There’s an informal gestalt in much of academia that unions are
not social movements at all: that union equates to “undemocratic, top-
down bureaucracy.” Yet not all so-called social movement organiza-
tions (SMOs) fit their own definition of social; many function from
the top down as much as any bad union. An SMO’s membership, if it
has one, can be and often is as irrelevant and disregarded as the rank
and file in the worst union. Likewise, scholars assume that material
gain is the primary concern of unions, missing that workplace fights
are most importantly about one of the deepest of human emotional
needs: dignity. The day in, day out degradation of peoples’ self-worth
is what can drive workers to form the solidarity needed to face today’s
union busters.
Earning my doctorate after long practical experience— as a young,
radical student leader, then as a community organizer, a full- time edu-
cator at the Highlander Center, and, eventually, a union organizer and
chief negotiator and an electoral campaign manager— I find it impos-
sible to sort the process of progressive social change into two distinct
piles or traditions. All of the unions I worked with were by any defini-
tion social movements, characterized by progressive goals that reached
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No Shortcuts2
2
well beyond the workplace; prefigurative decision- making; and robust
participation by workers, their families, and their communities.
In this book, in the term movement I consciously merge agencies that
have been studied separately: the people in unions, who are called work-
ers, and many of the same people after they have punched the clock
at the end of their shift and put on their SMO (or “interest group”)
volunteer hats—people who are then called individuals. Workers, too,
are individuals. A divided approach to workplaces and communities pre-
vents people and movements from winning more significant victories
and building power. To the extent that a dichotomous approach persists
in academia, it deprives scholars, students, and practitioners from better
understanding two longstanding questions: Why have unions faltered?
and What must be done?
My hypothesis is threefold. First, the reason that progressives have
experienced a four-decade decline in the United States is because of a
significant and long-term shift away from deep organizing and toward
shallow mobilizing. Second, the split between “labor” and “social move-
ment” has hampered what little organizing has been done. Together,
these two trends help account for the failure of unions and progressive
politics, the ongoing shrinking of the public sphere, and unabashed rule
by the worst and greediest corporate interests.
Third, different approaches to change lead to different outcomes,
often very different outcomes. I discuss three broad types of change pro-
cesses: advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing—although my emphasis,
if not my obsessive emphasis, is on the latter two. Each method pro-
duces a different kind of victory, and not all of these victories are equal;
some are actually defeats. Only organizing can effectively challenge the
gross inequality of power in the United States. Today, there is very little
understanding of what factors lead to small, medium-, and high-impact
victories, or why.
Power and Power Structure Analysis
In the United States, C. Wright Mills popularized the concept of power
and power structures in his book The Power Elite,2 published in 1956. In
the sixty years since then, progressives have largely ignored and omit-
ted discussions about power or power structures. Nothing produces
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Introduction 3
3
deer- in- the- headlights moments for activists in the United States like
the question “What’s your theory of power?” The 1967 follow- up book
to Mills’s work, Who Rules America, by William Domhoff (and his pres-
ent- day website bearing the same name), is still considered the best all-
around go- to resource for local activists trying to understand how to do
power- related research on their opponents. But Mills, Domhoff, and
others who offer academic discussions of power largely attend to the
power structures of the elites, of those who routinely exercise a great deal
of power (national power in Mills’s work, local power in Domhoff’s).
And the conversations about elite power can get very circular (they exer-
cise it because they have it, they have it because they exercise it, were
born into it, have friends with it …). Part of what made Frances Fox
Piven and Richard Cloward’s 1977 book, Poor People’s Movements,3 so
refreshing— and smart— is that they inserted ordinary people into dis-
cussions about who can exercise power.
In discussing power, I am going to put brackets around this very
big concept. My interest, borne out by the empirical cases that follow,
is in understanding the power structures of ordinary people and how
they themselves can come to better understand their own power. There’s
plenty of evidence on the front pages of The New York Times that Mills’s
elites still rule. The level of raw privilege that a Mark Zuckerberg or Bill
Gates or Jamie Dimon presently possesses isn’t much different from that
which Bertrand Russell described in his 1938 book Power as “priestly” and
“kingly.”4 That helps explain why multinational CEOs were included,
and indistinguishable from, the Pope, kings, and presidents in the many
photos taken at the December 2015 climate talks.5 It doesn’t seem all
that difficult to understand how today’s priestly- kingly- corporate class
rules. But for people attempting to change this or that policy, especially
if the change desired is meaningful (i.e., will change society), it is essen-
tial to first dissect and chart their targets’ numerous ties and networks.
Even understanding whom to target— who the primary and secondary
people and institutions are that will determine whether the campaign
will succeed (or society will change)— often requires a highly detailed
power- structure analysis.
This step is often skipped or is done poorly, which is partly why
groups so often fail. Domhoff’s website, combined with a dozen other
more recent similar websites— such as LittleSis, CorpWatch, and
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No Shortcuts4
4
Subsidy Tracker— can help groups in the United States sharpen their
analysis of precisely who needs to be defeated, overcome, or persuaded
to achieve success. Understanding who the correct targets are and the
forms of power they exercise should be only one step in a power- struc-
ture analysis,6 but often when that step is taken, it only plots the cur-
rent power holders in relationship to one another. Good start, but keep
going.
What is almost never attempted is the absolutely essential corollary: a
parallel careful, methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power struc-
tures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the
fight. Unions that still execute supermajority strikes have an excellent
approach to better understanding how to analyze these power structures:
to pull off a huge strike and win (as did the Chicago teachers in the new
millennium) requires a detailed analysis of exactly which workers are likely
to stand together, decide to defy their employer’s threats of termination,
and walk out in a high- risk collective action. Which key individual worker
can sway exactly whom else— by name— and why? How strong is the
support he or she has among exactly how many coworkers, and how do
the organizers know this to be true? The ability to correctly answer these
and many other related questions— Who does each worker know outside
work? Why? How? How well? How can the worker reach and influence
them?— will be the lifeblood of successful strikes in the new millennium.
Liberals and most progressives don’t do a full power- structure analysis
because, consciously or not, they accept the kind of elite theory of power
that Mills popularized. They assume elites will always rule. At best, they
debate how to replace a very naughty elite with a “better” elite, one they
“can work with,” who wants workers to have enough money to shop the
CEOs out of each crisis they create, who will give them a raise that they
will spend on consuming goods they probably don’t need. The search for
these more friendly elites frames the imagination of liberals and progres-
sives. An elite theory of power for well- intentioned liberals leads to the
advocacy model; an elite theory of power for people further left than
liberals— progressives— leads to the mobilizing model, because progres-
sives set more substantive goals that require a display of potential power,
or at least a threat of it.
People to the left of both liberals and progressives have a different
theory of power: different because it assumes that the very idea of who
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Introduction 5
5
holds power is itself contestable, and that elites can be pushed from
priestly- kingly- corporate rule. Though almost extinct nationally, there
are still powerful unions operating at the local and regional level. These
unions’ democratic, open negotiations— in which tens of thousands of
workers unite to stop bad employers from doing horrible things and
then create enough power to pull up to the negotiations table as equals
and determine something better— provide evidence that ordinary peo-
ple can exercise both absolute power (power over) and creative power
(power to). A focus of this book is on why and how to analyze this still
vast potential power of ordinary people.
Marshall Ganz simplified the concept of strategy by explaining it as
“turning what you have into what you need to get what you want.”7 The
word you is crucial— and variable. How do people come to understand
the first part of this sentence, “what you have”? And which people get to
understand? Only those who understand what they have can meaning-
fully plot the “what you need”: create the steps that comprise the plan,
plot and direct the course of action, and then get “what you want.” And
because “what you want” is generally in proportion to what you think
you can get, demands rise or fall based on what people believe they
might reasonably achieve. Who is the actual you in “what you want”?
To better understand outcomes— winning or losing, a little or a lot—
requires breaking down each subclause in Ganz’s excellent definition of
strategy.
First, Ganz rightly suggests that the specific “biographies” of those on
“leadership teams” can directly affect strategy because “diverse teams”
bring a range of “salient knowledge” and varied and relevant networks
to the strategy war room. It follows, then, that the bigger the war room,
the better. I expand who should be in the strategy war room from people
with recognizable decision- making authority or a position or title— such
as lead organizer, vice president, researcher, director, steward, and execu-
tive board member— to specific individuals who have no titles but who
are the organic leaders on whom the masses rely: nurse, teacher, anes-
thesia tech, school bus driver, congregant, and voter. I urge a deeper
dive into the specific backgrounds, networks, and salient knowledge of
the masses involved, rather than only those of the leadership team— the
rank and file matter just as much to outcomes, if not more, than the
more formal leaders. Why? Large numbers of people transition from
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No Shortcuts6
6
unthinking “masses” or “the grassroots” or “the workers” to serious
and highly invested actors exercising agency when they come to see, to
understand, and to value the power of their own salient knowledge and
networks. The chief way to help ordinary people go from object to sub-
ject is to teach them about their potential power by involving them as
central actors in the process of developing the power- structure analysis
in their own campaigns— so they come to better understand their own
power and that of their opponents.
When they see that three of their own ministers and two of their city
council members and the head of the PTA for their children’s schools
serve on commissions and boards with their CEOs, they themselves can
begin to imagine and plot strategy. People participate to the degree they
understand— but they also understand to the degree they participate.
It’s dialectical. Power- structure analysis is the mechanism that enables
ordinary people to understand their potential power and participate
meaningfully in making strategy. When people understand the strategy
because they helped make it, they will be invested for the long haul,
sustained and propelled to achieve more meaningful wins.
Three key variables are crucial to analyzing the potential for success
in the change process: power, strategy, and engagement. Three ques-
tions must be asked: Is there a clear and comprehensive power- structure
analysis? Does the strategy adopted have any relationship to a power-
structure analysis? How, if at all, are individuals being approached and
engaged in the process, including the power analysis and strategy, not
just the resulting collective action? Many small advances can be and
are won without engaging ordinary people, where the key actors are
instead paid lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations professionals, helped
by some good smoke and mirrors. That is an advocacy model, and small
advances are all it can produce— but I am getting ahead of myself.
Progressives, broadly defined, have enough resources to achieve
a massive turnaround of the long reactionary political and economic
trends in the United States, perhaps in all of the so- called Western
industrialized countries. And substantial change can happen fast— in
just a few years. (Note this, climate- change campaigners: Correct strat-
egy and deep organizing can make things happen quickly.) One impli-
cation of my argument is that the people controlling the movement’s
resources— the individuals who are decision makers in national unions
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Introduction 7
7
and in philanthropy— have been focused on the wrong strategies for
decades, leading to an extraordinary series of setbacks. Many of the big-
gest victories of the past 100 years, those won in the heyday of the labor
and civil rights movements, have been all but rolled back.
Yet some of the victories achieved by the people in these two move-
ments were durable— and so have not been entirely lost— because they
instituted major structural changes that were embedded in government
policies at the national, state, and local levels; they achieved strong or
relatively strong enforcement mechanisms; they achieved better fund-
ing and staffing for the enforcement agencies; and, most important,
each victory became part of the everyday consciousness of most people.
We know this because people who say they don’t like unions will also
say, “At least in this country it’s illegal for children to work in facto-
ries,” or “I told the boss I wouldn’t handle anything so toxic without
protection,” or simply, “Thank God It’s Friday.” That is, they don’t like
unions, but they see child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, the
eight- hour workday, and the weekend— all benefits won by workers
engaged in collective action through their unions— as the reasonable
and beneficial norm. Similarly, many white people in the United States
might find #blacklivesmatter overly confrontational, but they take it
for granted that black people can vote, and that whites- only primaries
and officially segregated schools are wrong, racist, and a thing of the
past. And, despite their own continued contributions to maintaining de
facto structural racism, they would not accept an official return to the
apartheid of Jim Crow laws.
That is why reversing the gains of the two most successful movements—
labor and civil rights— has required a sustained, multidecade, multifront
campaign by the corporate class. The global trade rules that corporate
elites methodically put into place have been a key strategy. From the
1970s through the 1990s, they gutted the power of U.S. factory work-
ers, the biggest organized labor force of that time, by putting them in
direct competition with workers earning $1 a day in countries where
rights are minimal and repression high. Then they started a drumbeat
about unionized workers in the United States being overpaid, and rallied
national opinion to that message. This is but one example of how peo-
ple, in this case the corporate class, can change what academics call the
opportunity structure to suit their long- term goals. Global and regional
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No Shortcuts8
8
trade accords also give multinational corporations the right to buy land
anywhere in almost any country, and new corporate landlords have for-
cibly evicted or cheaply bought off millions of people from self- sustain-
ing plots of land, directly contributing to a huge rise in immigration
into the United States and Europe.8
During the same decades, the corporate class pocketed the courts,
one judicial appointment at a time. The resulting deeply conservative
judiciary has relentlessly chipped away at the major laws sustaining the
victories of labor and civil rights, overturning hard- fought, key provi-
sions of affirmative action and voting- rights protections. Moreover,
along with austerity and privatization, conservative courts have facili-
tated a vertically integrated for- profit prison system, resulting in the
mass incarceration of African Americans, detention centers overflowing
with Latinos, and massive profits for the putrid penal system’s corporate
shareholders.9
The corporate class also created their version of a popular front,
seizing the cultural apparatus through such rulings as the Federal
Communications Commission’s Clinton- era decision to allow multina-
tionals to outright own the means of communication. They also built
up, through very generous funding, the powerful Christian right.
In the zigzag of forward progress from the 1930s to the early 1970s,
followed by defeats from the mid- 1970s to the present time, what
changed? Why were the achievements won during the heyday of the
pre- McCarthy labor movement and the civil rights movement so sub-
stantial compared with the progressive achievements of the past forty
years? Scholars and practitioners alike have numerous answers to these
questions, overwhelmingly structural in nature. But in most of their
answers they consider the labor movement as a separate phenomenon
with little relationship to the civil rights movement. Social scientists
have approached the study of each as if they were different species, one a
mammal and the other a fish, one earthbound and one aquatic. Yet these
movements have shared several key features that argue for understand-
ing them as more alike than distinct.
The main difference between these two most powerful movements
half a century ago and today is that during the former period of their
great successes they relied primarily on— and were led by— what
Frances Fox Piven has eloquently termed ordinary people. They had a
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Introduction 9
9
theory of power: It came from their own ability to sustain massive dis-
ruptions to the existing order. Today, as Theda Skocpol documents in
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American
Civic Life, attempts to generate movements are directed by profes-
sional, highly educated staff who rely on an elite, top- down theory of
power that treats the masses as audiences of, rather than active partici-
pants in, their own liberation:
Aiming to speak for— and influence— masses of citizens, droves
of new national advocacy groups have set up shop, with the media
amplifying debates among their professional spokespersons. The
National Abortion Rights Action League debates the National Right
to Life Committee; the Concord Coalition takes on the American
Association for Retired Persons; and the Environmental Defense
Fund counters business groups. Ordinary Americans attend to such
debates fitfully, entertained or bemused. Then pollsters call at dinner-
time to glean snippets of what everyone makes of it all.10
As the cases in this book— all situated in the new millennium— illustrate,
the chief factor in whether or not organizational efforts grow organically
into local and national movements capable of effecting major change is
where and with whom the agency for change rests. It is not merely if
ordinary people— so often referred to as “the grassroots”— are engaged,
but how, why, and where they are engaged.
Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing
Here is the major difference among the three approaches discussed in
the book. Advocacy doesn’t involve ordinary people in any real way;
lawyers, pollsters, researchers, and communications firms are engaged
to wage the battle. Though effective for forcing car companies to
install seatbelts or banishing toys with components that infants might
choke on, this strategy severely limits serious challenges to elite power.
Advocacy fails to use the only concrete advantage ordinary people have
over elites: large numbers. In workplace strikes, at the ballot box, or in
nonviolent civil disobedience, strategically deployed masses have long
been the unique weapon of ordinary people. The 1 percent have a vast
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No Shortcuts10
10
armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 per-
cent have an army.
Over the past forty years, a newer mechanism for change seekers
has proliferated: the mobilizing approach. Mobilizing is a substantial
improvement over advocacy, because it brings large numbers of people
to the fight. However, too often they are the same people: dedicated
activists who show up over and over at every meeting and rally for all
good causes, but without the full mass of their coworkers or community
behind them. This is because a professional staff directs, manipulates,
and controls the mobilization; the staffers see themselves, not ordinary
people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows
up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear— enough
for a photo good enough to tweet and maybe generate earned media.
The committed activists in the photo have had no part in developing a
power analysis; they aren’t informed about that or the resulting strat-
egy, but they dutifully show up at protests that rarely matter to power
holders.
The third approach, organizing, places the agency for success with a
continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never
previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all—
that’s the point of organizing. In the organizing approach, specific injus-
tice and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is
to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to
the 99 percent. Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are
primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process
and keeping them involved. The organizing approach relies on mass
negotiations to win, rather than the closed- door deal making typical of
both advocacy and mobilizing. Ordinary people help make the power
analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential
and they know it.
In unions and SMOs in the United States today, advocacy and, espe-
cially, mobilizing prevail. This is the main reason why modern move-
ments have not replicated the kinds of gains achieved by the earlier
labor and civil rights movements. Table 1.1 compares the three models
by their distinct approach to power, strategy, and people. Hahrie Han
has a somewhat similar chart in her excellent book How Organizations
Develop Activists.11 However, Han focuses on what I call self- selecting
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11
Table 1.1 Options for Change
Advocacy Mobilizing Organizing
Theory
of Power
Elite.
Advocacy
groups tend
to seek one-
time wins or
narrow policy
changes, often
through courts
or back- room
negotiations
that do not
permanently
alter the
relations of
power.
Primarily elite. Staff
or activists set goals
with low to medium
concession costs or,
more typically, set an
ambitious goal and
declare a win, even
when the “win” has
no, or only weak,
enforcement
provisions. Back-
room, secret deal
making by paid
professionals is
common.
Mass, inclusive, and collective.
Organizing groups transform
the power structure to favor
constituents and diminish the
power of their opposition.
Specific campaigns fit into a
larger power- building strategy.
They prioritize power analysis,
involve ordinary people in it,
and decipher the often hidden
relationship between economic,
social, and political power.
Settlement typically comes
from mass negotiations with
large numbers involved.
Strategy Litigation;
heavy
spending
on polling,
advertising,
and other paid
media.
Campaigns, run by
professional staff, or
volunteer activists
with no base of
actual, measureable
supporters, that
prioritize frames
and messaging over
base power. Staff-
selected “authentic
messengers” represent
the constituency to
the media and policy
makers, but they have
little or no real say in
strategy or running
the campaign.
Recruitment and involvement
of specific, large numbers of
people whose power is derived
from their ability to withdraw
labor or other cooperation
from those who rely on them.
Majority strikes, sustained
and strategic nonviolent
direct action, electoral
majorities. Frames matter,
but the numbers involved
are sufficiently compelling
to create a significant earned
media strategy. Mobilizing is
seen as a tactic, not a strategy.
(continued )
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No Shortcuts12
12
groups that do not make class a central issue. This book does focus
on class, and on the clear and vital distinction between the strategy of
developing activists, who are not always drawn from the working class,
and that of developing organic leaders, who always are.
Structure- based vs. Self- selecting Groups
The labor and civil rights movements were located in the landscape of
what I call structure- based organizing. The structures were, respectively,
the workplace and the black church under Jim Crow. Both movements
chose organizing as their primary strategy. Mobilizing and advocacy also
played a role, but the lifeblood of these movements was mass participation
by ordinary people, whose engagement was inspired by a cohesive com-
munity bound by a sense of place: the working community on the shop
floor, in the labor movement, and the faith community in the church, in
the fight for civil rights. The empirical research that follows and the volu-
minous literature examining the outcomes of the 1930s through 1960s are
fair grounds for arguing that structure- based organizing still offers the
best chance to rebuild a powerful progressive movement. Unorganized
workplaces and houses of faith remain a target- rich environment, and
there are plenty of them, enough to return the labor movement to the
35 percent density it had when inequality was falling, not rising.12
Since organizing’s primary purpose is to change the power struc-
ture away from the 1 percent to more like the 90 percent, majorities
Advocacy Mobilizing Organizing
People
Focus
None. Grassroots activists.
People already
committed to the
cause, who show
up over and over.
When they burn out,
new, also previously
committed activists are
recruited. And so on.
Social media are over
relied on.
Organic leaders.
The base is expanded through
developing the skills of organic
leaders who are key influencers
of the constituency, and who
can then, independent of staff,
recruit new people never before
involved. Individual, face- to-
face interactions are key.
Table 1.1 (Continued)
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Introduction 13
13
are always the goal: the more people, the more power. But not just any
people. And the word majority isn’t a throwaway word on a flip chart, it
is a specific objective that must be met. In structure- based organizing,
in the workplace and in faith- based settings, it is easy to assess whether
or not you have won over a majority of the participants in the given
structure to a cause or an issue. A workplace or church will have, say,
500 workers or parishioners, and to reach a majority, or even a superma-
jority, the quantifiable nature of the bounded constituency allows you
to assess your success in achieving your numbers. An organizer intend-
ing to build a movement to maximum power who is approaching a
structured or bounded constituency must target and plan to reach each
and every person, regardless of whether or not each and every person
has any preexisting interest in the union or community organization.
Beyond understanding concretely when a majority has been gained,
the organizer can gauge the commitment levels of the majority by the
nature, frequency, and riskiness of actions they are willing to take. The
process of building a majority and testing its commitment level also
allows a far more systematic method of assessing which ordinary people
have preexisting leadership within the various structures, a method
called leadership identification. These informal leaders, whom I will call
organic leaders, seldom self- identify as leaders and rarely have any offi-
cial titles, but they are identifiable by their natural influence with their
peers. Knowing how to recognize them makes decisions about whom
to prioritize for leadership development far more effective. Developing
their leadership skill set is more fruitful than training random volun-
teers, because these organic leaders start with a base of followers. They
are the key to scale.
This process differs considerably from the self- selecting that goes on
in movement work, such as environmental and other single- issue fights,
women’s and other identity- based movements, and nonreligious com-
munity efforts. Self- selecting groups rely on the mobilizing approach,
and many of these groups grew out of, or in response to, the New Left
project of the 1960s.13 In self- selecting work, most people show up at
meetings because they have a preexisting interest in or a serious com-
mitment to the cause. As Skocpol says, “[M] any of the key groups were
not membership associations at all. They were small combinations of
nimble, fresh thinking, and passionate advocates of new causes.”14 In
self- selecting work, movement groups spend most of their time talking
This material was originally published in No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey, and
has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-shortcuts-9780190868659).
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