Course Details

This course is for recent graduates, union staff and others who work or want to work in social change organizations that strive to make and keep corporations accountable, including primarily labor unions but also workers’ centers, environmental justice groups, and community-based organizations. It prepares students to engage corporations by teaching them, through hands-on techniques, how to research corporate ownership, finance, organization, and power.

The program targets those who want to learn about and contribute to the innovation taking place in union organizing and bargaining. For example, some recent successful campaigns have been multinational and multi-union. Other campaigns have drawn heavily on rank-and-file community-based action. A growing number of campaigns have targeted occupations and industries that either fall outside the NLRB model or are specifically denied legal employee status. Recent campaign victories include:

• In 2023, the year of the strike, unions won historic bargaining and strike victories at UPS, the Big Three auto companies, Hollywood, and the hospitality industry.  Organizers used a combination of rank-and-file community action and engagement, innovative strategies such as practice picketing, intermittent or rolling strikes, industry- and company-wide bargaining, and strategically targeting the most profitable segments of the company (parts and large trucks in auto and Netflix and Walt Disney in entertainment).
• SEIU 32BJ won an 8-year comprehensive campaign for a $19 minimum wage by 2023, for 40,000, low wage contract workers employed at New York and New Jersey airports. The victory is all the more significant because the union only represents 9000 contract workers at the three airports but was able to win wage gains for all airport workers. The campaign targeted both the airlines and the Port Authority. The victory came just a few days before October 2, 2018, Global Day of Action.
• As the print and digital news’ industry continues to go through major restructuring and employment changes, 3200 media workers organized with The News Guild (TNG/CWA) or Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) in the last 20 years. WGAE’s new units include Vice Media, Slate, Salon, Huffington Post, The Intercept, Gizmodo Media Group, and ThinkProgress; while TNG’s include New York Magazine, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Mashable, PC Mag, Geek, and Ask Men.

These victories came about through a combination of grassroots rank-and-file mobilizing, rank-and-file leadership development, and escalating actions in the workplace and broader community. However, fundamental to all these campaigns was careful strategic research.

Because the labor movement faces a shortage of strategic researchers, this course aims to increase the supply of people who understand both how to research corporate structure and power and develop union campaign strategies. To do that, the course provides hands-on research training, teaching students how to investigate corporate ownership, finance, organization, and power. Students learn how to analyze the key relationships, profit centers, growth strategies, and key decision makers that drive a particular corporation and shape its labor relations strategy. They also learn how unions can best respond to and capitalize on these characteristics through comprehensive organizing and bargaining campaigns.

The course uses a combination of teaching methods, including lecture, readings, discussion, small-group exercises, individual research activities, group research projects, and group presentations. Students receive in-depth, hands-on training in the online and library research tools required to conduct strategic corporate research. They work through a series of case studies dealing with diverse firms and industries, and they conduct in-depth research on an actual firm in the context of union organizing or bargaining.