Of the many responses to the recent defeat of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) at the Bessemer Amazon warehouse, the “postmortem” delivered by longtime union organizer Jane McAlevey — which criticized much of the campaign’s organizing strategy — has drawn significant attention within the labor movement and the Left. McAlevey has always applied her “tough love” philosophy toward turning union losses into case studies for future organizing efforts. Last September, she did this with the international “Strike School” she helped organize. This May, coming on the heels of Bessemer, she’s hosting her fourth online training and networking program, Workers Rising Everywhere! focused on “how to win.”

The series, which began this week, will bring together 9,500 participants from 111 countries, with training happening in twelve languages. Sam Fleischman and Wen Zhuang, from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a distributed grassroots organizing program created to support workers organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic (and can be reached to discuss organizing possibilities at your workplace here), spoke with McAlevey ahead of her training series on the rationale behind her Bessemer rebuttal, how union popularity should be matched with the right tools, and how these old and new organizing strategies can work in harmony toward building worker power that can win.