The following is an interview conducted by San Francisco Bay Area labor and social movements authors and organizers Robert Ovetz and James Tracy. They spoke with Daniel Gross about his new book Unions of Our Own: Eight Building Blocks to Change Work and the World (Haymarket Books, 2026). This interview has been edited for structure and clarity.
How did you get involved with the workers movement?
I worked at Borders Book and Music when I was really young. The pay, the hours, and the disrespectful treatment from some managers aggravated me. I figured the thing to do was reach out to unions, which I did.
My coworkers and I started doing meetings, but all the while I was fighting with management solo, which of course was a mistake. No plot twist here, Borders soon fired me. So I didn’t get very far in my first effort, but it holds a great significance for me. It gave me my start in unionism. And it planted the seed to become obsessed with what causes victory in union campaigns.
Fast forwarding a bit, I started working at Starbucks in 2003. I got to take part in the formation of a powerful labor union there, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, which changed my life and many others. It also helped break new ground in the labor movement in two ways: one, workers organizing themselves, and two, the campaign demonstrated that those who had called the fast food and retail sectors “unorganizable” were mistaken. The seeds we contributed in both those respects have sprouted greatly in the last ten or so years. That campaign was high-profile, and it started a process which continues to this day of connecting with workers from diverse industries and accompanying them on their campaigns.
I also started writing with my late mentor, Staughton Lynd, with whom I co-authored Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law (PM Press, 2008) and Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks (PM Press, 2011), the latter along with the great labor artist Tom Keough, also now departed. And I worked for well over a decade as a founding organizer of Brandworkers, a worker center of immigrant food manufacturing workers and one of the founding organizations of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. Those experiences again contributed to this blessing of having many liberatory workers get in touch with me and getting to be in movement with them.
Twenty-five years of organizing at my own jobs and being in close movement with many others at their jobs helped lead to the lessons and analysis of Unions of Our Own— along with careful study of historical campaigns. During this time, I learned that it is coworkers in workplaces and industries who are best positioned to design and refine unions to meet their needs. And it takes a complete model to win, which consists of eight fundamental building blocks.
There are the four foundational building blocks. The first is “Constituency,” which is the scope of coworkers you will organize among as well as secondary constituents who can help you come together and amplify your power when you do. Constituency is one of the most fiery questions in labor history and remains so today. The “Problem” building block deals with the issues or unmet needs weighing on you the most, on the job and beyond it. “Solution” is the type of union you’ll build, the affiliation choice you make, and the benefits you’ll create through your solidarity to take on the identified problems. “Strategy” is the 800-pound gorilla of a union model, the power to win your union solution.
Once you have that foundation, you turn your attention to the four structure and growth building blocks. “Mechanism” is how you hold or codify your gains. It’s a building block with huge importance for the character and performance of a labor union, and for social change as a whole. “Structure” is about having a union that coworkers control. “Funding” is what your union needs and you can get it; how you get it matters a ton for the responsiveness and fighting spirit of your union. Finally, the “Metrics” building block measures what matters most in your model to learn what’s working and to help ensure you are honoring your union’s values.
The book helps readers use the building blocks to maximize the chance at union victory, through bullet-pointed decision-making factors, many examples from contemporary campaigns, colorful and often hidden labor history, as well as my own stories.
What is the main argument about the state of the workers movement in your new book Unions of Our Own?
I’ve surprised some folks when I’ve said I’m optimistic, that this is a far greater time for unionism than when I came of age in the economy at Borders around the turn of the century. While uneven, there’s been tremendous working class activity and a turn towards unionism in the last ten or so years in the United States. It is amazing, and there is much to celebrate. At the same time, unionism has not grown overall in that period and the collective worker power it takes to take on oligarchy and fascism is nowhere near sufficient.
One of the things the book argues against is the tendency to say there is a method or technique that exists and we just need to execute the hell out of it with great discipline and then we can win in every geography and in every industry. Method and technique are very important and there are some great ones which I do share in the book. But the truth is that there is no cookie-cutter recipe that exists for workers to be able to meet their needs in full, honor their values, and advance their vision of the world in all contexts.
On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to attempt to start with a blank slate. That cuts you off from other working class wisdom and denies you a framework to your insights to the surface and test them. In conjunction with that framework, the tools to use it, and the validated moves our forbearers have made, my hope for the book is to make a small contribution to help coworkers maximize their chance of victory.
What is your analysis of the role of unions in capitalism?
Let me start with the two poles on either end. One is that unions are either never able to take on capitalism, they’ll always stabilize it to some extent. The other pole is that unions are always a meaningful check on capitalism.
One of the essential points in the book is that there is a back-and-forth relationship between union visions and union models. If you have a liberatory vision, but your model is not in accord with it, the model will drag it down. Sometimes this will happen right away, sometimes it takes place over time. On the other hand, you can have a model that nourishes and advances a liberatory vision.
One of the groups of readers whom Unions of Our Own is resonating with so far are workers who want to challenge capitalism and empire via a union. The book unpacks model choices that were made in the 1930s and consolidated in 1950 that tend to go against that. Workers have the right to make different choices, and I try to open up the field so they can consider doing so with confidence.
My reading of history combined with what I’ve come to understand about the “structural and material basis” of unions gives me a strong conviction that some types of union models can help achieve a society that is led and operated by workers and communities and that can get us past capitalism. But without intentionality, it’s easy for a union to become an “agent of capital”— to borrow a phrase from a union staffer I quote in the book.
What are the fundamental threats to and weaknesses of the workers movement today?
The oligarchy is piling up more of our resources than ever. As neoliberalism unravels, large capital, led by tech capital and other segments of the capitalist class, is positioning fascism as an alternative that many are finding compelling. AI is sucking up all the knowledge workers have produced and subordinating workers with it. All the while it is piling up more capital for a small number of oligarchs. The main use of AI currently is to control, extract, kill, surveil, disinform, and disrupt. So there are many threats.
Still, era after era it is workers on job sites, at companies, and in industries and communities who come up with union forms that work. This happens not in spite of, but because of challenges in the big picture economic, political, social, and technological environment. A weakness in the movement is not having enough space where workers have the opportunity to bring their collective wisdom to the surface and test it through struggle. The book, and even more so the growing community of people doing rank & file union building together, is an effort to expand that space. It is beyond inspiring to be part of that.
What are the roadblocks standing in the way of union organizing in the U.S.?
I’ve already mentioned the concentrated power of the oligarchy, so let me go elsewhere. One roadblock is that while many folks are trying to advance a liberatory labor movement, there are other forces in labor doing the opposite. Unions that are trying to grow their density via deals that disempower workers and shore up the power of capitalism. This is happening via legislative or other schemes between top union officials, company executives, and politicians to exchange bargaining rights for the right to strike, the right to meaningfully choose your union, and the right to democratically govern your union.
Major visionary initiatives are being steamrolled by these efforts and many more will not be able to get off the ground in the first place because of this maneuvering. Those need to be called out and opposed. They need to be outmaneuvered and the only way to do it is a deep coworker to coworker solidarity structure in union models that work.
One last thing is that it takes literally a single worker sitting down and starting to make a list of their coworkers to start the exploration of a union campaign. Any blockage, friction, or missing link for that worker to get started with confidence is a roadblock.
None of these roadblocks is insurmountable by any means. This, again, is a superb time to consider the union-building journey.
What needs to be done to reinvigorate the workers movement?
More space and support of all kinds for workers is needed to design and refine their own union models. Solidarity Union Network (SUN) members and community participants have been hard at work on that. There is more union integration with movements and rank-and-file connection, as we saw during the successful effort to repel the ICE invasion of Minnesota in early 2026. We need more deep integration with each other as a global working class rather than as a national project, like we’re seeing among workers at Amazon.
For folks in establishment unions, more work is of course needed to organize caucuses and boot out reactionary leaders, and that work is happening. But that’s not enough to avoid reverting to the status quo. You’ve got to collectively document and challenge the regressive parts of the union. Take the reform effort at the United Auto Workers (UAW) and at many other unions I could cite: these movements didn’t just organize a base and vote in a new leadership, as important as that is. It whittled down the management prerogatives clause to preserve strike rights to prevent plant closure. It changed the union constitution for direct elections of the president. It expanded the scope of autoworkers to seriously organize to include those in the American South. Its 2023 work stoppage innovated on the classic “whipsaw strike” to great effect, as I analyze in the labor strategy canon part of the book. Respectively, those are changes to the mechanism, union structure, constituency, and strategy building blocks of the UAW model. Those union model changes should inspire folks in other traditional unions just as much as the change of leadership.
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People fed up with work and imagining something different can find Unions of Our Own, free digital tools from the book, trainings, book talks, and confidential one-on-one support from SUN at unionsofourown.org.
