In Australia we can learn a lot from Labor Notes and their approach to discussion and organising.
This year I had the pleasure of attending the biannual Labor Notes conference in Chicago from Thursday June 11 to Sunday June 14, 2026. Labor Notes is a US-based training organisation and network that supports grass roots organising to build more democratic unions. Well over 4000 union members attended the conference held at Hyatt Regency.
I attended the conference to get an insight into union organising in the United States and to take back organising ideas that would be useful in Australia. The conference lived up to my expectations and there are lots of strategies and tactics that are relevant to unions in Australia.
The conference officially kicked off on Friday, but there were a few orientation activities on Thursday. After registering for the conference, I signed up for the Chicago Labor History Tour. The first stop on the tour was a mural celebrating the union struggles of the meat packers and their union. The mural was near the famous stockyard district in Chicago. From there we visited the site of the infamous Haymarket demonstration where a bomb was thrown into a crowd during a worker’s rally in 1886. The police framed and later executed labor activists. They become known as “The Haymarket Martyrs”. This was the birth of the modern May Day movement around the world. Next stop was the cemetery where the Haymarket Martyrs and other labor activists are buried, including the famous anarchist Emma Goldman.
After the tour I attended the International Guest Reception back at the regency. It was truly inspirational being in a room with union activists from around world including, Norway, the Caribbean, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Mexico and the UK. Labor Notes did a great job of providing headsets for simultaneous English translations into many different languages. Before heading back to my hotel, I listened to Great Labor Arts Exchange comrades swapping and singing labor songs.
Friday was the official start of the conference. Being a teacher, I signed up for the UCORE Conference. UCORE stands for United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators; the name really says it all. This is a national organisation of rank-and-file educators struggling to make their respective unions more democratic and responsive to members’ needs.
After an inspirational introduction where each region where loudly cheered for attending, we broke into different sessions. The first session I attended was “What to do when your union breaks your heart” hosted by Ellen David Friedman, the author of Keep Going: A Guide to Organising When It’s Hard.
Ellen commented that it was disappointing that this session was so popular alluding to the frustration that many rank-and-file activists feel when confronted with the inertia of their own union leadership. She pointed out the session title was a misnomer and should be titled “What to do when your union leadership breaks your heart”.
She stressed that one of the most important things a rank-and-file leader should do is empower others to see themselves as organisers. It is important to avoid being disappointed as you can only control what you can control, so there is no point in being disappointed. Other pieces of advice given were the need to stay calm, give yourself a break, and work with others. Ellen stated there is a need to project calmness. She closed the session by alluding to a quote by Marx that refers to not choosing the ground we fight on.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The third session I attended was titled “Opening up bargaining from below”. This session was about transparent bargaining where union members have an input into the actual negotiations with the employer. In some education unions, rank-and-file members can attend negotiating sessions and are given cards where they can write notes during negotiations. If management is talking rubbish, members can hand notes to negotiators. In some unions, members attend negotiations but are silent. In other unions, rank-and-file members can speak directly with management about personal experiences. It was not all rosy though. Members in some unions spoke about low turn out to negotiating sessions and any rank-and-file presence being tokenistic.
The first session I attended on Saturday, day two of the conference, was “How to build power: From acting tactfully to thinking strategically”. The session was moderated by Erica Wills. She spoke about the difference between strategy and tactics. Erica outlined a model for change using the following thinking.
- Setting a goal
- Outlining objectives
- Considering actions and tactics (the stuff that we do)
When developing actions and tactics, there are four questions we need to consider.
- How does this action support larger goals and objectives?
- How do we build this action?
- How does this action engage the membership and the community?
- How does this action support us building power and leverage?
The third session I attended on Saturday was a workshop led by Ellen David Friedman about her book Keep Going: A Guide to Organising When It’s Hard. Ellen explained that her book was not designed as an organising guide with advice on mapping workplaces, etc. It was designed to give advice and perspective to rank-and-file activists to keep going when the terrain is difficult and confronting. The book is a columniation of lessons learnt in 50 years of organising.
The book is structured into four sections.
Part 1: Four Principles for Organisers
Cultivating respect, organising democratically and staying grounded in reality
Part 2: Ingredients of Successful Organising
Helping co-workers understand their power, overcoming fear and division, understanding shifting balance of power.
Part 3: Getting Unstuck
How to overcome barriers such as apathy, fear, high turnover and bad union leadership?
Part 4: Think Again
Is a critical reflection on some traditional tactics that maybe aren’t yielding results such as agitation, over-promising, cheerleading, waiting for permission to act, one-way newsletters. I found this session extremely useful.
The two highlights of day three were a session on the film We Build Power and a session on building power and structure through strikes. We Build Power is a documentary of two successful strikes in 2019 and 2023 led by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). Importantly, the film demonstrated the links the UTLA had with the parent and student communities. The union successfully built strong links with both groups by sitting down and listening to their concerns and then fighting to address those concerns in their log of claims.
Parents wanted a more responsive and inclusive type of school called community schools. Students wanted to stop police on campus conducting random searches. There are obvious lessons for how education unions in Australia relate to the community during campaigns. We can learn a lot from Chicago and Los Angeles education unions.
The last session I attended was a panel lead workshop on building power and structure through strikes. That the strike isn’t just a tactic to win concessions from the employer but an important method to build the union’s fighting capacity through building structure.
One question leaped out at me. What structures were created in your latest industrial action? In my own union, I can’t point out any new structures being officially formed to empower the members. However, there have been many unofficial structures created as rank-and-file members have successfully organised to reject the recommendation of our own union leadership.
One story from the session made an impression. During a strike campaign of a local higher education union the President asked Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to organise a rally, the union’s members were exhausted. DSA did organise a rally. I can’t imagine this happening in Australia.
Conclusions
The 2026 Labor Notes conference was inspiring. The fact that over 4000 union members attended a weekend conference was impressive. In Australia we can learn a lot from Labor Notes and their approach to discussion and organising. Let’s be clear about what Labor Notes is. They are a left-leaning democratic reform current in the United States union movement. Many rank-and-file militants in the US have taken the Labor Notes playbook and toppled their own union leadership and empowered other rank-and-file members. Labor Notes focuses on rank-and-file democratic control of unions. Labor Notes is not a revolutionary party or a class struggle union. However, if every union followed the Labor Notes model the working class in US and Australia, would be in a better position to fight independently for their own class interests.
Many hard left groups in Australia are very good at explain the “What”. What is wrong, what is happening, what is the cause? Labor Notes goes a long way of providing the “How”. How do we recruit, how do we organise, how do we win? When the union membership dips down to below 15%, I would suggest the “How” becomes crucial.
United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators provides a model of how militants across an industry can support each other.
Ellen David Friedman’s sage advice to militants in Keep Going: A Guide to Organising When It’s Hard is crucial if we are going to build a long-term movement that can sustain victories and well as defeats.
Opening and transparent bargaining is necessary if we want maximum buy in and ownership of industrial struggles. This has been highlighted in Victorian AEU where the membership has recently rejected a recommendation of the union leadership.
Erica Wills’ approach to winning any campaign through carefully considering strategies and tactics demands serious consideration. Too often in Australia we are reactive and don’t carefully build our own base before getting involved in the next campaign.
The film We Build Power demonstrates how a union can successfully build links with the community to win a dispute. Similar lessons can be learned from the Chicago Teachers Union and the education unions in Minneapolis with their fight against ICE where they protected the local community.
If we are serious about putting Marx’s maxim “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” then unions need to be genuinely led by rank-and-file workers. In Australia that means a serious overhaul of many unions.
Is the quasi syndicalism of a Labor Notes approaching the ultimate answer? Probably not. Is it a prerequisite to build confidence for greater struggles? Definitely, yes. In the end, Ellen David Friedman is correct to point out that the most important thing we can do is educate others to understand their own power to shape their own destiny.
Daryl Croke has been a union and political activist for 44 years. He has been a teacher in Victoria for 20 years. Currently Daryl is the AEU President of his local sub-branch and President of the Broadmeadows region of the AEU.
