The Labor Notes Podcast

You might be in a battle of wits with a great white shark on a New England beach and needing a bigger boat. Or maybe you're getting into property fights with your goth relatives (or imposters) in the Addams Family. Perhaps you're just a toy, a child's plaything, but developing power analysis in the Toy Story franchise.

Wherever your big screen adventures are playing out, we at the Labor Notes Podcast think you're probably applying a labor lesson from our bestseller, Secrets of a Successful Organizer, or our new book, Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It's Hard.

Tune into this week's episode for why our favorite summer blockbusters are really about organizing. 

Links to resources we mention in this episode: 

Stewards’ Corner: Workplace Safety Is Not a Game (Labor Notes Podcast, October 2025)

Four Union Strategies to Fight on A.I. (Article on labornotes.org | Labor Notes Podcast, May 2026) 

Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It's Hard: Order your copy | See Inside: Introduction: How to use this book; Chapter 1: Cultivate Respect

You guys loved our episode about having bad meetings so much that we’re actually bringing it back. Revisit this old Labor Notes pod banger and evergreen organizing question: “What if Unions Meetings Were Actually Good?”

It feels like we just saw about 4,700 of you a week ago in Chicago, so we're taking some space this week to give you a chance to miss us a little. (i.e. We're catching up on sleep after the 2026 Labor Notes Conference, and will be back to our programming next week!)    

In the meantime, watch the conference livestream:  

Friday, June 12

Main Session: WATCH HERE 

Saturday, June 13

The Soul in the Machine: Resisting A.I. Pressure on the Character and Quality of Our Jobs: WATCH HERE 

Opening Up Bargaining: WATCH HERE 

Sunday, June 14

Main Session: WATCH HERE 

See you next week, solidarity y'all!

What do you do when you work at a public school in a “right-to-work state” that also bars public employees from collective bargaining? And what happens, when your school district exploits its leverage over employees to snatch raises owed to workers? 

Members of the Durham Association of Educators in North Carolina turned to the tried and tested principles of collective action. They helped channel members’ frustrations into action, brought more school workers into the union, and built an escalation campaign that empowered members to hold out until their demands were met—and they won. 

Theirs is among several stories of strategic, persistent organizing featured in the new Labor Notes book, “Keep Going: A Guide To Organizing When It’s Hard,” by Ellen David Friedman—Organizing that gets the goods, even against what may seem like stacked odds. 

Author and Labor Notes board chair Ellen David Friedman and Durham Association Educators member Carlos Pérez join the pod. 

Order your copy of “Keep Going” here!

And read Ellen David Friedman’s Labor Notes interview with DAE’s Carlos Perez and Allison Swaim on their organizing wins in North Carolina.

You’ve learned the passes on the campaign mountain, figured out your co-workers’ most widely and deeply felt issues, and polished up your 1-1 skills. It’s time to start bringing in your co-workers—with the humble spreadsheet. 

List-building is a foundational organizing function that helps you map your workplace, reach out to members, and assess the strength of the union you’re building together.

This episode is based on a recent piece by Labor Notes Organizer Lisa Xu, “List-Building 101, or How to Expand Your Reach as a Troublemaker.”