This book is a guide to help workplace organizers get started, keep going, and get unstuck when things aren’t going as expected.
Organizing is full of challenges and dilemmas. How do you decide who to talk to, if your coworkers all seem scared or apathetic? What if you invite people to a meeting and no one comes? What should you do when your organizing committee is splitting apart? What if your own union leaders break your heart? This book will help you evaluate any situation and find a way forward.
Drawing on a half century of experiences in training and advising thousands of workplace activists, Ellen David Friedman teaches four essential principles and four basic ingredients of organizing. She shows how to apply these principles and ingredients to familiar situations and invites you to rethink common missteps. You’ll start to see how you can get yourself unstuck, no matter what situation you’re in.
Eight featured true stories of workplace organizers bring the ideas to life, gorgeously illustrated by Fernando Martí.
What People Are Saying
“Against the seemingly limitless power of corporations and billionaires, and the cruelty of a government turning against its own people, there are workers everywhere standing up and fighting back. I’ve known Ellen David Friedman for many years. She knows what it takes to organize and give people real hope. This book contains that experience and helps anyone who is building power in the workplace—step by step, facing endless challenges—to keep going.” Senator Bernie Sanders
“While many organizing books focus narrowly on techniques, Keep Going hits on key fundamentals putting questions of union democracy and power front and center. It combines practical advice with fundamentals insights on organizing.” Joe Burns, labor attorney/negotiator and author of Class Struggle Unionism
“The book Keep Going captures the need for humility in organizing, especially when things get hard. Through storytelling, Ellen shares organizing lessons that are in response to common organizing questions and challenges and that provoke thought about the processes of organizing often taken for granted or forgotten.” Diamonté Brown, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union
“Ellen David Friedman has gifted us all with this essential book on organizing! We’ve all been there as organizers, hit with obstacles that seem insurmountable on our journey to build power in our workplaces and in our lives. This text gets right to the point, addressing what it will take to shift our mindsets and the culture of oppressive systems to ones that beam with hope and real tools. Every element is taken from stories in the field with lessons that carry over to help us all. Our rank-and-file caucus cannot wait to begin our book group!” Jia Lee, Movement of Rank-and-File Educators caucus/United Federation of Teachers, NYC
“Each page of Keep Going will help you gain and build momentum when you feel stuck. It’s easy to get frustrated, to complain or take a step back from your union or a campaign. I’ve been there. But we must lean into our problems, organize, keep going, and keep an eye on the horizon. This book equips you to push through your frustrations, anxieties, fears, and burnout. Every real-world story delivers an organizing principle that will help you build collective power with your colleagues and create a democratic union along the way.” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA
“In this era of oligarchy workers are up against great odds and their best hope lies in their ability to organize. Ellen David Friedman’s book Keep Going; A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard faces the harsh challenges of organizing and offers not only concrete guidance but examples of success. It is based on real experience and provides wonderful guidance.” Larry Cohen, president of Communications Workers of America, 2005–15
“Labor unions are more admired than they have been in a half-century. Maybe it’s because of people like Ellen David Friedman, who are building—or rebuilding—unions that are democratic, led by rank-and-file members, and fearlessly committed to demanding and winning what workers need. That vision, lost in too many unions, is irresistible to workers, both those inside unions and those not yet organized. Ellen David Friedman was advising us in the Massachusetts Teachers Association at the start of our decade-long transformation into a fighting union about the approach to union organizing she writes about in Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard. If your union is breaking your heart, or you are at the start of building the union you deserve, or if you, like all of us, are figuring out how to overcome the latest outrage by your boss, read this book and you’ll gain new inspiration to Keep Going.” Max Page, president of Massachusetts Teachers Association
“Is union organizing a cult, a skilled craft, or just a job assignment for professional staffers with a quota of new members to sign up? According to longtime labor educator Ellen David Friedman, the process of bringing workers together to change the balance of power between labor and management should be none of the above—if it’s going to be bottom up and deeply democratic. The author’s great new guide to building workplace organization through collective action highlights the importance of forging personal relationships, encouraging rank-and-file initiative, and fostering new leadership development. Unlike some campus-based consultants who dispense workplace organizing advice, David Friedman is not trying to peddle some hot new theory, model, strategy, or formula. Instead, she is sharing the very practical lessons of her own nearly sixty years of hands-on work, in the US and abroad, with students and workers in both the private and public sector. The result is a handbook so clear, simple, and direct—and jargon-free—that it can be used by first-time organizers and others far more advanced in the field.” Steve Early, former International Union Representative, Communications Workers of America
About the Contributors
Ellen David Friedman is a retired organizer with the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association. She has trained and advised thousands of union members, staffers, and officers, and is the architect of the popular Labor Notes workshop “What to Do When Your Union Breaks Your Heart.” She is a regular contributor to Labor Notes magazine and chair of the Labor Notes board. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
Fernando Martí is a printmaker, community architect, writer, and poet based in San Francisco.