Organizing Work is a website about the nuts and bolts of organizing.
We first and foremost provide a platform for workers to talk about their workplace campaigns themselves, from their own perspective. In addition, we do investigative reporting and commentary on the challenges workers and unions face today.
Many of us are members of the Industrial Workers of the World. As a model, we favor “solidarity unionism”: a committee of workers in the workplace democratically running the union effort, and taking direct action “on the shop floor” to get what they want.
Too often, left labor journalism is an extension of public relations. Most outlets sympathetic to unions end up signal-boosting press releases and cheerleading campaigns, while papering over the strategic decisions driving those campaigns, and minimizing their weaknesses.
There are obvious reasons for this: we all want labor to win, and we are up against the anti-union, business-friendly, corporate-owned media.
At Organizing Work, we could not be more committed to helping workers win. The publisher, and most of the authors, are workplace organizers. However, we believe that the only way to learn from our experiences is to talk about them in an honest, strikes-and-gutters way, sharing what worked and what didn’t.
When we share and learn from each other in this way, we believe there is no limit to what workers can achieve.
The site’s publisher is Marianne Garneau.
You can support the site here.