What the Boss Doesn't Want Us to Know

After the labor movement faded away in the lives of most Americans, organizing is back! Workers are organizing at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and Google, to name just a few. But it’s going to take more than picket signs and marches in front of stores and corporate headquarters to win real union contracts with real protections for these workers. To beat these firms and others like them, workers and their unions will need to learn much more about their adversaries to identify key vulnerabilities and build effective campaigns to win. What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know is the first volume to teach the basics of conducting this research and how to use it to build winning campaigns. It explores how to identify corporate decision-makers, profit centers, growth plans, and secondary targets and the kinds of power that activists can use to beat even global giants. What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know is for more than just professional researchers and campaigners. This book offers up a radical new practice for investigating employers. The authors propose a member-based, democratic approach to corporate research that will train an army of rank-and-file researchers to investigate and beat the firms that control so much of our lives. This approach has already been successfully utilized with NewsGuild of New York at the New York Times, Reuters, Gannett, the United Food and Commercial Workers at Tyson Foods, workers at Google (the Alphabet Workers Union), Apple retail workers, the Association of Flight Attendants at Delta Air Lines, and Trader Joe’s United. The lessons contained in this book hold great promise to supercharge the new organizing wave currently sweeping across America.