The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) 2023 “stand-up strike” against Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis delivered historic gains for our members. But just as significant is what came next. Before the strike even ended, thousands of nonunion autoworkers — primarily in the South — began signing union cards on their own, using website links from defunct campaigns. No staff. No plan. No infrastructure. The strike was the spark. Workers used it to light their own fires.
For decades, launching a union drive at a Southern auto plant required months — or even years — of deep groundwork. Now workers were self-organizing at a scale we hadn’t seen in decades. We believed we had entered a movement moment, a rare opening when momentum spreads faster than fear and collective action becomes contagious.
To seize the moment, we launched Stand Up 2.0, a national campaign to organize multiple nonunion auto plants across the country. Our strategy was to experiment with new organizing approaches (namely, momentum and worker-to-worker organizing as compared to traditional structure-based organizing) that treat mass-scale union organizing more like a social movement than building a guerrilla army.
“Momentum-based organizing” relies on trigger events — high-profile actions that polarize the public and generate waves of participation. It scales up quickly by prioritizing mass sign-ups, rapid mobilization, and decentralized leadership. Worker-to-worker organizing — where the primary responsibility for building the organizing committee and the campaign needed to win is placed on workers themselves rather than professional organizing staff — is a perfect match for the momentum model.
In contrast, “structure-based organizing” is slower and more methodical. It emphasizes systematic leadership identification, committee building, supermajority public support, and carefully planned escalations to build confidence and overcome employer resistance. It is also…
Auteur: Chris Brooks
