Organizing

The Art Of Organizing

June 9, 2025 Brian O. Shepherd, Portside. Organize! Labor Movement, Organizing, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Organizing isn’t just a science, it’s also an art. Normally the latter is passed on through phone calls, debriefs, meetings, and late-night shit talk. This is an attempt to share with the next generation of union organizers some of those lessons learned along the way, some in victory, some in defeat. None of this is new. None of this is mine. I certainly don’t have the answers, I just know it’s something that I’ve given my life to over the past quarter of a century. The art requires staying close to the ground where people are—and that’s messy. It requires us to relate to others, take chances, innovate, all while asking the hard questions of others and ourselves. All of it is simple. None of it is easy.

Municipalism, Economic Development, And Participatory Democracy

October 23, 2024 Austin Cole, Black Agenda Report. Create! Democracy, Organizing, Participatory Democracy

In this first part of the conversation, Nick lays out his thoughts on a large range of topics: definitions of economic development and how to think about expanding it to serve all people in a more holistic manner; the fallacy of jobs-only economic development programs and measurements; radical municipalism that can form and utilize people-centered institutions; what true participatory democracy might look like; how to make the public sector work for “the people” and why organizers should get involved in local/municipal governance ; and governing from a place of radical inclusiveness, collective wisdom, and a shared responsibility.

Gig Organizing 101

October 6, 2024 David Rovics, This Week with David Rovics. Organize! Aaron Swartz, Art, Community, culture, Music, Organizing

The great Seattle-based songwriter, Jim Page, was coming to the east coast back in the mid-1990's. I was living in Boston then, and offered to organize a gig. I was already well into my twenties, but I had never done such a thing before. Jim was and is fairly well-known in Ireland, with one of Ireland's most revered musicians, Christy Moore, having recorded a number of his songs, one brilliant example of which became a real anthem for anti-nuclear sentiment in Ireland, "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Russian Roulette." Boston had (and has) a large population of people who were born and raised in Ireland, and a much larger population of people of Irish descent.

How Prisoner-Led Organizing Saved My Life

July 31, 2023 Darrell Jackson, Waging Nonviolence. Strategize! Activism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Organizing, Prisoners

To survive in prison, inmates usually accept a “convict code” that demands toughness and makes us wary of others. To thrive in prison, I learned to embrace organizing for social change and discovered the rewards in thinking of others first. Contributing to a collective has helped me find deeper purpose in my life, even while serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Like most transformations in our lives, this didn’t happen overnight. My introduction to organizing was the Black Prisoners Caucus, or BPC, at Clallam Bay Corrections Center in Washington state.

North American Wobblies Hold 2022 Organizing Summit

October 24, 2022 It's Going Down. Organize! Illinois, IWW, Organizing, Worker Rights and Jobs

Chicago, Illinois - On the first weekend of October, Wobblies from across North America converged on the grounds of a Marriott hotel in suburban Chicago. The plan for the two-day summit came in the form of several workshops solicited by North America IWW’s Organizing Department Board and suggested by attendees. A total of fourteen Wobblies presented on topics ranging from nonprofits, to tipping, to interviewing IWW members about their organizing. The first workshop I attended was a “Grievance Sort and March on the Boss,” facilitated by Jenni and Louisa of the Organizer Training Committee. We were assigned to small groups of four or five and given a range of grievances, from the mundane (“I don’t like the music that plays at work”) to the potentially life-altering (“my boss makes us work faster and faster regardless of safety”).

Learn It, Do It, Teach It

April 28, 2022 Stephanie Basile, Brittany Carloni, and Andrew Pantazi, Labor Notes. Organize! CWA, Labor Movement, Organizing, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Over the last five years, in big pro-union cities and small Southern towns, more than 7,000 workers in 145 shops have organized with the NewsGuild, a sector of the Communications Workers (CWA). After years of layoffs, buyouts, and pay cuts, workers across an entire industry seemed ready to organize. There was no way our union could hire enough staff organizers to keep up. So we built a member-led movement that could grow fast. Rank-and-file members, many of them fresh off their own organizing campaigns, answer emails and calls from workers at non-union shops, train new organizing committees, track assessments of support, win certification elections, and prepare workers for brutal first-contract campaigns.

Winning Against The Odds: The 32BJ SEIU Organizing Model

April 26, 2022 Rob Hill and Stuart Eimer, New Labor Forum. Organize! Organizing, Transportation, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Over twenty-five years have passed since the AFL-CIO New Voice movement urged unions to dedicate 20-30 percent of their budgets to organizing. Despite recent high-profile victories by the Writers Guild in digital media, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in home health care and at Starbucks, and the Transit Workers at JetBlue, most unions have not heeded the call to organize, and the labor movement has continued to shrink.[1] Facing this decline, unions have turned much of their attention to labor law reform, hoping to address notable weaknesses in U.S. labor law that impede organizing success.[2] Winning the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would be a game changer in this regard but the PRO Act will not pass without organized pressure and militancy from non-union workers demanding unions.

How To Build Fierce And Worker-Centered Unions

March 31, 2022 Paige Oamek, In These Times. Organize! Organizing, Unions, UNITE, Worker Rights

In the early 2000s, UNITE was a small, scrappy union that put an immense amount of resources into new organizing. They had small teams of organizers who flew around the country and lived in hotels and motels and spent their life organizing. I think it’s really important for unions to be oriented in that way, to have just about every arm focused around new organizing and building the labor movement and having militant sites. At the same time, we have to really think critically about the role of organizers. Organizing can be such a science: We assess things, map workplaces, determine our tactics. Our tactics add up to be our strategy. It’s all very methodical and stripped of emotion. I write about standing up in front of the group and telling the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which is something organizers in UNITE get trained to tell.

Building Collective Power Within Our Organizations

December 29, 2021 Jen Disla, Organizing Upgrade. Organize! Accountability, Organizing, Transformation, Trust

As we imagine an alternative society, we should think about how we will create something more collective, something where all people have a voice. Most of us come from a tradition where a select few make large impactful decisions for social justice organizations. Organizations have practices that at times feel inadequate and inaccessible for all. How do we move more towards a democratic collective process? These questions come to mind as many movement organizations are wrestling with creating collective democratic power internally. How can processes be more transparent in the organization—and how do we balance that with some need for confidentiality? How do we balance legal obligations/liabilities and honesty?

People In Prison Organize Collectively For Survival

December 11, 2021 Kelly Hayes, Truthout. Organize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, mental health, Mutual Aid, Organizing

On this show, we talk about how to build the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. When we have talked about the rise of fascism, and how to fight it, I have often made the point that we have a lot to learn from prison organizers, who operate under the most fascistic conditions in the United States. But amid this pandemic rollercoaster of hope, disappointment and uncertainty, I feel like we also have a lot to learn from imprisoned and formerly incarcerated organizers about how to sustain ourselves and each other psychologically during hard times. So, today we are going to hear from Monica Cosby, a formerly incarcerated Chicago organizer whose insights about mutual aid as a form of social life support are invaluable right now. We are also going to hear from Alan Mills, the executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center about the fight for mental health care in Illinois prisons, how COVID has affected the situation, and what we can do about it.

Healthy Group Accountability: Learning How To Learn

August 24, 2021 Michael Strom And Joshua Kahn Russell, Organizing Upgrade. Organize! Accountability, Nonprofits, Organizing

A team of facilitators from our organization, The Wildfire Project, was invited to support a base-building group whose staff was absolutely burnt out. Our first workshop brought their staff together with a volunteer leadership team (from their base) who, until then, had been minimally engaged. Staff shared their overwhelm and laid out their workload. It was clear that unless the whole group took collective ownership and responsibility for the direction of the organization, it would collapse. We ended that first session together on the other side of that breakthrough: feeling grateful, connected, and on-purpose. But the more difficult work began when we came back together to make that vision of shared leadership real.

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