Chris Brooks

The core lesson: If we hope to scale organizing, we can’t rely on momentum or structure alone. We need strategic fluency: the ability to read the terrain, anticipate resistance, & adapt our approach. Dogma won’t save us. Discipline, experimentation, and the courage to fail might

Momentum got us closer than ever before at Mercedes, but against extreme employer opposition, it wasn’t enough. We needed deeper structure: stronger leadership identification, escalating public actions, real supermajority demonstrations, more organizers, more pressure.

Mercedes management ran a ruthless anti-union campaign — daily captive audience meetings, supervisor pressure, firings, anti-union consultants, even a public CEO swap in the final stretch. When the vote came, we lost by nearly six hundred votes.

Mercedes in Alabama was different. We knew the terrain would be hostile but wagered that speed and momentum could carry us. Two major problems emerged: we filed without a clean list and overestimated support, and we lacked the external leverage that had helped at VW.

On April 19, 2024, Volkswagen workers won 73 percent to 27 percent — the first foreign-owned, nonunion auto assembly plant in the South to unionize. Momentum plus worker leadership, combined with real leverage, carried the day.

At VW , we used that lean, worker-driven approach. A skeleton staff helped build a massive activist organizing committee that signed up coworkers & assessed support directly. We also leveraged our alliance w/ IG Metall & the Global Works Council to restrain mgmt’s union busting

In higher ed, that model was incredibly effective. Between 2022 and 2024, UAW organizers ran 24 campaigns, organized more than 30,000 workers, and won with an average 92 percent yes vote — often with extremely low staff-to-worker ratios.

We experimented with momentum-based and worker-to-worker organizing — treating mass unionizing more like a social movement than building a guerrilla army. Momentum-based organizing scales quickly through mass sign-ups, rapid mobilization, and decentralized leadership.

With thousands wanting to organize right now, we launched Stand Up 2.0. The strategy drew from 2 sources: our recent strike, which got tens of thousands strike-ready at breakneck speed, & UAW’s higher ed campaigns, where workers were winning big with lean, worker-driven models

So we asked hard questions. Could this mass interest become a mass movement? Could raw momentum and worker-to-worker organizing outpace employer opposition? Could we bend some rules of traditional structure-based organizing and still win?

Many staff had never been trained in core structure-based skills: structured organizing conversations, IDing natural leaders, running real organizing committees, escalating toward supermajority public support. We had thousands ready to move — and not enough structure to meet them

Shawn Fain and other reformers were elected to fight and grow the union, and the strike delivered on that promise. But decades of business unionism, low expectations around organizing, and a patronage-driven staff culture left us unprepared to meet the scale of interest.

A movement moment is rare. It’s when momentum spreads faster than fear and collective action becomes contagious. Workers weren’t waiting for staff-driven campaigns — they were moving on their own.

Near the end of the Stand Up Strike, our IT Department told us thousands of nonunion auto workers were signing authorization cards using links from old defunct campaigns — some of them years old. That’s when we realized we might be in a real movement moment.

For decades, launching a union drive at a Southern auto plant meant months — sometimes years — of deep groundwork. But after the Stand Up Strike, workers across the auto sector began self-organizing at a scale we hadn’t seen in generations.

Learning From the UAW’s National Organizing Push If the labor movement hopes to survive, it must find ways to organize in the private sector at scale. The UAW’s national push to organize higher ed, and its recent union drives at Volkswagen and Merce...

If the labor movement hopes to survive, we have to organize the private sector at scale. I was one of the central architects of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike and our national auto organizing push. I shared some of what I learned in this new @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social piece 🧵
jacobin.com/2026/02/uaw-...

I have been made aware of reports of an ICE agent firing a gun into a car in Roxbury this week.

Whenever ICE is around, you can expect violence. It's time to ABOLISH ICE.

Until then, NJ must use its full might to pass laws protecting us from ICE.

Excellent breakdown of the UAW’s landmark tentative agreement at VW 👇

We must stop confusing caution with prudence. The future of labor depends on our willingness to be bold. We don’t need perfection. We need more workers in struggle. The only way we can win is if we fight.

We also cannot be afraid to lose union elections. In fact, we cannot be afraid to lose on a larger scale. It is far better to fight and lose than to not fight at all. In fact, the insistence on running union elections only if we will win is contributing to our slow death.

The math is clear: unions must either scale or fail. To do that, union must be willing to pour the resources necessary into organizing an army of rank-and-file and staff organizers and run coordinated strategic campaigns that scale up our ability to win.

Running thousands more union elections is necessary, but not sufficient. Workers must also be adequately supported in overcoming employer opposition. That means training thousands of new organizers & designing organizing models that distribute rather than concentrate expertise.

The major obstacles are employer opposition and labor’s capacity to effectively support worker organizing. Most workers who want a union never begin organizing. Of those who do, only some win recognition and fewer still secure a first contract due to employer opposition.

Labor’s collapse is not due to worker apathy. Roughly 70% of Americans approve of unions, and tens of millions say they would join one today if given a real chance.

Labor’s event horizon is the point where unions could become too small to win big gains for current members, too weak to organize new workers at scale, too invisible to the public to matter. At 3% national density, the nation will look like South Carolina everywhere.

On average, BLS-reported union density has declined 0.1 % a year over the past two decades. If current trends hold, private-sector union density will hit 3% within a generation — the point I call labor’s event horizon.

Even with historically high win rates, unions have not been organizing workers in large enough numbers to keep up with job growth in the economy.

Half a century ago, unions routinely ran more than 7,000 union elections a year in an attempt to represent four to five times the numbers of workers we are trying to organize today.

This has had the paradoxical effect of increasing union election win rates over the past few years, while the number of workers filing for union elections has significantly dropped.

As labor unions have shrunk and employer union busting techniques have intensified, the number of organizing campaigns has significantly dropped. Today, most union drives don’t go to an election unless there is very high confidence that they will win.