At a moment of dark news proliferating across the globe, the American labor movement has recently been, in a refreshing change, a bright spot. We find ourselves at a moment of growing public support for unions, recent high-profile victories by unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) in their “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers, and a number of innovative new organizing campaigns across a wide range of corporations and industries in the United States.

The latter is the topic of Rutgers labor scholar and frequent Jacobin contributor Eric Blanc’s forthcoming book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (University of California Press, 2025), as well as his article in the journal New Labor Forum, “Worker-to-Worker Organizing Goes Viral,” drawing from research on that book. Blanc argues that the worker-to-worker model allows workers to train each other and gives them tools to start organizing on their own, rather than relying on expensive, unscalable, staff-heavy union organizing models.

Blanc spoke to Micah Uetricht for the New Labor Forum podcast Reinventing Solidarity. You can listen to the full conversation here. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.