Alternet has this great article The Big Difference Between Organizing and Mobilizing: How Unions Can Win in the Future, A discussion on what ails the labor movement and why we need to stop ignoring the rank-and-file.

This is an interview with Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer known for her work with SEIU in the 2000s. One of McAlevey’s answers only begins to show you the good stuff to learn by reading the whole article.

Our assumptions about who’s going to think what are so often wrong. That’s why it’s so fun do an organizing conversation with just a worker on the door. You can pull up to a door, see a conservative bumper sticker or something else and start making assumptions. But then you go in there, and through the process of a good, long, face-to-face conversation, almost every time, the individual comes out pissed off at their boss, understands that their boss is connected to a bigger system, and starts for the first time to think, “I can do something about this if we act collectively.”

I can attest to the fact that I have learned a number of lessons from this article about what I, as a grassroots organizer for Bernie Sanders, can do better to further the cause of the revolution that Bernie Sanders says we need.