Practical

What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This is the lens where labor stops being history and theory and becomes the campaign down the street. The last several years have been the most active period for new organizing in a generation: Amazon, Starbucks, graduate workers, nurses, teachers, auto, and the return of the strike. The materials here are meant to connect that wave to the room’s own workplaces and to the concrete question of what it takes to build power where you work.

Anchor questions

Who is organizing near you, at work or in their industry, and what are they up against?
What is the difference between a union that mobilizes the already-convinced and one that organizes everyone? Why does it matter?
When Amazon or Starbucks fights a union drive, what exactly do they do, and how do workers answer it?
What does it take, concretely, to move coworkers from private complaint to collective action?
What can a strike do that a petition cannot? What does a strike require to work?
If there is no boss to bargain with, if you sell fruit on a corner, clean houses, or wait at a day-labor pickup, who do you make your demands of? What is the equivalent of a strike?
Your landlord takes a third of what you earn. Is that a site of struggle in the way the job is? What would organizing there look like?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. Many labor podcasts publish a free main feed and paywall only bonus episodes, so the core content is free for a group.

Journalism and reporting

Labor Notes (1979 to present). The rank-and-file labor magazine and organizing project, reporting inventive organizing tactics and contract campaigns “to put the movement back in the labor movement.” The core practical outlet, and the publisher of the handbook below. Free: labornotes.org
More Perfect Union (2021 to present). A nonprofit video-journalism newsroom producing short, shareable explainers on labor disputes, gig work, and corporate accountability from a working-class lens. Excellent for session openers. Free: perfectunion.us

Films and documentaries

Union (Stephen Maing and Brett Story, 2024, 90 min). A cinema-verite chronicle of the Amazon Labor Union’s grassroots drive to organize the Staten Island JFK8 warehouse under Chris Smalls. The definitive on-the-ground film of a contemporary campaign, and it streams free through PBS POV with discussion guides and lesson plans. Free: pbs.org
Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1976, 103 min). The Academy Award-winning verite record of the 1973 to 1974 Brookside coal miners’ strike in Kentucky, filmed on the picket line under real threat of violence. A touchstone for what a strike costs and demands. On the Criterion Channel or for rental, and free with a library card on Kanopy where available. criterion.com
Food Chains (Sanjay Rawal, 2014, 83 min). About 195,000 views. Follows the Coalition of Immokalee Workers through a hunger strike against Publix, in the campaign that built the Fair Food Program: farmworkers, not the supermarket, write and police the standards, and the brands are bound by contract to fund them. The best screening companion to the worker-driven material below, and a model that owes nothing to the NLRB. Made in close cooperation with the CIW and firmly on the workers’ side. Free with ads on the official Popcornflix channel, in English and Spanish: youtube.com/watch?v=6vw-qTCW8fo

Practical handbooks and how-to material

Secrets of a Successful Organizer (Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, and Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes, 2016). Forty-seven concrete practices for building power on the job, from mapping a workplace to running an escalating campaign. The book is for sale, but all of the handouts, exercises, and the trainer’s guide are free PDF downloads in English and Spanish, and amount to a ready-made workshop curriculum. Free materials: labornotes.org
Rules for Radicals (Saul D. Alinsky, 1971). The foundational community-organizing tactics text, best used as a debated classic to read critically alongside the whole-worker approach of McAlevey and Labor Notes rather than as gospel. No borrowable copy exists; every free text online is an unauthorized upload. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. Alinsky discussing the book with Studs Terkel the year it came out is free in the WFMT archive: studsterkel.wfmt.com

Organizing where there is no employer

Most of the material above assumes a workplace, a boss, and a legal path to a union election. Most workers in the world have none of the three. The majority of employment on earth is informal, and in the United States domestic workers and farmworkers were written out of the National Labor Relations Act at its founding, a bargain struck with segregationist Southern senators. These organizations did not wait for the law. They built other leverage.

The Only School We Have: Learning from Organizing Experiences Across the Informal Economy (Dave Spooner and Chris Bonner, WIEGO, 2012). A 124-page handbook drawn from what informal workers’ organizations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America actually did: how to recruit, how to stay democratic, and how to negotiate when there is no employer across the table and no labor board to certify you. WIEGO is the research arm of that movement rather than an outside observer of it. Free: wiego.org
Collective Negotiations for Informal Workers (Chris Bonner, WIEGO and StreetNet, 2011). Number 4 in a series of resource books for organisers, and the most directly useful here: it works through how you bargain with a city council, a market authority, or a contractor. Co-produced by StreetNet, the international federation of street vendors, so the organizations described wrote it. Free: wiego.org
Domestic Worker Organizing Toolbox (National Domestic Workers Alliance, 2023). NDWA’s own eleven-module curriculum, from theory of change through membership structure, campaign strategy, and political education. The political education module is ready to run as-is, which makes this the most turnkey item in the lens. Published by the union itself. Free: organizing.domesticworkers.org
Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), India (International Labour Office, 2013). A 33-page case study, drawn as a chapter from a larger ILO volume, of the union of roughly two million women who are street vendors, home-based workers, and waste pickers rather than employees. The clearest short account of the union-plus-cooperative model SEWA pioneered. The ILO is a tripartite UN agency, so read this as an institutional outsider’s account and pair it with SEWA’s own site. Free: ilo.org
Janice Fine (b. 1959), Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (EPI Briefing Paper 159, 2005). Fine’s own condensation of her book, mapping the worker center as a form and reaching the honest conclusion that these centers win on wage theft and dignity but struggle to build durable bargaining power. Read it as the argument against romanticizing the model. Free: files.epi.org
What is Worker-driven Social Responsibility? (WSR Network, 2024). The claim is simple and sharp: worker organizations, not brands, must design, monitor, and enforce the programs meant to protect them, backed by legally binding agreements rather than corporate promises. One site carries the Fair Food Program, the Bangladesh Accord signed after Rana Plaza killed 1,134 garment workers, and Milk with Dignity. Founded out of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ experience and openly hostile to conventional corporate social responsibility, which it treats as a proven failure. Free: wsr-network.org

Tenant unions and organizing outside the workplace

If the wage is one relation worth organizing, rent is another. A landlord takes a fixed share of what a worker earns and can evict them; a building is a shop floor with the same logic of collective refusal, and the rent strike is the strike. Groups running this section should expect the room to have more experience as tenants than as union members.

Tenants Association Handbook (Los Angeles Tenants Union, 2020). Twenty-one pages on building a tenants association in one building, concrete enough to work through in a single session. Committed to the autonomous tenant-union model, organizing from below and outside the nonprofit service-provider frame. Free: atun-rsia.org
How to Start a Tenants Union (Tenants Together, 2024). A four-step guide from core team to outreach to first assembly to affiliation, with real detail on planning the first meeting. The gentlest on-ramp here, and a good pairing with the more militant LA handbook. A California statewide organization, more coalitional and policy-facing than the autonomous unions. Free: tenantstogether.org
Building a Citywide Tenant Union in Kansas City (Andrew Willis Garces, The Forge, 2022). How KC Tenants went from nothing in 2019 to a citywide union that won a tenants’ bill of rights, right to counsel in eviction court, and a $50 million housing bond, told through founding organizer Tara Raghuveer. It is useful precisely because it refuses to claim a trick: the method was disciplined base-building over years. The Forge is a publication by and for organizers, so this is the organizers’ own telling. Free: forgeorganizing.org

Podcasts and interviews with organizers

Working People (Maximillian Alvarez, 2016 to present). First-person interviews with rank-and-file workers about their jobs, struggles, and organizing, from warehouses to rail to graduate-student strikes. The best “workers in their own words, today” audio for this school. Free main feed. inthesetimes.com
The Valley Labor Report (Jacob Morrison and Adam Keller, 2020 to present). Alabama’s union talk-radio show, with recurring segments like “Last Week in Southern Labor” and “Boss Watch.” Valuable for a view of organizing in the South, where union density is lowest. Free: tvlr.fm
Belabored (Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chen, Dissent, 2013 to 2023). A biweekly news-and-analysis show interviewing journalists, academics, and organizers about strikes and campaigns across sectors. The back catalog is a deep, searchable record of the last decade of labor struggle. Free: podcasts.apple.com

Explainers and case studies on video

“Why Corporate America Hates Unions” (Second Thought, 2022). Roughly 18 minutes, about 742,000 views. Walks through union-busting tactics and the recent Amazon, Starbucks, and REI wins. A strong practical opener. youtube.com/watch?v=yv0QJVqovDo
“Starbucks Tried to Crush Its Baristas. What Happened Next Will Shock You” (More Perfect Union, 2024). Roughly 12 minutes, about 350,000 views. Follows baristas forcing Starbucks toward the bargaining table. A concrete case study of a live campaign. youtube.com/watch?v=w9V-o8ckKyg
“We Just Unionized Amazon” (Democracy Now!, 2022). Roughly 28 minutes, about 183,000 views. A long interview with Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer on how the first Amazon union won. A deep companion to the film Union. youtube.com/watch?v=82UEYmJs0jQ
“How To Start A Union: Step By Step” (More Perfect Union, 2022). Roughly 13 minutes, about 67,000 views. Chefs Sohla and Ham El-Waylly walk through one-on-ones, going public, and bargaining. A direct how-to that pairs with the Labor Notes handbook. youtube.com/watch?v=tok00IDVTz4

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially case studies and accounts from groups that have run local sessions, and material on organizing outside the workplace, in tenant unions, and in the informal economy.

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