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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.
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.
199 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 14, 2025
Excellent, practical suggestions and tables/diagrams for organizing labor power.
Read
February 5, 2026skimmed this for professional development lol
a short, digestible introduction to strategic research/campaigns for labor unions
this book tries to resolve some of the tension between the bottom-up rank-and-file organizing model (advocated for by mcalevey for e.g.) and top-down strategic research/campaigning (from union bureaucrats like ME). their argument for strategic campaigns are that companies nowhave complex structures/subsidiaries/financing/operations where the decision-maker may not be so readily apparent, and the leverage of strike power is also diminished if you just represent a little slice of the company. the answer is to have member-led strategic research Hahaha... which i have found hard to facilitate but we can keep trying
this was a helpful refresher with some good case studies + i'm inspired to revisit strategiccorporateresearch.org for some upcoming campaigns
some other practical takeaways:
- for next time we have a member research committee, 6 week research project (instead of indefinitely meeting), assign from the SCR website template and have people follow along w the website, do analysis/summary together
- staff could use training about private equity
- i could provide more pared down and clear analysis/summary (e.g. list of strategic leverage)
- i could be more aggressive at work about what i know
a short, digestible introduction to strategic research/campaigns for labor unions
this book tries to resolve some of the tension between the bottom-up rank-and-file organizing model (advocated for by mcalevey for e.g.) and top-down strategic research/campaigning (from union bureaucrats like ME). their argument for strategic campaigns are that companies nowhave complex structures/subsidiaries/financing/operations where the decision-maker may not be so readily apparent, and the leverage of strike power is also diminished if you just represent a little slice of the company. the answer is to have member-led strategic research Hahaha... which i have found hard to facilitate but we can keep trying
this was a helpful refresher with some good case studies + i'm inspired to revisit strategiccorporateresearch.org for some upcoming campaigns
some other practical takeaways:
- for next time we have a member research committee, 6 week research project (instead of indefinitely meeting), assign from the SCR website template and have people follow along w the website, do analysis/summary together
- staff could use training about private equity
- i could provide more pared down and clear analysis/summary (e.g. list of strategic leverage)
- i could be more aggressive at work about what i know
August 29, 2025
Feels very strange to review this book on an Amazon platform. It’s them, they’re the boss who doesn’t want me to know this!!
Good book, definitely will affect the work I’m doing. Very specific to the task, not for the general reading casually interested in labor
Good book, definitely will affect the work I’m doing. Very specific to the task, not for the general reading casually interested in labor
April 2, 2025
Great book with actionable insights. Will reference its contents for years to come.
April 21, 2026
This short and digestible book provides a good introduction to "strategic corporate research", being designed as an accompanying guide to the authors' eponymous website. Their approach creates a non-hierarchical balance of union staff and rank-and-file members to iteratively answer 24 core questions -- from lived experience and formal research -- that inform where levers of power can be pulled.
At a high level, this approach and the overall book is thoughtful and rooted in their decades of the author's combined experience in the academic and research trenches. Each chapter does it's job and the appendix is especially useful for distilling their lessons learned on how to properly set up the research. However, from my close read, I give it only 4 stars out of 5 because of several repeated contradictions, hand-waving, romanticizations, and out-of-touch comments.
Most prominently is the back-and-forth assertion of the value of finding "dirt" on employers and/or key decision makers, which is sequentially as follows throughout the book:
1. (FOR) Ray Rogers secretly and successfully pressures a board member -- who is simultaneously a CEO of a different company -- to push the company to recognize the union, a success that viralized the "corporate campaign" upon which SCR is founded
2. (AGAINST) Ray Rogers never succeed again, so it was all a fluke. Companies have no shame. Board member's don't care or aren't leverageable
3. (FOR) Symbolic power is the gained by raising up the union and breaking down the company in the eyes of workers and the public, the latter of which is from finding dirt
4. (AGAINST) Symbolic power is actually only useful when all the other types of power dominate, so it is a far lower priority
Some choice quotes which rubbed me the wrong way:
“If every working person replaced just 5 percent of their social media time with…we could change the world.”
“It’s time to stop automatically doing what you’ve always done; it’s time to develop a plan.”
“Escalating too much against a decision-maker may leave scorched earth and cause them never to settle. This is not true for key relationships [like customers]”
“We know some workers feel uneasy about gathering information about their employer because they are concerned about being fired or otherwise targeted by their boss. It’s helpful to remind workers that most of the information found online is public information, which means anyone can access it.”
Despite my criticism, it's still 4/5 stars, so for anyone interested in the how (or why) of strategic and participatory union research, you should read this book!
At a high level, this approach and the overall book is thoughtful and rooted in their decades of the author's combined experience in the academic and research trenches. Each chapter does it's job and the appendix is especially useful for distilling their lessons learned on how to properly set up the research. However, from my close read, I give it only 4 stars out of 5 because of several repeated contradictions, hand-waving, romanticizations, and out-of-touch comments.
Most prominently is the back-and-forth assertion of the value of finding "dirt" on employers and/or key decision makers, which is sequentially as follows throughout the book:
1. (FOR) Ray Rogers secretly and successfully pressures a board member -- who is simultaneously a CEO of a different company -- to push the company to recognize the union, a success that viralized the "corporate campaign" upon which SCR is founded
2. (AGAINST) Ray Rogers never succeed again, so it was all a fluke. Companies have no shame. Board member's don't care or aren't leverageable
3. (FOR) Symbolic power is the gained by raising up the union and breaking down the company in the eyes of workers and the public, the latter of which is from finding dirt
4. (AGAINST) Symbolic power is actually only useful when all the other types of power dominate, so it is a far lower priority
Some choice quotes which rubbed me the wrong way:
“If every working person replaced just 5 percent of their social media time with…we could change the world.”
“It’s time to stop automatically doing what you’ve always done; it’s time to develop a plan.”
“Escalating too much against a decision-maker may leave scorched earth and cause them never to settle. This is not true for key relationships [like customers]”
“We know some workers feel uneasy about gathering information about their employer because they are concerned about being fired or otherwise targeted by their boss. It’s helpful to remind workers that most of the information found online is public information, which means anyone can access it.”
Despite my criticism, it's still 4/5 stars, so for anyone interested in the how (or why) of strategic and participatory union research, you should read this book!
September 12, 2025
Quick, easy to understand, and empowering - this book is amazing for what it is and what it's trying to do. This is a valuable and necessary read for anyone looking to form or strengthen a union/union campaign. Despite not currently being applicable to my life, I found this book fascinating. It gives interesting context and background to unionization and the labor movement in the U.S., and gives valuable resources, processes, and campaign examples that make unionization seem approachable and possible. While this book focuses on union campaigns, I found that the strategies and resources discussed in this book are great frameworks that can be applied to any number of problems.
July 22, 2025
Great resource for anyone looking to organize their workspace and learn more about labor and unions. I thoroughly enjoyed this book!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews