgent. But actually the socializing piece, what we call socialize before you organize, is really crucial. Because if workers don’t even know each other, sort of, in a deep way personally, and don’t have some sort of basic level of familiarity, then it’s actually very difficult to convince people to take some sort of collective political action. 

 So you need to get people to feel part of a collective oftentimes before you can get that collective to do anything politically relevant. And then the other tactic that I mentioned, it’s just worth reiterating is, I always recommend when I talk to workers who are trying to unionize, you know, can you get a petition at your workplace? 

 You know, this doesn’t have to be, you don’t don’t have to use the word union, which can be scary for some people, but find out what the issues are amongst your co-workers and see if you can get a majority of them to sign a petition. You know, even something as modest as like, we want the break room to be better stocked. Or, we want to have more flexibility on X, Y, Z thing. 

If you can get workers to do something as simple as that, then everything else becomes possible. And so, I do think part of it is when you come into deep organizing In places where there’s a lot of fear – you know, it’s a little bit different if you’re organizing outside the workplace, but particularly the workplace where fear is a real issue – then you have to start where people are at. 

I think that’s a big part of it. You have to really not jump ahead of yourself. You have to understand where people are at and figure out what is the very first thing. The most modest, but real step that individuals and groups can take. And when you identify that, that gets the ball rolling for bigger and better things. 

[00:32:20] Steve Grumbine: I appreciate that immensely. I mean, it puts the bullseye on it. You can’t do big things unless you can do small things. Let’s, give them a taste test. Let them flex their muscle. Let them see what it looks like to be in solidarity and to do something together. And that will beget other opportunities.  

You wrote another article that I thought was really powerful and I’d like you to, kind of, go through this. I mean, you’ve written a lot. You’re prolific, man. I just was shocked at how many things you’ve written out there. But in particular, this is a recent one here in September. It kind of piggybacks on all this stuff. 

And you talked about the new labor organizing model of EWOC. I’ve never even heard of EWOC, and I probably should have as much as I talk about union stuff. But this Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, let’s talk about this a little bit because I think this is interesting. Just the first sentence, “Interest in union and workplace organizing is high, but proactive workers have few opportunities to launch their own organizing drives.” Start from there, man 

[00:33:21] Eric Blanc: Sure. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or we call it EWOC for short, is a project that emerged to fill a gap. And that gap is that there’s millions and millions of workers who want to unionize. Most unions aren’t being proactive about giving them the tools necessary for them to start organizing and oftentimes say no to them when workers reach out. 

This is just very, very pervasive problem that workers reach out to a union and the union, for all the reasons I explained before, systematically and frequently will say no to workers for a variety of reasons. And so EWOC emerged at a moment of crisis. It emerged, literally, in March 2020. Right at the beginning of the pandemic.  Because, The workforce,  Keep in mind, just put yourself back in that moment, right? 

People were terrified about going into work that companies were forcing people to go in without PPE, [personal protective equipment] without sick time. And so you have all of these workers who all of a sudden started reaching out to the Bernie campaign to ask for help. And so I was a labor organizer for the Bernie campaign.  

And people just started reaching out from all these different industries, saying, literally, our company is forcing us to go in, what do we do? What can we do to fight back? And so EWOC emerged out of that moment where people from labor organizers from the Bernie campaign joined together with the Democratic Socialists of America [DSA], which is the biggest socialist organization in the U S, together with the United Electrical [Workers] Union, which is maybe the most longstanding Left union in the country, joined forces to found EWOC. At first it was just a Google form where workers could reach out to say, Hey, I need help. And then we’d connect people.   We knew the experienced organizers. We knew the workers reaching out for help, to give them support. 

And ever since then, it’s now mushroomed into something far bigger. We’ve had thousands and thousands of workers reach out, trained, over 5, 000, uh, workers in the regular bimonthly trainings we do. The basic process of EWOC right now is to support any worker in any industry who wants to organize. That most of the time means unionizing, but it also can mean something as simple as just fighting back for better wages or conditions. 

And so all you have to do, if you’re listening out there and you’re saying, Oh, maybe this sounds good. Maybe you’ve been thinking about organizing, or even just considering it. You just go to the website, which is http://www.organizedworkers.org and you fill out a form in which, you just say where you work and we’ll get back to you within seventy-two hours. 

And so you fill out a short form, and then what EWOC does is they’ll connect you to a volunteer, but experienced, worker-organizer who will then help you start organizing your co-workers. So that’s what EWOC does. It’s all of the things we’ve been talking about. It’s gonna give you a personalized support system so that you can start doing it. 

You don’t have to wait for an established union. We’ll help you connect to a union down the road because we do think, we encourage workers to get the resources they need. Sometimes workers decide to go independent. Most workers decide to affiliate. Well, you know, that’s up to workers. But we, we want workers to have power. 

And so what we’ll do is we will help you take the first steps towards unionization. We say that unionizing takes 100 steps. EWOC will help you take the first 50 of those steps. 

[00:36:30] Steve Grumbine: One of the things you mentioned in the article, though, is putting a heavy emphasis on, lean on volunteers as much as possible. And you know, volunteers are great, you love them. But volunteers are volunteers. And, after a while, the urgency of said issue . . . The urgency of, trying, You know, I think of it like, you’re on the beach, 

and if you ever watched that movie, Moana, there’s a scene where they’re trying to break out into the open sea but they can’t get past the coral reef. The waves just keep crashing and pushing the boat back and breaking up the boat. But once you get past the waves once you get past the coral reef, you’re out to the open sea, you can go. It just seems like getting past the coral reef is a real challenge with volunteers, in particular. Because It requires persistence to get over the reef. And with something as difficult as relying on unpaid staff, you’ve really got to have people that really believe in the situation to make that happen. 

 I’m interested in hearing a little bit more explanation on that if you wouldn’t mind.  

[00:37:40] Eric Blanc: Sure. I mean, the challenge you pose is real. But to be honest, we haven’t lacked for capacity for volunteers in EWOC for a couple reasons. First of all, as I mentioned before, we’ve been able to lean on volunteers from Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical. And there is something about, I think, having radical politics and feeling, sort of, a deep solidarity and commitment to making the world a better place that leads people to put in an inordinate amount of time to make the world better. And so, just think about the Bernie campaign in 2016, 2020. We really come out of that moment. And there were so much effervescence of volunteers. Think about all the people canvassing, door knocking, and all of that. 

And so that same energy has gotten channeled into EWOC, and some of the same structures to onboard people and things like that. So, the reality is there’s a generational dynamic, in which so many young people, Gen Z, Millennials are just very conscious of how evil the system is and just how much unnecessary human suffering it causes that they’re willing to, and eager to put in the work to turn things around. 

 And in particular, they’re eager to do that around labor organizing, because as you mentioned before, given how hard it is to make change, people understand that the labor movement is really our best hope, that if we can’t turn the labor movement around, then we’re not going to be able to win on any of the issues that we need. Whether it’s stopping the genocide in Gaza. Whether it’s climate change. Whether it’s just reversing economic and racial inequality. 

And so, I think that there’s a large number of people who understand this to be the task in front of us and are willing to volunteer. And what’s exciting about EWOC is we’re not just throwing people in who have no labor experience. Putting you in touch with people who’ve been organizing their own workplaces or helping organize other workplaces for years. 

And that is really what a movement is. So, in EWOC, for instance, workers who have unionized their workers at Barboncino, the first pizza place to unionize in New York City, we helped them win. And then they were so excited about unionizing that they went out and organized and unionized and help support a union effort, at the Nighthawk movie theater in New York. 

And so you can see how volunteers – there’s not like a, it’s not a zero sum game. the more organizing you have creates more volunteers. People win a union drive and it’s a snowball effect. And so EWOC is really built off of the snowball model in which everyone who gets involved with EWOC, we’re training up new people who are in turn training up new people, and it does have this exponential factor. And to me, that’s why it feels like a movement. and it’s, very exciting. 

[00:40:16] Steve Grumbine: is very exciting. I want to pivot now to your as to be released, yet to be released, book – We Are The Union: How Worker-To-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor And Winning Big. I have it preordered. It’s due out, apparently, in February of 2025. So it’s a little bit out there. 

What can you tell us about the book?  

[00:40:36] Eric Blanc:  book talks about a lot of the things we’ve been talking about over the last 45 minutes. And the The major argument of it is that the potential exists, at 

this moment and over the coming years, to organize tens of millions of workers. There’s, literally, tens of millions of workers who every poll have indicated that they would vote for a union tomorrow. 

And so, the question is, how do we make that potential a reality? And we need to make that potential reality. Because, otherwise, we’re screwed. And the argument is, as I mentioned before, is basically that the existing model of union organizing of most established unions can’t make that potential reality because it’s too staff-intensive. 

It relies too much on staff and there’s just not enough staff and not enough money to organize tens of millions of workers that way. So we need a new model. And my argument is that the new worker-to-worker model, which I, sort of, described earlier that’s come out of the Starbucks campaign. That’s come out of the United Auto Workers and things like this.  Um, is showing a new model for organizing that can be generalized across the economy. 

[00:41:32] Steve Grumbine: I guess the question is, you know, given that we’re coming up on up on time. What would you want people to really take out of this? That, maybe what we didn’t cover? High points? Is something that you feel would really, really make an impact? 

[00:41:47] Eric Blanc: Getting a copy of the book would be to organize their workplace. And to take that seriously as a possibility. A lot of people feel like the labor movement is something out there. You know. They support it. 

They want to see it grow. But they haven’t really in a deeply felt way, realized that they can. And that you should take the initiative at your own workplace to unionize. Any job can be a union job. It’s not just for blue collar workers. It’s not just in this or that part of the country. Any job can be a union job. 

And the responsibilities of people like folks listening to this interview and to all the work you do, is to take that initiative. if you realize that, there’s so many problems in the world. And if you feel sort of heartbroken about what you see every day, then, I just feel on a moral level. 

It’s our responsibility to be strategic about building the power necessary to defeat the billionaires that are destroying this world and so many people across it. And the labor movement is our best hope to do that because the labor movement has power. The labor movement. Is how we win and the labor movement is you, the labor movement is all of us. But that requires you taking the initiative. 

So if you’re, thinking about it, do it. We can support you through EWOC. So again, just, go to organizedworkers.org. Fill out the form and we’ll support you taking those steps towards organizing. It’s going to be, like people through you. That’s how we’re going to change the world. 

 And I’m optimistic, despite everything, that the labor movement is going to turn around its fate and that we’re going to transform this country in the process. 

[00:43:15] Steve Grumbine: Fantastic. I really, really, appreciate your time folks, aside from purchasing the book, which we’ll put links and everything in the show notes. Where can we find more of your work? And by the way, a lot of his work is on Jacobin, but where can we find more of your work, Eric? 

[00:43:30] Eric Blanc: Sure. I think the best place to follow my work is, subscribe to my free substack. It’s just called LABOR. If you go to laborpolitics.com , the other Substacks, labor politics, that I put up my writings. And I’m on Twitter. You just look me up, Eric Blanc. And then, yeah, in the book, We Are The Union. It’s going to be in February, but the pre order is up. Those are all good places to see what I’m up to and to get connected to the causes I’m trying to support. 

[00:43:56] Steve Grumbine: Fantastic. All right. Folks, I want to just thank you, Eric, for joining me today. I appreciate you making time. I know you’re very, very busy. I really do appreciate you making time for us here. On behalf of myself and my guests, Eric [Blanc], this is Macro N Cheese podcast. We are part of Real progressives, which is a nonprofit organization, 501(c)(3). 

We survive on your donations. So please consider coming to patreon.com forward slash real progressives. You can come to our website, real progressives. org. You can go to our Substack, which is, Realprogressives.substack. com, and you can also find us online. So with that, Eric, thank you so much for your time. Folks, on behalf of Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.  

Books: 

Blanc, Eric, We Are the Union, How Worker to Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, 

Burns, Joe Class Struggle Unionism