The Bosses Are Organized. Why Aren’t We?

Every protection you have at work, every hour shaved off a seventy-hour week, every child who is not working in a factory right now, exists because workers organized and forced it.

The bosses know this. Which is why they never stopped organizing against you.

While you were working your shift, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was spending more money lobbying Congress than any other organization in the country. While you were figuring out how to pay your rent, the American Legislative Exchange Council was writing model legislation in hotel conference rooms, handing it to state legislators, and watching it become law, here in Tennessee and in thirty other states. While you were deciding whether the union was worth the trouble, your employer was paying a union avoidance consultant massive sums of money to make sure you decided no.

This is their business model: spending untold amounts of money to not have to pay you more or work you less.

The union-busting industry generates an estimated $340 million a year. Consultants train managers to hold captive audience meetings, to identify and isolate organizers, to make workers feel that a union would only bring conflict into an otherwise peaceful workplace.

The conflict, of course, was already there. They just don’t want you to think you can do anything about it.
“Right to work” did not spring up spontaneously in twenty-seven states. It was coordinated, funded, and executed by a network of foundations and advocacy organizations that have been at this for decades. Tennessee passed its right-to-work law in 1947. The infrastructure that built that law is still running — in fact, it spent buckets of money in 2022 to get that law enshrined in the state constitution, and that law wasn’t even facing a threat at the time.

So, if the people who own your workplace are organized into associations, coordinated through lobbying groups, advised by consultants, and protected by laws that they helped write — what does it mean that most workers are not organized at all?

It means the fight is not even. Every individual grievance, every whispered complaint in the break room, every person who got fired for speaking up — all of it runs into an apparatus designed to absorb from the start to absorb exactly that — one person, one complaint, one firing at a time.

There is only one thing that changes that math: We organize. We build relationships with the person next to us on the line, the one across the aisle, the one who has been there twenty years and knows where the bodies are buried. We stop thinking about work as something that happens to us and start thinking about it as somewhere we have power — if we build it.

The bosses figured this out a long time ago. That is why they work so hard to make sure you don’t.