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

Tom Juravich, Olivia Geho, and Andrew Gorry

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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.

“The corporate elite have built complex systems to keep us divided, demoralized, and exploited, while too many organizing campaigns still rely on outdated approaches. This book is more than just a theoretical approach to organizing—it is a practical guide to helping workers build research-backed campaigns that empower us to wield strategic workplace power. It is a must-have manual for anyone hoping to take on multinational corporate power and win.”

—Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA

“Too often, progress is only possible when workers can effectively challenge the power of their employers. Doing so requires a deep understanding of the employer, their industry, and finances. What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know provides an invaluable framework for analyzing a company and developing a winning campaign.”

—Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers

“This book is an invaluable weapon for the rank-and-file worker in understanding how the boss operates, where they are vulnerable, where our tactics should be directed to land the greatest blows, and what we need to know in order to win what workers deserve.”

—Marybeth Seitz-Brown, organizer, Service Employees International Union District 1199

“Unions must engage in strategic comprehensive research to have a full understanding of the challenges before them. A union’s members are intrinsic to this process. Whether a contract or public interest campaign, members must be involved to be successful. This new approach allows union researchers to plumb the depths of the expertise in the membership to leverage information for better campaign outcomes.”

—Simon Collins, researcher, Canadian Union of Public Employees

“Only an informed and organized working class can win the war on corporate greed. What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know is an invaluable field guide for how rank-and-file workers can take matters into their own hands and strategize to build power and win campaigns regardless of the industry they are in.”

—Chris Brooks, chief of staff to UAW President Shawn Fain