Unions of Our Own: 8 Building Blocks to Change Work and the World

(Hardback)

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An unorthodox, irreverent, and battle-tested strategy for workers ready to leverage the power we already have.

We know how our workplaces should be, but they're changing for the worse. We know how we want the world to be, too, but billionaires are doing their best to make things fall apart.

Unions of Our Own provides a radical, step-by-step framework for workers who want to fight for the better workplaces they've always envisioned-and dream of bigger changes, too. In a world teeming with union-busters and bad bosses, Daniel Gross reveals the eight building blocks needed to build a sustainable labor union that can actually stand up for workers' needs.

Cookie-cutter organizing methods and traditional models are often ineffective. It takes something more: it takes you and your coworkers. From first conversations with those coworkers to the actualization of real, collective power, Unions of Our Own will offer a potent antidote to the idea that change is impossible.

Through practical tools and real-world examples, Unions of Our Own is an actionable, inspiring, and confidence-boosting handbook on how to win the workplace-and the world-you deserve.

Reviews

Praise for Labor Law for the Rank & Filer

Workers rights are under attack on every front. Bosses break the law every day. For decades Labor Law for the Rank and Filer has been arming workers with an introduction to their legal rights (and the limited means to enforce them) while reminding everyone that real power comes from workers solidarity.
Alexis Buss, former general secretary-treasurer of the IWW

As valuable to working persons as any hammer, drill, stapler, or copy machine, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer is a damn fine tool empowering workers who struggle to realize their basic dignity in the workplace while living through an era of unchecked corporate greed. Smart, tough, and optimistic, Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross provide nuts and bolts information to realize on-the-job rights while showing us that another world is not only possible but inevitable.
John Philo, legal director, Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice

Some things are too important to leave to so called experts: our livelihoods, our dignity and our rights. In this book, Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross have provided us with a very necessary, empowering, and accessible tool for protecting our own rights as workers.
Nicole Schulman, coeditor of Wobblies! A Graphic History and World War 3 Illustrated

Lynd and Gross are to be commended for developing a useful resource not just for shop stewards, but for every wage-earner engaged in the struggle to improve the condition of working people.
Gordon Simmons, UE Local 170

For those readers who want to strengthen workers rights and improve our overall quality of life, or for those who may see labor organizing as also a strategy to achieve not only the vision of a participatory economy but a participatory society as well then this book should definitely be in your arsenal.
Michael McGehee, Z Magazine

Author Bio

Daniel Gross has been doing worker-led organizing and union-building for more than two decades, accompanying thousands of workers creating unions in their workplaces. Together with his co-workers, Gross helped found the groundbreaking IWW Starbucks Workers Union, which held power for over a decade at the coffee giant and helped revitalize a more inclusive labor movement.

Gross has practiced labor law from a rank & file perspective and served on the board of the National Lawyers Guild and the Food Chain Workers Alliance. He is also the founding director of Brandworkers, the first worker center of immigrant workers in the metro New York local food manufacturing industry.

With Staughton Lynd, he is the co-author of the classic Labor Law for the Rank & Filer:Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law as well as the graphic pamphlet, Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks, with illustrator Tom Keough. He is based in New York City.