Chris Brooks

Reuters: A record 129 journalists were killed in 2025. Two-thirds were killed by Israel.

Hats off to those workers and to the Teamsters for backing them. But we can’t sugarcoat the real lesson here. If workers can’t credibly disrupt the company at scale, the company has little incentive to settle. Density across the employer isn’t optional — it’s the precondition for winning.

First contracts are often a second bite at the union-busting apple. Without strategic leverage and deeper organizing density, employers can and will stall indefinitely. Recognition alone doesn’t force a deal. Labor law won’t compel it to happen. Only worker power can get it done

What Will It Take to Unionize Chipotle? Workers in Michigan became the first Chipotle employees to ever win union recognition. Three years of fighting management for a contract they didn’t get taught them everything the next Chipotle union ...

Interesting read. After 3 years of bargaining, only union Chipotle store in the US has called it quits on push for a first contract. That’s not a moral failing, it’s a structural one. 1st contracts require leverage & a single shop of 12ish workers simply didn’t have it jacobin.com/2026/02/chip...

It is done

"Learning From the UAW’s National Organizing Push," by Chris Brooks (Feb 16, 2026).

bsky.app/profile/chac...

Labor Movement, Attack! Another year of decline. Here's how to fix it.

Union density, the most important measure of worker power in America, was stagnant for another year. We can start turning this around whenever the labor movement is ready to put on its ass-kicking shoes.
www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/labor-move...

Five great, action-oriented questions by Hamilton Nolan. The entire piece is excellent, highly recommended—especially when read in conjunction with the two most recent pieces in Jacobin by @chactivist.bsky.social (linked below).

Which form of organizing is more effective: one based more on momentum or on structure?

As @chactivist.bsky.social shows in this carefully crafted piece on UAW's Stand Up 2.0, it depends.

Click through for a summary of outcomes; read through for an analysis that organizers will truly appreciate.

This is amazing. Solidarity with the Twin Cities Tenants!

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.