The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) 2023 “stand-up strike” against Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis delivered historic gains for our members. But just as significant is what came next. Before the strike even ended, thousands of nonunion autoworkers — primarily in the South — began signing union cards on their own, using website links from defunct campaigns. No staff. No plan. No infrastructure. The strike was the spark. Workers used it to light their own fires.

For decades, launching a union drive at a Southern auto plant required months — or even years — of deep groundwork. Now workers were self-organizing at a scale we hadn’t seen in decades. We believed we had entered a movement moment, a rare opening when momentum spreads faster than fear and collective action becomes contagious.

To seize the moment, we launched Stand Up 2.0, a national campaign to organize multiple nonunion auto plants across the country. Our strategy was to experiment with new organizing approaches (namely, momentum and worker-to-worker organizing as compared to traditional structure-based organizing) that treat mass-scale union organizing more like a social movement than building a guerrilla army.