Our Movement Strategies Haven’t Worked

Our Movement Strategies Haven’t Worked– Here’s One That Does

Written by SP Editor

Not long ago, workers in Philadelphia marred Whole Foods’ perfect unionbusting record and won the first representation election at any of their stores in the US. Baristas at so many cafes in Philly have organized with Workers’ United’s Local 80 that the city now has America’s highest union density in that industry.

Labor activists (me included!) are convinced that Philly's Local 80 and the Whole Foods victory can be traced directly to an experiment called Philly Workers for Dignity. We are also convinced that the lessons from this experiment’s successes and failures point to a viable path forward for the movement in this period of deep reaction. With the benefit of hindsight and additional organizing experiences, we’re convinced that the return on investment for this kind of organizing is unmatched.

Here, I present an account of what went right and wrong during Dignity’s life from 2018-2020. From there, I discuss our efforts to make sense of its collapse and the wider ebb on the left in that pivotal year. I then zoom out and make the case for several principles tested against the experiences in 30 organizing projects with which I am familiar, often intimately.

Dignity was a workers’ organization created by Philly Socialists, but in keeping with our strategic outlook, it was independent of the socialist group. We organized via wage theft campaigns, policy advocacy, trainings and connections with unions, and union organizing campaigns, all of which were unified by neighborhood meetings, doorknocking, and tabling. The point was to organize any worker willing to join regardless of whether we would push for a collective bargaining agreement, but also to push for such agreements in workplaces established unions just would not go.

We punched above our weight. AFSCME UNITY… We had mature organizing committees at six companies when COVID hit. At one, we forced the company to pay sick leave to virtually 100% of the staff they laid off. We lost our first NLRB election in a tie. We built a citywide Barista Council… When Dignity folded in 2020, workers at Korshak Bagels and Greenline Cafes had been organized with one winning their union.

The ferment of activity Dignity was able to create—the opportunities for learning, the social cohesion created by building a shared organizational identity—leveled up activists more quickly and more effectively than remotely based organizing or traditional union organizing campaigns. It provided an organizational structure that allowed for people to continue to grow even if their individual campaigns failed.

As Local 80 organizer Eli Kastempowski puts it, Dignity is “one billion percent” responsible for the organizing surge in Philly cafes. Leaders of contract fights got their start in campaigns there. (Baristas from across the city met each other through its work.) Training materials continue to circulate.

There may be other theories as to why the committee we built at Whole Foods in 2020 was the first to break through Amazon’s defenses, or why the cafe scene in Philly is so much further ahead of the rest of the country. Some say that barista organizing is traceable to their demographic status–highly educated and downwardly mobile, and indeed it is. The demographic question is central. But this alone does not explain why Philly is exceptional. Others point to the union density of Philadelphia as a whole. It is indeed the 11th most union dense of metro areas with a population of a million or more and 51st among all metro areas, but that does not explain why it is the most unionized of the cafe sector. Nor does it explain why a Philly Whole Foods was the first to break through, as opposed to one in a metro area with even higher union density than Philadelphia.

If objective factors alone were enough to explain why some drives succeed and others don't, there'd be little reason to investigate them. But if subjective factors are relevant, our movement should learn from them. We don’t control the current or the wind, but we can control how we steer.

Admittedly, this is just one organizer’s take. I’m not an academic. I played a central role in Dignity, its six advanced workplace organizing campaigns, and an earlier Philly Socialists linked effort, the Philadelphia Tenants Union. The trajectory of Philly Socialists itself, as well as that of our other flagship project, the Cedar Andreu Iglesias Garden, informs my views. I have also spent time as a labor union staffer. I originated a Membership Coordinator position with PASNAP, revived several chapters of the formerly SEIU affiliated Local 100 in New Orleans, and worked briefly as an organizer for National Nurses United where I observed a preventable loss in Denver. While in New Orleans, I worked with ACORN founder Wade Rathke on several organizing experiments outside Local 100 and was able to learn from several of ACORN International’s affiliates. I am an amateur student of labor history and have gobbled up much of the big labor discourse of the past ten years.

The essential principles I came to believe in are:

We have to build in place, not all over the place.
Zoom = Doom.
“Meet workers where they’re at” but literally, in their homes, and never stop.
The highly educated are uranium.
Deal with, don’t defer to, existing unions.

I make a case for each of these points. Dispersed, remote organizing is a colossal waste of time and energy, while on the other hand, people are desperate for community and will jump at the chance to join groups wherever they live. Connecting primarily via Zoom, group chats, and email chains simply cannot generate sufficient emotional bonds and energy to move people into the risky actions required by organizing. We have to, instead, aggressively double down on house visits–more and more workers spend more and more of their time at home. We also have to treat the highly educated as uranium—powerful, but requiring severe constraints and changes in order to prevent them from poisoning collectives. And finally, established unions should not simply be the beneficiaries of our organizing. They should not be approached with deference, as though they know best how to organize because they have professional organizers, or as though they are the link to the mystical working-class. Rather, it should be the opposite–they are struggling to avoid annihilation and must be pushed and challenged by our instigations and organizations.

These are “rules” that don’t guarantee success, but give us hope for it, and help us avoid the things that I am convinced guarantee failure.

Having made my case for these, I then present a time-tested template for an organizing model–unions in the community– that would begin to address central questions plaguing our movement. Questions like, how should ideologically motivated people who want to organize spend their limited time? How can the militant minority of highly educated working-class people bridge the gap to other segments of the class, rather than pushing them into reactionary backlash? How can we make sure that the skills acquired by that minority are not wasted when individual drives inevitably fail? How can organized labor itself become more relevant to the working class as a whole?

The answer boils down to this: we should focus our energies on the creation of geographically bounded organizations, unions in the community, that:

are open to all workers within set neighborhood boundaries;
meet in person;
do consistent outreach to ordinary people in the area that include visits in people’s homes;
attack issues at all levels of workplace and community organizing;
offer varied levels of potential commitment corresponding with the intensity of those issues/campaigns, and;
strictly forbid online organizing.

This approach stands to achieve overlapping goals: catalyzing new organizing by creating systematic social momentum around it, building up a confident cadre of organizers and supporters at various levels of ability, creating a structure that can nurture the militant minority through campaigns’ ups and downs, and linking people across various unions to spur them to take bolder action.

It is the best approach I can see that might let our movement cut through the knot tied by our society’s main disorganizing forces: educational polarization and the capture of social life by smartphones. It also has the advantage of forcing us to act outside the basically hopeless bounds set by the NLRB system.

Certainly, there are other answers on offer. We can keep fighting for labor law reform as we’ve done since 1947. We can keep trying to take over unions through the rank-and-file wars of attrition. We can keep trying to convince cautious union leadership to revive the strike. We can keep pushing that same leadership to free up more of their vast holdings to hire armies of new organizers.

But those are all distant goals dependent on unpredictable upsurges of social movements. On the other hand, an individual DSA chapter could begin incubating a Dignity-style organization tomorrow. A brave union local could fund one with relative pennies. A philanthropist willing to part with $100,000 in experimental start-up capital could hire an organizer or two and get rolling now.

Others in the labor movement don’t believe massive reform is needed, they believe unions just need to step up and do more of what’s proven to work to win union elections. They need to pump more resources into organizing more workers. But the central obstacle to this lies within unions’ very structure. Hamilton Nolan puts it well: “the overwhelming internal political incentive of any union’s leadership is to serve the needs of current members.” He writes:

…[T]his ensures that new organizing — which is to say, spending the dues money of current members on work that benefits people who are not members — will always lack a natural internal political constituency inside of unions, other than the minority of people who are ideologically motivated by a belief in the labor movement.

This might be the most generous explanation for the dysfunction at the heart of most of our unions. Speak with any professional union organizer who is good at what they do off the record and you will uncover horror stories of petty or paranoid bosses squelching or sabotaging promising campaigns, reallocating staff irrationally, making high-handed and destructive tactical decisions….and the staffer being completely unable to do anything about it. Across the movement, this is the rule, not the exception. But even assuming the best and being most generous to the unions as they are, Nolan concludes that “what we need is a new structure that can make new organizing happen without being held back by the internal politics of unions.” However, although Nolan believes such a structure would require a vast scale and billions of dollars, we are effectively outlining just such a structure that people can begin building tomorrow.

What about pumping more resources into the few unions who are doing good organizing work, steadily notching victories one brutal battle at a time? Unfortunately, this won’t change the dynamics within the labor movement nor will it scale up fast enough. Eric Blanc has done the calculations and estimates that, at the current costs of organizing new members, even if labor unions were to put 30% of their financial holdings into new organizing–a basically inconceivable possibility–it would only get us back up to 2015 levels of unionization. That’s why he is rightly looking for a new model in We Are the Union.

Indeed, Blanc's important new study and argument for where labor ought to focus demands a response. Blanc’s work is precisely the kind we need more of– looking into what works, what doesn't, who's behind successful organizing, with specific actionable steps interested people can take. He's absolutely correct that workers need to have organizing tools ready to hand so organized labor can grow more quickly. His account has been embraced by the labor literati and reform leaders of our most militant unions.

That's why it is particularly important at this moment to make the case that he is wrong. Blanc believes the critical reorientation unions should make is away from “staff intensive organizing” toward a “worker to worker organizing.” In this “new model,” workers do more of the tasks traditionally associated with staff organizers, specifically aided by “digital tools,” “generational radicalization,” and the now moot “government policy” of the Biden NLRB.

The problem, however, is that if both paid and volunteer organizers end up using the same approach (and Blanc says they should), and if both paid and unpaid organizers come from the same small demographic pool, there is a similar ceiling that both “models” have. Having worked in both all-volunteer and professional contexts, I’m convinced that the critical question is not whether unions mobilize the radicalized as paid or volunteer labor. The question is how the segment of the class drawn to union organizing at all can succeed in organizing outside our comfortable redoubts–universities, media and tech– and connect with the wider class, rather than help push it into reactionary backlash.

What Blanc celebrates, and what is all too common among the left and labor reformers, is what I call the “Digital Field of Dreams” approach– if we build it, they will come. The idea is to “support” anyone who comes in the door via intake form or webinar and give them the tools they need to make something happen.

These practices are doomed to fail and stand to deepen the problems associated with the “Brahminization” of the labor movement and left. Blanc’s model also encourages pointless deviations from the time-honored organizing methods for winning majorities within specific workplaces. Additionally, it is totally reliant on the NLRB process and the battle for shop-by-shop exclusive representation.

By contrast, the model of bounded, place-based organizing rooted in face-to-face rituals gives us a hope for making headway with the wider class.

Now, to be clear, I don’t believe we are or have been in a period marked by “explosive” growth, “waves” of new organizing, or any such. If we’re clear-eyed and realistic, we can acknowledge that the decline of unionism has proceeded apace despite the heroic skirmishes we’ve been able to win in our retreat. I don't believe we have “beating the billionaires” on the short-term horizon.

What we can hope for is to build leadership in wider layers of the class and, crucially, to transform the politics of the highly educated to better reflect the needs of that class. So that when the winds shift in our direction, we are prepared to take advantage of and lead it rather than squander opportunities as we did from Occupy to Bernie to BLM.

Digital “Field of Dreams” Approach - open to all online comers, building through Zoom meetings and digital communication	Community union approach - Place based anchor, face to face rituals
Dignity’s late period	Dignity’s early period
Philly Tenants Union 2020 (Rent Strike)	Philly Tenants Union 2015-2020
Philly food delivery company	Cake Life
Dollar Store Workers United	STEP UP LA Dollar Store Organizing
	UNITE HERE DC Tenant Organizing
New Orleans barista victories	Local 80
Workers Organizing and Support Center	Local 100 new locals
ATUN	Stomp Out Slumlords
Marxist Center	Philly Socialists
UAW Alabama Mercedes Campaign	Chris Smalls’ JFK8 victory
EWOC/Organise Now	ACORN US/UK
OUR Wal-Mart	Wal-mart Workers Association

Inspirations for Dignity

We took inspiration from the short-lived Wal-mart Workers Association, a 2004 multi-union experiment in organizing a union outside of the NLRB process or card check. In We Are the Union, Blanc asks, “why not use labor’s access to a huge amount of voter data to call or knock the doors of every voter who works at Amazon, Walmart, and FedEx to generate leads for ambitious national unionization campaigns at these companies?” In 2004, UFCW, SEIU, and ACORN did just that, albeit focused in the then politically pivotal I-4 corridor of Central Florida.

Directed by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, it was a proof-of-concept effort for the “majority unionism” approach he argued labor as a whole ought to take. “The heart of my argument was…. we needed to create organizational formations that allowed workers–and not employers–to decide that they wanted a union or some form of worker association. In fact, we needed to take employers out of the equation completely, build the organization on a membership basis, put the members into action, and eschew an election or bargaining regime, until we had the organizational strength sufficiently established for the employers to sue for peace and stability.” (Nuts and Bolts)

This would be the principle behind the Wal-Mart Workers Association. “We were not going to file for a representation election with the NLRB. Ever. Nor were we going to take any steps to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. Joining…the organization meant that a Walmart worker understood this was going to be their organization and to win they were going to have to ‘push and shove’ within the company to get the job done.” (Nuts and Bolts, 481).

A team of organizers deployed down to Florida. They created massive lists of low-income people in the area and autodialed them with a robocall asking whether the person worked at Wal-Mart, and then whether they would be interested in finding out more about their rights and benefits. Organizers would then go to the people’s homes who responded positively and have organizing conversations. According to Rathke, 60% of the people organizers managed to reach signed up then and there for dues starting at $10 a month. They built up leadership, signed up about 1000 dues spanning 35 stores in under 9 months, won a slew of demands around scheduling on the store level, (and forced the company to change its scheduling system nationwide). A row between SEIU’s and UFCW’s respective presidents abruptly killed the project before it could stand on its own. But it demonstrated that people would join a union even if it wasn’t boss or government certified.

We were also inspired by Lisa Phillips’ account of New York City’s District 65 union from the 30s through the 50s. District 65 was unique in that it organized workers of all kinds at small workplaces in the service sector, workers other unions considered “unorganizable.” They took a geographic approach:

The union organized every wholesale shop on Orchard Street and eventually marched around the corner to Broadway, organizing each shop from “top to bottom” along the way. District 65 organized not just clerks but secretaries, sweepers, and delivery men too. The shops’ owners, who typically employed just four to six people, signed contracts covering everyone who worked for them. Their neighbors were often forced to do the same after word got around to workers that the union would get you an extra few cents per hour and Saturdays off.

What unified them was a hiring hall program that forced desegregation on multiple employers, and a bustling union hall that served as a social hub for its members. They refused to negotiate dues check-off agreements with bosses, requiring members to pay their dues in person at the hall each month. [The leadership felt this flesh and blood contact between members and their organization was essential.]

Just as we had connected with the Crown Heights Tenants Union for guidance on building the Philly Tenants Union, we connected with worker leaders from Burgerville, Spot Coffee, the early aughts IWW Starbucks drive, and picked their brains at length.

Philly Workers for Dignity

In late 2018, Philly Socialists set up the independent labor organization called Philly Workers for Dignity. As the Walmart Workers Association did, we would use the ACORN neighborhood organizing approach and apply it to organizing workers. Like District 65, we would go where other unions would not, and would aim to build shared identity through social events. We would pursue NLRB elections if and when we could, but we would also be open to individual wage theft fights, minority unions, issue campaigns, whatever, so long as people would become dues paying members of Dignity.

We didn’t have a staff of organizers— Philly Socialists at the time was paying two people a part time stipend— but we did have real results to draw on from our experience launching the Philly Tenants Union and winning repair and eviction fights as well as legislation through that. We had leaned heavily on Labor Notes’ Secrets of a Successful Organizer and Jane McAlevey’s work to organize tenants, why not apply them back to labor?

So, we started out. We had some money and resources from PS to get a logo, pins, and printouts made, but at the beginning it was basically “just the 3 of us and some clipboards,” as Kevin McCloskey puts it. We experimented with a program of visits to workplaces with questionnaires that didn’t work at all— the only interesting conversations we had were with pissed off bosses. We saw we could have studied the Wal-Mart experience harder, where Rathke said “we were dead when making contacts in and around the stores.” So, we doubled down on the ACORN method of selecting a specific neighborhood and doing lots of doorknocking there. We were dead serious about several aspects of the ACORN playbook— we always started with open ended questions, tried to agitate on the issues we identified, laid out a plan, and made a clear ask to join. The other thing was maybe even more critical: we asked to come inside the person’s home to have this conversation.

We would have open ended conversations with people around issues they experienced at work, asking what they would change if they could pick something. We built up to a first Organizing Committee meeting at a barbershop that one of the recruited members had a connection to.

Then we made two big deviations from the ACORN model, which, predictably, didn't work out well. In the ACORN model, just like in a good union drive, you find the issues that are most widely and deeply felt. You’d pick one or two that could motivate people, would make a difference if changed, and that you could realistically win by putting 100 people into motion. Unsurprisingly, people had issues of all kinds, but we were trying to force them into the box of focusing on issues in the workplace. People wanted playgrounds and community centers. Lots more people needed a job, period, than had problems at their job. We were getting hung up on a jurisdictional issue of our own creation, too–if someone had a landlord problem, did that mean we needed to refer them to also all-volunteer Tenants Union?

The other significant deviation was that none of us were out hitting the neighborhood full time. We weren’t getting the necessary face time in with key leaders, pushing them to take on more, checking in, becoming a reliable fixture in the area.

So, we could see we weren’t getting the kind of traction we wanted. We thought to hold a big “Know Your Rights” meeting instead of launching a neighborhood branch, as the ACORN model would have had us do. In deference to the big internal pushes within Philly Socialists that had led to such requirements for our meetings, we made sure we had ADA access and a childcare provider.

Despite this, basically, no one came to this meeting. We went back to the drawing board. We followed up with the most solid leads we had and urged them to step up. We added flyering and tabling at local transit centers to the mix. We lowered our expectations from what we had learned about ACORN–we just didn’t have anyone who could devote 40-50 hours a week in a single neighborhood, so it made sense our results would be commensurate with the smaller number of resources we had.

Meanwhile, we were getting a few more leftists who wanted to do “real stuff” out to talking to people. That was the only thing you could volunteer for—outreach.

Slowly, frustratingly slowly, it seemed, we were making progress. We started meeting people who’d had wages stolen and scheduled one-on-ones with them. The same for a few people with bad bosses. While canvassing, a couple came up to us and asked what we were doing. They thought it sounded good. One of them became one of our most dedicated members. As McCloskey says, “some people are just looking for other good people doing good things.”

We ran into a couple rank and file union members who cared deeply about their own unions and were interested in reforming them. We met a building trades woman who wanted to push more acceptance of women in the trades. Could we help with this? Yes!

We pulled together all these contacts into smaller, less ambitious meetings close to where we’d been doing outreach. If we were tabling in West Philly, we’d make sure our meeting was booked in a rec center nearby to increase the chances people would actually bother to show up. Although we followed Jane McAlevey’s advice and tried to build from people’s existing ties and networks–e.g., asking them, where’s a good meeting place around here? --the overwhelming majority of people were not accustomed to going to meetings and were involved in no groups. We jumped at any connections we could get, but mostly we settled on whatever church or rec center was close and would take us.

Initially, meetings were to discuss possibilities and the future, and come up with concrete things we could do. Later, the meetings were full of updates on the status of the various campaigns in progress.

We expanded our activities to find things for people to do who were not capable of organizing where they worked. We started hosting regular “Organizer Dinners” where we’d invite guests of honor from unions and union caucuses from around the city. We’d eat together and talk shop, share lessons learned.

We found that union leaders jumped at the chance to talk to an interested audience. Just having a venue where unionists connect across unions is a rare thing. As former Dignity organizer Tabitha Arnold put it after she’d moved to Tennessee, “we really had an amazing model, like the organizer dinners and talking to contract lawyers, all that was so helpful and cool. It’s been a struggle in Chattanooga even getting the labor council going. That’s been a big focus of activists just to encourage these union people to meet regularly.”

When we finally found the first person with what we thought was a compelling wage theft campaign and the willingness to fight, we brought in the most promising volunteers to help plan tactics and strategy for the campaign. We delivered demands, picketed the workplace, and ran online actions.

After a few months, we held elections for temporary officer positions organized around our growing portfolio of activities. Mindy was elected “Solidarity Director” to focus on support for other unions like showing up at pickets; James was our Social Director and put together movie screenings and get-togethers; Laura would oversee the “Stewards Committee” which would be the organizers who would approve, coordinate, and complete individual member fights; our Treasurer, Chris, worked on incorporating us, kept the books, reported on fundraising via dues and others; our Secretary, Jack, kept all of our documents together and made sure minutes were taken by a member, he also tracked dues payments; I, as “New Organizing Director,” would coordinate the union drives..

By design, Dignity didn’t suffer from any of the features endemic to socialist organizing: no “resolutionary socialism,” no didactic readings or lectures about imperialism. We weren’t bogged down by theory-heads in love with the sound of their arguments. Locating our meetings outside the city’s gentrified corridor helped dissuade many. Those who did bother to show up quickly found themselves a bad fit for the culture. No discussion groups or reading assignments, no bloviating in the meetings. Of the first 10 events we made public on our Facebook page, 7 were either canvasses or tabling sessions.

At first, we succeeded in not turning it into a front group for our socialist group, even discouraging Philly Socialists members from just showing up to meetings unless they planned to contribute outreach time. We didn’t want the meeting rooms to be clogged with leftist types. When efforts were made in Philly Socialists to systematize its support by sending more cadre to project meetings, we pushed against this.

We did plenty of ‘political education,’ though, via sharing stories of worker organization from around the country and world. We hosted IWW unionists from Poland who told us about their experiences organizing in Amazon facilities there. We hosted screenings of movies like Sorry to Bother You and a documentary about ACORN with former leaders of its Philly chapter.

Word began to spread to lefty workers that we were out there, doing stuff, even if it wasn’t exactly clear to them what we were doing. We started talking with just about any workers who wanted to organize their own workplaces, offering advice, support, or bodies at their actions. We mobilized our members to show up to support strikes as Dignity members. This became another way for people to get involved.

All of this helped create a social momentum, a center of gravity that pulled people into action and started to give people a sense of common identity as “Dignity” members. There were multiple ladders of engagement for people to climb, depending on their interests.

Our most committed volunteers worked as organizers, supervised by the group’s elected leadership, for traditional union organizing campaigns. At first, we were open to bringing things to a certain point and then handing them to established unions, but eventually, we decided we ought to at least pitch ourselves as the union to be affiliated with. We had campaigns at various levels of development at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Cake Life bakery, a food delivery company, the CookNSolo chain of restaurants, Starbucks, and multiple local coffee chains.

At the initiative of several barista members, we and a UNITE HERE staff member started putting together meetings of a “Philly Barista Council.” Quickly, it was clear that we had more resources to provide to the baristas than the overloaded UNITE HERE staffer— we had an organization, regular meetings. We had t-shirts and pins! And you could join up right away. Joining UNITE HERE was an abstract possibility years down the line, only possible in the event of a collective bargaining agreement.

As with much of what we were doing, it felt uncertain and unprecedented. But, we figured, that was our job. To push the envelope, be a gadfly, experiment. That’s the ethos we brought to the work.

Dignity’s Union Drives

Our first serious sit-down with workers trying to organize their workplace was with a group of Trader Joe’s employees upset that they’d been denied the right to wear pronoun pins. Ultimately, the all-white group opted against moving forward after a Black co-worker who’d been in a failed drive in New York discouraged them, effectively telling them that unions were a risk that only people with privilege could afford to take. When they asked us to assist with their efforts to create a “union that’s not exactly a union” or a “whisper network,” we declined.

But more reached out for help. We connected with a group of Starbucks workers who had already planned out a march on the boss with demands for the removal of their manager. We backed them up in late 2019, helped them file an unfair labor practice, offered advice on subsequent steps of organizing. They, too, decided they did not want to take the traditional next steps in building a union, and we moved on. Their case continues to stretch on 5 years later.

We connected with workers at Cake Life bakery. We went to a house meeting with them where they’d gathered the entire front of house staff and shared the Know Your Rights presentation we’d been shopping around. They realized that, on top of their other grievances, the company had not been allotting Philly’s legally required 5 days of annual sick leave.

We weren't sure what our relationship ought to be, so we gave the workers several options for working together. Given that they already had 50% of the staff at a house meeting, we encouraged them to think seriously about moving toward unionizing rather than just delivering a letter with demands. No reason not to get all the legal protections against retaliation if they were already close to building a majority and doing so was feasible.

The workers decided, yes, they would file for an election with the NLRB, but they would create their own entity, Cafe Workers United. They would keep autonomy, but affiliate with Dignity. This created a kind of federated dynamic where we could offer strong advice, but ultimately had to follow the workers.

This quickly led to a fatal setback when we reached the first pivotal strategy question – whether to go public before or after approaching back of house staff. We argued strongly that the back of house team had to be contacted first before any other steps. We laid out the risks of not doing so.

But the front of house staff had serious reservations. First off, they did such different kinds of work. Would they have common concerns? More importantly, the back of house staff included single moms and Spanish speakers, both of whom stood to lose more in the event of retaliatory firings, at least as the front of house staff saw it. The guilt was thick among this all-white group of workers.

Ultimately, they decided to go to the Inquirer before bridging the gap. It blew up in their faces. After we'd been proven right on this, the workers followed our tactical advice and we went by the book: bargaining survey, one on ones, a public support campaign, “Why I’m Voting Yes” posters, bingo at captive audience meetings. Those steps made sure we didn't lose a single vote from the filing to the election, even though Cake Life waged a full-on anti-union campaign run by unionbusting behemoth Littler Mendelson, the same firm Starbucks uses. They redbaited, went ‘woke’ and characterized unionizing as a threat to “consent” and “safe spaces,” and every other trick in the book. We won the initial vote count. But after months of grueling NLRB hearings about disputed voters’ supervisory statuses, and after all our members had been laid off due to COVID, we lost in a tie.

Eric Blanc argues to give workers “the decisive say over strategy” as the third pillar of his “worker to worker” model. This sounds good, who wouldn’t be in favor of workers deciding strategy? And when Blanc counterposes this with the kind of press-conference cardboard cut-out roles for workers preferred by many campaigns, of course, real worker control is better. But when you get down to it, what Blanc seems to mean is that it’s good to bow to newly organized workers’ requests to avoid the uncomfortable steps for winning a majority in a workplace, such as touching base with all divisions within a workplace before coming out publicly. He celebrates Alabama workers fighting for the UAW to not have house meetings, and to not conduct organizing committee meetings in person.

In his recounting of Burgerville’s self-run strategy, he discusses how workers “unschooled in IWW doctrine”-- i.e., not bought into the IWW’s rigid anti-contract dogma – end up pushing the union back onto the traditional, correct path: if you can, get a dang contract! To me, that’s years of waste. (“Three Worker to Worker Wins”)

The playbook for winning majorities is the main value-add organizers, whether staff or experienced volunteers, bring to the table in union drives. It’s the distilled experience of the decades of the labor movement in what works and what doesn’t.

After we learned from our mistake at Cake Life, we hardened our stance against this kind of thing. We’d support workers no matter what, even in the event of losses, but if they wouldn’t follow the critical steps of majority building, we would part ways amicably.

Our most advanced workplace campaign was at the fast-casual brands of local restaurant chain, CookNSolo. We aimed for all eleven brick and mortar locations plus the delivery drivers.

We had an even more direct competition with UNITE HERE with one of the local restaurant chains. We both courted them, but we had a Dignity member in the shop. They ended up choosing to stick with us, on the basis that for UNITE HERE they would always be a low priority.

As COVID loomed, we were at our peak. Our wage theft fight had wrapped up. Membership was rising. The barista council’s final meeting before lockdown was standing room only. We had supported Starbucks workers who'd successfully gotten a manager removed. We were very close to going public at the CookNSolo chain, we had just filed for what we hoped would be our first NLRB election, Whole Foods was looking promising, labor staffers frustrated with the limits of their staff work were coming on board to add to our volunteer capacity.

It would all be over in less than a year.

The end of Dignity; or, “if you build it, WHO will come?”

We felt the pandemic would likely mean growth and the ability to win even more fights with bosses. We were right. We were flooded with interest. Panic was spreading, people were desperate, and they wanted help. We could barely keep up. Our campaign at the CookNSolo chain “went public” in a sense, after everyone was laid off. We successfully fought a high-profile fight to get the company to pay out sick time to everyone. There were wildcat pickets to attend. It felt like we were talking to journalists multiple times a week.

But we took seriously the need to “lock down.” Our in person meeting days were over. As the crisis unfolded, we took a page from the Communist Party’s efforts in the 30s and announced we’d create an Unemployed Council, and would take actions to demand relief from the government and businesses. We did something different here: we promoted these events and meetings online. What other choice did we have?

We quickly shed the outer layer of our non-politicized working-class membership after the novelty of the first couple Zoom meetings wore off. But we attracted a new demographic in spades: people who were highly educated and downwardly mobile. Newly threatened and, often, newly unemployed, they had time on their hands, deeply held beliefs, and skills honed at excellent universities and non-profits.

As we moved through spring, things became increasingly chaotic. To absorb and put to work the glut of new recruits, we created committee after committee. It was dizzying: the organizing committee to help with intake and follow-ups, the ‘action committee,’ the ‘hiring hall’ to help connect people with benefits and jobs, the ‘education committee’ to find enlightening readings for our membership meetings. Within those, more tasks proliferated. Someone on the Action Team to track the “PPE” pledge businesses could make, someone to head up the #ReliefNow demand, someone to bottom-line the socially distanced protest action.

These task-based committees were perplexing. Where did Dignity end and the Unemployed Council end? Who had authority where, over what? If the “Action Committee” agreed on a plan but the general membership meeting didn’t like it, who should win out?

The murder of George Floyd kicked these processes into another emotional register. The notes from our June 4th “emergency” meeting, titled, “How Can Our Organization Support the Black Lives Matter Movement,” are positively manic. We had plans for a Google survey of baristas to shame cafes for their police calling policies. Plans for multiple in person actions. A social media campaign highlighting stories of people losing income and jobs.

In the discussion about what to do, members wondered, should we march for worker centric demands at all, would that not “take away” from the demands of BLM? One “immediate” proposed task from one of the new recruits was “a longer-term plan to start reaching out to other organizations and connect the network of socialist organizations in the city.” Despite several Google forms already being thrown around, someone asks, “Would this be a good opportunity to do a form?” Let’s create more digital tools: “Create a toolkit for workers and businesses on how to become involved” with “email templates, social media graphics & effective language” which also “really lay out the risks and mitigation strategies.”

Worse, we found that creating all kinds of work for the highly educated just did not work. Or rather, it would work only for a brief period of time before the new recruits would begin problematizing the work and, quickly, the organization itself. They would get hung up on the inherent “risks” of organizing, start demanding slowdowns so that more training could be provided, and call for greater involvement of professional organizers and negotiators. They wanted to know everything was being done ‘right,’ as the well-ensconced experts of The Movement would see it. [[And they used the fact that they had contributed their skills and time as the license to make their demands.]]

One particularly vocal grad student led the most powerful attacks against the group they’d just joined. They said a discussion about a new sick leave law in a Signal chat was racist and demanded financial reparations. They convened a two-hour meeting detailing the harms inflicted on them and demanding apologies. They argued that it was racist and paternalist to talk about “organizing the unorganized,” because everyone is already organized, how admiring the Black Panthers was a cultural appropriation.

The storm did not blow over after that struggle session. Several of the new members who were particularly moved by the grad student’s presentation and influence felt that our elected leadership was effectively perpetuating some of the oppressions they were out in the street protesting against. They put together a petition demanding additional accountability measures, including paying a local organization to conduct racial sensitivity trainings.

It all bore a striking resemblance to the drama Richard Wright describes in his 1944 essay, “I tried to Be a Communist,” wherein a passionate Party official from out of town stirred up charges of subversion against a local chapter member, throwing the club into total chaos. The members only eventually learned the “official” had escaped from a mental institution …. “Then what kind of club did we run that a lunatic could step into it and help run it? Were we all so mad that we could not detect a madman when we saw one?”

Had it been just the one episode, we could have maybe taken our licks and moved forward. But it wasn’t. Multiple incidents combined to create an overwhelming sense that the role of the “left” in our workplace organizing would be to stymie it, interfere with it, problematize it, or at best, to ham-fistedly try and get the people we’d recruited involved with whatever their pet project was.

On the one side, we had a group of well-meaning but unhelpful people who felt entitled to set direction for organizing because they were volunteering their time. On the other, overweening monitors who by virtue of their “socialist” identity felt entitled to directly interfere. More and more of our time was devoted to parrying the concerns of both.

As a group, we sank into what Maurice Mitchell called a “doom loop” in his wide-ranging 2022 essay analyzing movement culture. That is, “identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.” The working-class recruits who remained within Dignity were confused and turned off by the mounting toxicity.

Our leaders had been elected just a few months ago for temporary positions. We had members “going on strike” against us. One by one, the effects of all this pushed us down and out. I took a mental health hiatus in May that just kept going. I wrote to an old friend in June that I felt like, for all the missed opportunities of the BLM moment we’d left on the table, maybe I should have just been messing around with music and relaxing all these years.

Other leaders kept pushing through the summer. But by the fall, they’d all given it up. The highly educated activists had succeeded, in a sense. They'd sapped the will of a problematic organization, and it folded by 2021.

Aftermath– Flowers Keep Blooming

Key leaders from Dignity did not give up on the movement. Tabitha went on to be a prominent working-class artist in Tennessee, weaving tapestries inspired by worker action. Kevin was elected shop steward at the post office. Tim continued working within the AFSCME Unity reform caucus and as a steward.

But more importantly, Dignity’s second NLRB effort at Korshach Bagels went forward. As Dignity deteriorated, the workers there affiliated with Workers United, SEIU. They made their own little bit of history in contract negotiations by refusing to settle for a no strike clause, instead, demanding and winning a strike process clause. The worker leader of this effort, Eli, led the now seasoned group of barista activists around the city into winning contract campaign after contract campaign, convincing Workers United’s Philadelphia Joint Board to open membership to coffee workers beyond Starbucks. It remains the only Workers United Joint Board in the country to do so.

David Thompson is an experienced community, political, and labor organizer and researcher, most recently for ACORN and the National Nurses United, and currently in law school at Temple University in Philadelphia