Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: Labor Organizing During covid-19

Abstract

This article explores how crises become opportunities. Through a study of a progressive teachers’ union caucus in New York City during the emergence of covid-19, this piece examines how organizations convert crises into opportunities for political growth. Drawing on sociological theories of political articulation and crisis, this article explores the role of union caucuses to foment political change. We argue that crises become politically significant according to how organizations use events to catalyze competing political narratives to drive new political formations. We examine how union caucuses engage in this work. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and interviews, our study finds that caucuses with established visions, internal organizational structure, and moral legitimacy are better able to take advantage of crises. These conditions allow caucuses to exercise power, not just petition for it. We conclude that the existence of organizational infrastructure and ideological coherence enables a group to convert crises into opportunities.

Toward a Field of Labor Activism

“…Future research could pull on the threads that bind one strategic action field to another, both horizontally, across different types of sectors and worker organizations, and vertically, as innovative locals or worker centers destabilize "taken for granted" rules and logics that affect national federations upstream. The seeds of such research are already present in studies that examine the conditions under which a Bargaining for the Common Good platform might be taken up by a dissident caucus during a moment of crisis (Shirmer & Tarlau, 2022) or how worker centers adopt elements of traditional unionism to neutralize employer power. Putting forth a research program centered on strategic action fields also requires asking questions about how opportunities in one locus of a field create constraints or increased capacities in another.…”