What the Boss Doesn't Want Us to Know: Discovering Power and Winning Campaigns

After the labor movement faded away in the lives of most Americans, organizing is back!

Workers are organizing at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and Google, to name just a few. But it’s going to take more than picket signs and marches in front of stores and corporate headquarters to win real union contracts with real protections for these workers. To beat these firms and others like them, workers and their unions will need to learn much more about their adversaries to identify key vulnerabilities and build effective campaigns to win. What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know is the first volume to teach the basics of conducting this research and how to use it to build winning campaigns. It explores how to identify corporate decision-makers, profit centers, growth plans, and secondary targets and the kinds of power that activists can use to beat even global giants.

What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know is for more than just professional researchers and campaigners. This book offers up a radical new practice for investigating employers. The authors propose a member-based, democratic approach to corporate research that will train an army of rank-and-file researchers to investigate and beat the firms that control so much of our lives. This approach has already been successfully utilized with NewsGuild of New York at the New York Times, Reuters, Gannett, the United Food and Commercial Workers at Tyson Foods, workers at Google (the Alphabet Workers Union), Apple retail workers, the Association of Flight Attendants at Delta Air Lines, and Trader Joe’s United. The lessons contained in this book hold great promise to supercharge the new organizing wave currently sweeping across America.

Labor activist Tom Juravich is professor of labor studies and sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of At the Altar of the Bottom Line, Ravenswood, and Chaos on the Shop Floor. He is one of the leading strategic corporate researchers in the United States and Canada, the founder of the website StrategicCorporateResearch.com, and the creator of a framework to conduct corporate research that is widely used in the labor movement. He lives in Brattleboro, VT.

Olivia Geho is a digital organizer with the Virginia Education Association where she supports unionization efforts in dozens of school divisions across the Commonwealth. She is the vice president of the Virginia Professional Staff Association and has been teaching rank-and-file union members how to conduct research for three years. She is also the webmaster for StrategicCorporateResearch.org and has a master’s degree in labor studies from the UMass Amherst Labor Center. She lives in Richmond, VA.

Andrew Gorry has worked in labor and politics for over fifteen years as a communications staffer and leader, including as a communications organizer for American Federation of Teachers-Oregon and as president of the Professional Staff Union, MTA/NEA, representing over two thousand employees at UMass Amherst and UMass Boston. He has a master’s degree in labor studies from the UMass Amherst Labor Center and serves on the board of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.