Eric Blanc

1 week ago | laborpolitics.com | Eric Blanc

Zohran Mamdani has shocked the political establishment by turning the New York City mayoral race into a nail-biter. How has a thirty-three-year-old Muslim socialist gotten this close to heading the world’s most economically and politically important city? Some pundits have pointed to Zohran’s charisma and brilliant use of social media. Others have stressed the strength of his volunteer canvassing army as well as the popularity of his policies to lower living costs. All those things are true.

1 week ago | jacobin.com | Eric Blanc

Zohran Mamdani has shocked the political establishment by turning the New York City mayoral race into a nail-biter. How has a thirty-three-year-old Muslim socialist gotten this close to heading the world’s most economically and politically important city? Some pundits have pointed to Zohran’s charisma and brilliant use of social media. Others have stressed the strength of his volunteer canvassing army as well as the popularity of his policies to lower living costs. All those things are true.

2 weeks ago | jacobin.com | Eric Blanc

Why did American labor leaders do so little to seize the real opening for resurgence that emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic? Despite a very tight labor market, a vigorously pro-union National Labor Relations Board, and youthful grassroots activism at Starbucks, Amazon, and beyond, most unions invested exasperatingly little into new organizing. Critics of the labor […] Sorry, but this article is available to subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.

3 weeks ago | laborpolitics.com | Eric Blanc

Organizing isn’t just a science, it’s also an art. Normally the latter is passed on through phone calls, debriefs, meetings, and late-night shit talk. This is an attempt to share with the next generation of union organizers some of those lessons learned along the way, some in victory, some in defeat. None of this is new. None of this is mine. I certainly don’t have the answers, I just know it’s something that I’ve given my life to over the past quarter of a century.

1 month ago | laborpolitics.com | Eric Blanc

What can we do to turn around decades of union decline? This is the key challenge of our era, because the power of a revitalized labor movement is needed to pull America off its descent into oligarchy and authoritarianism. There are no easy answers, which is why I welcome the responses of union organizer Peter Olney, Labor Notes co-founder Jane Slaughter, and labor scholar Ben Fong to my new bookWe Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.