Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1468810
stated, but the basic beats of the plot follow more or less the same pattern. It starts with the feeling that one's work merits more respect, it leads to the discovery and cultivation of a community of folks who feel likewise, and it culminates in the realization that such a community can wield real power through solidarity. I'm sure a lot of you reading this have your own version of this story. Maybe you once raised hell on a picket line to flip a non-union show. Or maybe you quietly conferred with coworkers to get everyone on the same page so that nobody on the crew would agree to accept comp time in lieu of overtime. Recognizing the worth of your work, forging ties with colleagues who feel likewise, supporting each other to collectively achieve better — it's all funda- mentally the same tale. Flash forward to the present. A quarter of a century, almost to the day, after I first got involved in unions — on Cesar Chavez Day, March 31, 2022 — I attended the Los Angeles County Federation of L abor 's Workers Congress. In the ballroom of a downtown hotel I sat alongside hundreds of other activists from L.A.'s union scene, all of whom came from different organiza- tions, different backgrounds, and different industries — but each of whom likely had an origin story that was, in rough contours, more or less analogous to my own. T h e Wo r k e r s C o n g r e s s 's h e a d l i n e s p e a k e r w a s t h e l e g e n d a r y A n g e l a Davis, reflecting sagely upon the struggles of generations past and the struggles of the present day. Davis is an elder now, but her voice has lost none of its power or its precision — it remains resonant, eloquent, and erudite, with those superfluous little semi-schwas she appends as grace notes to the end of her words. To a rapt room she spoke engrossingly of intersectionality, resistance, and the predatory nature of capitalism — bringing to each topic all of the fire and exactitude that she had brought to her famous jailhouse interviews more than half a century previously. I know I was not alone in the room in feeling a thrill to hear this iconic iconoclast tell us that she had never before felt such optimism about the potential for transformative social change. Davis was asked how she maintained her drive to fight for justice over the span of decades of struggle, including long periods in which revanchist reactionaries had the upper hand. That's when she said, "Hope is a discipline." And a murmur of assent spread through the room, the sound of a mass of people recognizing a truth they had instinctively felt but perhaps not previously heard articulated, crystalized into a simple declaration. Because the activists in that room knew that there can be no struggle without hope, and that there are periods — epochs, even — when hope is mostly, maybe entirely, a function of will and work. And what I'd been taught since my first entrée into the labor movement a quar- ter-century before was that organizing was a discipline, too – an art and science with its own rules and procedures, a long tra- dition of received wisdom, tradecraft, and best practices. I may have got my start by passing out a bunch of fliers willy-nilly, but I soon acquired mentors – many of whom had helped midwife the great boom of pub- lic-sector union organizing a generation before – who taught me that organizing was a methodical practice. But what, though, if hope – or even organizing – isn't only, or isn't always, a discipline? On March 31, as the crowd of Angeleno labor activists gathered listening to Davis, on the other side of the country a small team of bureaucrats in the Brooklyn offices of the National Labor Relations Board were count- ing ballots. For those who tuned in remotely via Zoom, the drably nondescript hearing room on the screen belied the historic sig- nificance of the event therein unfolding. The votes NLRB officers were counting had been cast in a union election at an enormous Am- azon warehouse in Staten Island (dubbed, in Amazon's parlance, JFK8). That election pitted a behemoth of trans- national capital, founded by the world's second-biggest billionaire, against a little upstart organization without staff, funding, or dues-paying members, founded by an unemployed Amazon warehouse worker who'd been fired in 2020 for leading a walk- out to protest the company's inadequate COVID-19 safety protocols. Allusions to the story of David and Goliath are perhaps a bit pat, but it's hard to imagine a much more asymmetrical contest. This new little union, calling itself Amazon Labor Union, had no resources and no institutional backing; it was the antithesis of what the champions of unfettered capitalism used to derisively refer to as "Big Labor." But this little group had a big foe, a notoriously anti-union cor- poration with unfathomable resources and power, and the determination to quash any dissent within its workforce. It wasn't simply, though, a question of resources. Unions almost invariably take on opponents with deeper pockets, but unions can still win. Organizing, though, is a discipline, a set of established practices and pathways to power. And to outside observers, it didn't look like the upstart Amazon Labor Union was observing all the orthodoxies of organizing. Organizing campaigns are supposed to build organiz- ing committees large enough to reach every worker; to spend time inoculating workers with a preview of management's anti-union rhetoric, so that workers build immunity before the bosses begin efforts to intimi- date; to reach supermajority support before petitioning for an election; to have ironclad tests to assess workers' support; to use tactics such as house visits to have multiple one-on-one conversations with each work- er in a safe place away from the worksite. To most outside observers, it doesn't appear as though the nascent union at JFK8 did much, The experts were all wrong. The little guy with the slingshot won. 16 C I N E M O N T A G E G E T T I N G O R G A N I Z E D