The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood, the non-Doges-approved standard two guests today.

Eric Blank will tell us about worker-led union organizing, and Molly O'Neill will review the recent

elections in Germany, which saw the far-right AFD make a strong showing.

Traditional union organizing, that is the kind done by professional organizers, has not been

racking up the successes lately,

and by lately I mean for several decades. Last year, just 5.9% of private sector workers were

members of unions, less than half the share of 1990, and a quarter of the share of 1974. It's

hard to imagine how the working class could have more prosperous and secure lives without reversing that slide.

New models are clearly necessary, and my first guest, Eric Blank, a scholar, a journalist and activist who specializes in unions, is here to talk about them.

Eric, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers is just out with a book.

We are the union, how worker-to-worker organizing is revitalizing labor and winning

big, from the University of California Press. His previous book, Red State Revolt, was a look at the

teacher uprisings in West Virginia and other states. He was on this show to discuss it when they

came out in 2019. This one is a study of worker-led organizing efforts, like those at Starbucks and Amazon,

that have shown remarkable energy and even some success in a time when Labor's story is mostly a catalog of defeats.

The strategy is also informing more traditional unions, like the UAW under President Sean Fain,

in their successful strike against the auto industry in 2023.

And we're seeing it now in the resistance federal workers have shown to Trump's attempts to decimate the government workforce.

Eric Blank.

There have been some, and I think I've talked to you about this in the past, there have been great changes in the spatial layout of American life since the great labor upsearch of the 1930s.

Then we had dense urban areas

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