No shortcuts
"The crisis of the progressive movement in the United States today is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. Today's progressives now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington, where they are outmatched and outspent by special interests. Labor unions now focus on the narrowest possible understanding of the interests of their members, and membership continues to decline in lockstep with the narrowing of their goals. Meanwhile, promising movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have not accomplished meaningful change. Why do progressives in the United States keep losing on so many issues? In No Shortcuts, Jane McAlevey argues that progressives can win, but lack the organized power to enact significant change, to outlast their bosses in labor fights, and to hold elected leaders accountable. Drawing upon her experience as a scholar and longtime organizer in the student, environmental, and labor movements, McAlevey examines the case studies of recent social movements to pinpoint the factors that helped them succeed - or fail - to accomplish their intended goals. McAlevey makes a compelling case that the great social movements of previous eras gained their power from mass organizing, a strategy today's progressive have mostly abandoned in favor of mobilization or advocacy.
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4recommend
5mentions
4people
2020–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- No, this still doesn't matter. Just still waste of time of time caring about what journalists think over activating the local community into your cause.
Go read "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey to understand what effective organizing is.
- Check out "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey. Great book about creating a tech union, and it gives background on how other industries did it (and often where they went wrong)
- Resources maybe, but not necessarily experience. Very little actual organizing has been done over the past several decades. McAlevey's book No Shortcuts is worth a read on this front.
Also, the RWDSU is not affiliated with the Teamsters. This is a different (and much better-resourced) union looking to step up and do the work better.
- To answer your question, probably not. For a fuller answer, I'd read this breakdown by Jane McAlevey, who wrote the extremely well-sourced "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age" about the importance of actual organizing, rather than just trying to drive an approval vote: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/bessemer-alabama-...
Basically, there were a number of really bad tactical errors made by organizers throughout the process.
- A great book is No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey[1]. She specifically goes over history, organizing tactics, analysis about why some unions succeed vs others that don't, as well as how to transition from a bad/no union to one that is representative. Each have examples of recent strikes and efforts in the last decade.
Here's a quote that jumped out at me.
> According to Buffkin's congressional testimony, it was the [Smithfield Foods'] intent to replace blacks with Latinos with two objectives in mind: to keep the workforce divided through both instigation of racial conflict and overt segregation, and to create an undocumented immigrant workforce that the employer believed they could more easily control.
> [Key to success was] first earning legitimacy with each major constituency in the plant, and then bridging the divisions between them, creating unity and solidarity despite the extraordinary efforts by the boss to systematically pit worker against worker.
[1]: https://janemcalevey.com/book/no-shortcuts-organizing-for-po...
