![]() The basic building block of organizing is the one-on-one encounter between an organizer and a worker. A union organizer from the 1930s dropped into the center of an organizing campaign today would feel familiar with more than just the day-old coffee and the pervading stench of cigarettes. It is easy, looking at photos of the great labor struggles of the past-Ludlow, Lawrence, Flint, Paterson-to focus on how exotic and foreign the scenes seem and miss the fact that basic components of union organizing have changed precious little in the past hundred years. Studying union organizing is not merely an exercise in nostalgia. Loyalty to petrified opinion,” said Mark Twain, “never broke a chain or freed a human soul.” The results may cause us to doubt the truth of some of our most cherished stories, but a rigorous analysis of the past is worth exploding a few myths. The authors - one an organizer and the other an academic - show how challenging, and how important, it is to dig deep for the facts. We don’t have answers to some very basic questions about the who, what, where, and how of organizing. Much of organizing’s past is lost to historical memory. This classic piece from 2003, reprinted here from Labor History, shows us how important that project is. One of the reasons we created The Forge was to capture the best practices and ideas in the contemporary organizing world.
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