The Power to Win is in the Community, Not the Boardroom
The Power to Win is in the Community, Not the Boardroom
This chapter dissects the relationship between power and strategy, and compares two distinct approaches to social change—the dominating mobilizing approach and the underused organizing approach. It proposes a blended approach called whole-worker organizing that tightly integrates workplace and nonworkplace issues, action, and learning into a holistic strategy. The successes of whole-worker organizing show that where unions understand all workers—union members and unorganized—to be class actors in their communities, and when the workers systematically bring their own pre-existing community networks into their workplace fights, workers can still win, and their wins produce a transformational change in consciousness. Sandwiched between the why and how of deep community engagement is a focused discussion about the difference between organizing and mobilizing, the evolution of the mobilizing model, and why each approach produces different levels of power.
Keywords: mobilizing approach, organizing approach, whole worker organizing, community networks, community engagement
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