Episode 76: WE Are the Union

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Episode 76: WE Are the Union

Guest: Eric Blanc - Labor Organizer, Professor, and Author of "We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big"

Scott Aaron Rogers

Apr 11, 2025

Transcript

Episode 76: WE Are the Union

Guest: Eric Blanc - Labor Organizer, Professor, and Author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big

Full show notes at https://hoosleft.us/

Eric on Substack: https://www.laborpolitics.com/
His personal website: https://ericblanc.org/
Buy the book: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/we-are-the-union/paper

Welcome to the HoosLeft Podcast, a show about Indiana politics, history, and culture from the unapologetic perspective of the social democratic left. My name is Scott Aaron Rogers, and I’m recording from Bloomington.

So, as the disorganized American left and center try to piece together some sort of coherent resistance to the Trump mafia and its state-level capos like Mike Braun, one of the debates is whether put your energy into existing institutions or to build new ones. Many on the left have grown tired of the Democratic Party establishment’s corruption, cowardice, and complicity - telling Lucy they’re done trying to kick that football. Now, maybe I’m just a simple Charlie Brown-type, but I’m still on record arguing for working within the party - for a variety of reasons which I’ve outlined before (mostly because it’s already planted everywhere) - and I think we’re really gonna kick that ball this time. I have a good feeling about it.

Look, I understand those who seek to focus their energies elsewhere. But you still don’t want to reinvent the wheel. What about other centers of existing, institutionalized people power? How about labor unions? Well, the power of organized labor has significantly diminished over the last 40+ years. Total membership peaked in this country in 1979, but union density reached its zenith even before that - in the 1950’s - with about a third of American workers unionized.

The election of Ronald Reagan, and then his stunning decision to fire 11,000 union air traffic controllers in 1981, delivered a backbreaking blow to organized labor, the middle class, and the American Dream. Union members now constitute less than 10% of the workforce. But as much as I would like to blame Reagan for everything, the unions themselves bear some of the blame. Some of the bigger unions became bloated, corrupt bureaucracies that were unresponsive to the rank and file, and none focused on growing the movement so much as maintaining what they had.

Despite all this, there are glimmers of new labor militancy, and in sectors where workers had not previously unionized. With a new generation of labor organizers operating in new environments come new techniques, new lessons, and new models for organizing. My guest today talks all about it in his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.

Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, researching new workplace organizing, strikes, digital labor activism, and working-class politics.

A longtime labor activist, Blanc is an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which he helped co-found in March 2020. He directs The Worker to Worker Collaborative, a center to help unions and rank-and-file groups scale up their efforts by expanding their members’ involvement and leadership.

His writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society, New Labor Forum, and Labor Studies Journal as well as publications such as The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin. He’s also recently been doing the rounds on the podcast circuit - appearing on such outstanding programs as The Dig, Behind the News, and My Labor Radio, but we are grateful he’s slumming it here with us today.

In this conversation, we’ll talk all about the recent labor renaissance, how worker-to-worker organizing differs from the traditional model, and how technology has shaped the labor movement. We’ll also look at what the big established unions can learn from the new generation of organizers, and what lessons they can teach. Also, we’ll talk about ways you can get involved and how a little corporate espionage is a good time.

Real quick before we jump to the interview, please consider supporting HoosLeft with a paid subscription. This is an independent media project; I don’t paywall content; and I don’t rely on advertising. I depend on individuals like you. So please, if you find value in my work, go to HoosLeft.us and subscribe at the paid level - it’s only $5 a month, or $50 a year, to help me write more, research more, and organize more. I would like to dedicate my full time to you, this project, and Indiana’s future; but I need your financial support to do so.

And listen, I know things are uncertain right now, so there are other ways to help grow this community - by liking and sharing on social media, commenting, leaving reviews, providing feedback, and forwarding articles to your people. We are building a community of Hoosiers dedicated to making this state, and its government, work for all of us, not just the elite few.

Follow us on Facebook, Bluesky, YouTube, and TikTok at HoosLeft, and I’m personally at scottrog78 on Instagram, Threads, Twitter and Mastodon. Tell the others. Let’s build a radically-democratic Indiana together. Thanks again.

Now, here is my conversation with Eric Blanc

Things We Talked About:

Rutgers a “Pioneer in the Field” of Organized Labor Studies: https://smlr.rutgers.edu/about-smlr/smlrs-history/history-labor-education

Rutgers Faculty Went on Strike in 2023: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1170284149/rutgers-university-faculty-strike-ends-tentative-deal

Even the Frat Bros Supported the Strike: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/12iql38/solidarity_comes_in_many_forms_even_from/

Federal Workers' Unions Fight Trump Admin: https://www.afge.org/publication/unions-sue-trump-administration-over-move-to-bust-federal-employee-unions/

Starbucks Workers United: https://sbworkersunited.org/our-story/

Latest Between Starbucks and Their Workers: https://www.nwpb.org/2025/01/28/starbucks-and-its-workers-union-still-havent-reached-a-collective-bargaining-agreement/

What Is Salting: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-salting-organizing-tactic

Salt Now: http://bit.ly/saltnow

Starbucks United an SEIU Affiliate: https://workersunited.org/

Amazon Workers Join with Teamsters: www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/amazon-workers-at-seven-facilities-go-on-strike-as-teamsters-press-for-labor-contract

The News Guild Affiliates with CWA: https://newsguild.org/

Trump Administration Ends Collective Bargaining For TSA Workers: https://apnews.com/article/collective-bargaining-agreement-tsa-homeland-security-e3eb1d5e0ae8e1b4a6fdb87cd7f6bd39

Shawn Fain Calls for 2028 General Strike: https://inthesetimes.com/article/may-day-2028-general-strike-working-class

UAW Includes Academic Workers: https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206209107/united-auto-workers-union-uaw-membership-grad-students-big-3-strike

Save Public Services: https://go.savepublicservices.com/

Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee: https://workerorganizing.org/

Once again, that was labor organizer, professor, and author Eric Blanc.

In 2020, COVID showed many workers how little their bosses cared for their health and safety, so these essential workers began demanding PPE, hazard pay, and appropriate staffing. Blanc and his co-founders launched the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to equip them with the resources, the networks, and the training they need to win their demands. Though the acute phase of the pandemic has long passed, EWOC continues to help workers organize. Labor’s need for material support is evergreen.

Now, I wasn’t in the room when this committee was founded, so I don’t know if the acronym was chosen intentionally, but when I hear EWOC, I immediately think of Star Wars. And, coincidence or not, I think those Ewoks offer a valuable lesson about solidarity, so let’s visit the evergreen forest moon of Endor.

Yeah, Return of the Jedi. That last battle. You’ve got the slick, well-armed Rebels — your white collar insurgents with their plans, their code names, their high-tech ships. And then you’ve got the locals: the Ewoks - three foot tall teddy bear Muppets, armed with sticks and stones and a deep, generational loathing of fascist occupation.

And together? They take down the most powerful empire in the galaxy.

That’s not just a heartwarming sci-fi story — that’s the union playbook that will beat OUR fascist occupiers. Right there on screen.

The Empire is exactly what it always is: a bloated, top-down machine of extraction and repression. Run by fragile old men in robes who believe they’ll rule forever, enforced by disposable soldiers, and powered by the assumption that no one will dare fight back. That the oppressed will stay divided — that the little people will stay in their places, bickering over who gets to suffer more politely.

But that’s not what happens. The Rebels and the Ewoks — the strategic and the scrappy — realize they’ve got a common enemy. And when they move together, it’s over.

See, here’s the thing the bosses, the billionaires, the petty tyrants of our world never want you to internalize:

A blue collar or a white collar is STILL A COLLAR.

You might work behind a counter, or behind a desk. You might wear steel-toe boots or a badge on a lanyard. You might punch a clock or you might punch a keyboard, but if you don’t own the place? You probably wanna punch the boss. You’re on the same damn side. Different tools, same chains.

That’s what the future of labor organizing must understand. That’s what solidarity demands. That the people who earn a paycheck — all of them — realize that they are all being exploited by the same empire, just in different ways.

At one point during the battle, Harrison Ford’s swaggering Han Solo reluctantly accepts assistance from a tiny Ewok, saying “well, short help is better than no help at all.” And yeah, maybe at first, industrial workers, hospitality workers, tech workers, and academic workers might think the others wouldn’t understand their struggle, that there’s nothing they could bring to the fight. But our skills complement each other and there’s a place for everybody in the resistance. Every time a CEO gets dragged to the bargaining table by a coalition of people they thought would never talk to each other? That’s another imperial walker going down in the woods.

The Empire doesn’t fall because someone files the right paperwork, or if we vote harder. It falls because the people it depends on — to code the systems, to clean the floors, to ship the packages, to keep the whole rotten machine humming — stop playing along.

According to no less authoritative source than Wookiepedia, George Lucas always intended that a primitive race should overthrow the Empire in what was intended at that time to be the final episode, a lesson that even the most seemingly overmatched group can overcome great power by working together.

Do not underestimate a unified working class. If you do — don’t be surprised when the forest rises up and burns your empire to the goddamn ground.

What do you think? Let us know. Reach out on social media - I’m on Facebook, Bluesky, YouTube and TikTok at hoosleft and on most other social media sites at scottrog78. You can also email me at scott@hoosleft.us.

Thank you for listening and thanks again to our guest Eric Blanc. Subscribe to his Substack, Labor Politics, and his book We Are the Union is available from University of California Press wherever you get books, but preferably from your local independent bookshop. After that purchase, if your budget allows and you value this work, how about a paid subscription over at HoosLeft.US, where you can also find my entire archive. Hit me up on social media with your feedback, tips, ideas, and concerns. Please forward the show to a friend and have them to forward it to another friend. Let’s keep building this project - and a truly democratic state - one conversation at a time. Until the next one, this has been the HoosLeft podcast. I’m Scott Aaron Rogers. Love each other, Indiana.