The Worker to Worker Collaborative

What is W2W?

The Worker to Worker Collaborative, a project of the Workplace Justice Lab, was founded to provide strategies, tools, and structures to unions aiming to scale up power by expanding their members’ involvement and leadership.

Rather than relying primarily on staff to drive forward organizing efforts, the most effective and innovative unions in the world are recruiting and developing worker leaders capable not only of coalescing their co-workers, but of taking on much of the work normally reserved for staff, such as initiating campaigns, training others, and leading teams of volunteers. Precisely this type of new distributed organizing model is needed to help working people and their organizations effectively confront entrenched corporate power and our society’s deepening crises.

Re-orienting staff and union resources towards training up and supporting wide numbers of worker leaders is an essential step towards lowering organizing costs, increasing union democracy, and putting the movement back into the labor movement. By leaning on digital tools and a “Learn-Do-Teach” spirit, unions can transform their internal practices — and exponentially expand their impact — by connecting members to other members, holding regular mass trainings to spread time-tested deep organizing tactics, and by providing workers the tools they need to start self-organizing.  

The Collaborative — a project of the Organizing Department of the Workplace Justice Lab-Rutgers University supported by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee — seeks to spread these scalable best practices by providing trainings and consulting services to any union looking to incorporate worker-to-worker practices and structures. W2W is based on the work of Eric Blanc, whose book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big is out with UC Press in February 2025. To contact Blanc about potential collaboration with W2W, you can reach him at ebb57@smlr.rutgers.edu.