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Reading List June 09, 2019

Get Organized

“Organizing is the strategy on which the success of all others depend. Yet it is the strategy that most progressives talk about the least.”

The 2020 election is still over 500 days away, but the media buzz makes it feel a lot closer. Instead of focusing on “the ritual of pushing buttons in the quadrennial extravaganzas,” we should be paying attention to what Noam Chomsky recently called the “regular political engagement that is the foundation of functioning democracy.”

It is the same advice we heard from Rev. William Barber, who was just convicted for protesting peacefully at the North Carolina statehouse: “We put too much of our actions into electoral campaigns. And when the campaign is over, and we lose, we go home until the next campaign. Even extremists don’t do that. Even when they’re in the minority, even when they lose a vote, they continue to organize.”

So this week we took a trip into our archive and have come back organized. From the potential for solidarity in Silicon Valley, to how to organize immigrant workers, to the role that faith-based activists can play, today’s essays are the perfect reads to help you get prepping for 2020.

—Rosie Gillies

Sarita Gupta, Stephen Lerner, Joseph A. McCartin
Traditional worker organizing has failed on every level. But new approaches are finding success, pointing the way to a more just future.
Brishen Rogers
Tech companies have seen waves of worker protest, but they are still far from democratic. The remedy is to build and exert real forms of worker power inside the workplace.
Robin D. G. Kelley

In 1963 and today, the real work happens elsewhere. 

Toussaint Losier, William J. Barber II
William J. Barber II on the the successes of civil disobedience, the failures of electoral campaigns, and why the South holds the key to transformation in this country. 
Ruth Milkman
The unlikely spark for a rebirth of labor.
Peter Kellman, Ed Bruno, James Gray Pope
Unions are being strangled by laws that block workers from organizing, striking, and acting in solidarity. Becoming a rights-based movement is the only way to save labor.
Nancy MacLean

What can faith-based activism do for labor?

Jennifer Gordon
Organizing workers in the global economy.
Peter Dreier

Nice rhetoric. What does it mean in practice?

Ernesto Cortes, Jr.

What about organizing?

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