In recent years, a word imported from the American labor movement has begun to creep into Spanish union circles: "organizer."
ContentsThe Problem of Our Time: Unions Without Unionists
What "Organizing" Tries to Solve
The Forgotten Art of Talking to Comrades
The Obsession with Supermajorities
The "Organizer" and Historical Anarcho-Syndicalism
An Old Workers' Tradition
The Debate on Organic Leaders
What We Have Lost
A Lesson for Spanish Unionism
Recovering the Organizing Militant
Recommended Bibliography
It appears in debates about the IWW, in Labor Notes courses and conferences, in campaigns to unionize Amazon or Starbucks, and more recently in training initiatives like Organizing for Power - O4P. For many union members, especially those with an anarcho-syndicalist background, the term provokes a certain aversion. It sounds like an unnecessary Anglicism. It is associated with the figure of a hired professional, a strange methodology, or even a covert way of introducing leadership and hierarchies.
However, the more one delves into the literature of "organizing" and the history of the Spanish labor movement, the more evident the paradox becomes: the "organizer" is not so much an innovation as a recovery.
What Americans today call an "organizer" is much more like the historical union activist than we tend to acknowledge. Perhaps its value lies not in what is new, but in what it reminds us of what we have left behind.
The problem of our time: unions without union members
One of the most surprising phenomena of recent decades is that trade unions have survived better than trade union culture.
We still have unions with hundreds of thousands of members. Well-established structures. Legal departments, federations, strike funds, financial resources, and a presence in companies and throughout society. But it's becoming increasingly difficult to find people capable of organizing their own colleagues.
This contradiction is not unique to Spain. Jane McAlevey identified it years ago in the United States in her book No Shortcuts . Kim Moody has been pointing out similar problems for decades. The IWW itself has built much of its recent activity around a fundamental question:
How do you create real organization in a workplace?
The question seems simple, but its implications are enormous. Because having members is one thing, having organized workers is another. Having representation is one thing, but having power, the capacity for collective action, and implementation is quite another. And the gap between the two is much wider than we are willing to admit.
Too often, the relationship between worker and union adopts the logic of customer and supplier. The worker has a problem, goes to the union, explains their situation, and expects a solution. They don't expect to organize their colleagues, build collective strength, or take responsibility. They expect someone else to handle the matter.
From this perspective, the union ceases to be a workers' organization and becomes a conflict management tool. The problem isn't legal assistance, which every workers' organization needs, but rather that assistance replaces organization, that representation displaces participation, and that the member goes from being a protagonist to a user.
What the "organizing" tries to solve
The literature on "organizing" arises precisely from this observation. Authors such as McAlevey or the publications of Labor Notes note that many trade union organizations have developed an enormous capacity to manage conflicts, but very little to build workers' power.
That's why "organizing" shifts the focus. It doesn't just ask how we solve this problem; it asks how we build the necessary strength to solve this problem and those that will come after.
The difference seems subtle, but it isn't. In the first case, conflict is the focus of activity. In the second, conflict is an opportunity to build organization.
And here the figure of the "organizer" emerges. Far from certain stereotypes, this is not a professional agitator, nor a charismatic leader, nor an external strategist directing campaigns from above. In its most developed formulation, especially in the IWW and Labor Notes, the "organizer" is an organization builder.
Its main function is to develop the organizational capacity of other people. It doesn't do things for the workers, but rather helps them learn how to do them. It doesn't replace collective initiative, it amplifies it.
The forgotten art of talking to colleagues
It's striking that one of the fundamental tools of organizing is something as simple as one-on-one conversation. A large part of organizing training consists of learning how to talk to colleagues. Not how to give speeches, write memos, or win ideological debates. It's about listening. Asking questions. Identifying shared problems. Understanding motivations. Building trust.
It may seem obvious, but many unions have developed a great capacity for communicating with those already convinced, while losing the ability to speak to those who remain on the sidelines. Labor Notes constantly emphasizes this problem: activists talk to activists, militants to militants, the convinced to the convinced. Meanwhile, the majority of the workforce remains excluded from the conversation.
The organizer tries to break that dynamic. Their task is to continually expand the circle of people involved.
The obsession with supermajorities
Perhaps the most distinctive contribution of contemporary organizing is its emphasis on so-called supermajorities. In many activist circles, there is a tendency to confuse an active minority with an organized majority. Five highly committed workers may create the impression of a strong organization, but if they work in a company of three hundred people, this is probably not the case.
That's why the "organizer" insists on measuring strength in concrete terms: How many people are participating? How many support it? How many are undecided? How many oppose it? How many would act if necessary? The central issue ceases to be ideological purity or the intensity of a minority's commitment, and becomes the collective capacity of a majority.
This concern appears constantly in McAlevey, in the IWW manuals, and in the Labor Notes materials. Difficult strikes are not usually won by small, heroic groups, but rather when a large part of the workforce participates. That is why organizing insists so much on building supermajorities before undertaking major conflicts. Not because it is a moderate strategy, but because it is a strategy of accumulating strength.
The "organizer" and historical anarcho-syndicalism
At this point, it's worth asking an uncomfortable question: to what extent is all this really new?
Anna Monjo's work on CNT militancy during the 1930s provides an important clue. Studying the CNT of that era reveals what we would now call a robust organizational culture. There were activists capable of recruiting new workers, solidarity networks, mechanisms for political and trade union training, and individuals dedicated to expanding the organization to new sectors. Membership was not seen as a consumer relationship, but as a form of participation.
The same can be observed in the works of José Peirats or in Chris Ealham's studies of the Barcelona labor movement. The strength of the CNT did not stem exclusively from its ideas, but from its capacity to reproduce its militancy. Each union generated new organizers, each conflict generated new workers' cadres, each victory produced new people capable of organizing others.
What we would describe today with the word "organizer." Back then, they were simply called militants.
An old working-class tradition
The history of the international labor movement reveals similar phenomena. In *Labor's Untold Story* , Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais describe how American workers built organization long before institutionalized unions existed. They did so through informal networks, labor agitators, itinerant organizers, and solidarity campaigns. There were no sophisticated bureaucratic structures, only individuals capable of connecting one struggle to another. There were organizers.
The IWW itself historically developed around similar figures: workers who traveled, talked to other workers, spearheaded campaigns, and built organization where none existed. They weren't outside specialists; they were working-class activists. The contemporary "organizer" inherits much of that tradition.
The debate about organic leaders
One of the most debated aspects of organizing is the identification of so-called organic or influential leaders. Many libertarian trade unionists view this practice with suspicion, and they have good reason to: every organization must be vigilant against the concentration of power.
But it's important to understand what this concept means. When organizers talk about organic leaders, they aren't necessarily referring to formal managers, but rather to people whose opinions influence others: people who are respected, listened to, and capable of building trust. These figures exist in any workplace or social group. Ignoring them doesn't make them disappear.
The question is how to engage with them. "Organizing" proposes incorporating them into the collective building of the organization, not to replace democratic processes, but to expand them. Yes, there is a risk that this could lead to forms of top-down control if we neglect the process and collective empowerment. But the opposite risk also exists: ignoring the real dynamics of influence can lead organizations and union members to be unable to connect with the majority of workers. As with any organizational tool, the issue is not its existence, but how it is used.
What we have lost
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of "organizing" is not its specific techniques, the maps and template lists, the supporting charts, the conversational methodologies, but rather the shift in focus. For decades, much of the trade union movement has dedicated enormous efforts to representing workers, and far less to producing new union members.
This difference is fundamental. An organization can grow in membership while simultaneously decreasing its organizational capacity. It can have more resources and fewer members, more structure and less initiative, more representation and less power or collective capacity. We have observed this trend, more or less prevalent, since the introduction of works councils and staff representatives into union activity.
The "organizing" approach attempts to reverse that trend. Its main question is not how many members we have, but how many people are capable of organizing others.
A lesson for Spanish trade unionism
Trade unionism in Spain doesn't need to mechanically import American models. The historical, legal, and cultural differences are too significant for that. But it can certainly draw valuable lessons, especially in a context marked by labor fragmentation, precarious employment, and a weakened working-class culture.
Perhaps the main lesson is this: organizations don't emerge spontaneously; they must be built. And building them requires time, patience, constant presence, conversations, training, trust, and activism. There's no legal shortcut or communication strategy that can replace this work. No organizational structure can function indefinitely without it.
Recover the organizing militant
Perhaps the greatest value of the concept of "organizer" is precisely its ability to remind us of something the labor movement already knew: unions are not built only with ideas, structures or resources, but with people capable of organizing other people.
Throughout much of the 20th century, the Spanish labor movement produced thousands of them. People who visited workshops, distributed newspapers, spoke with coworkers, trained new members, built union branches, instigated labor disputes, and wove networks of solidarity. They weren't professionals, technicians, or managers. They were organizers.
Today, in a very different context, the challenge remains essentially the same. It's not about copying the IWW, imitating Labor Notes, or importing foreign recipes. It's about recovering a function that was central to the growth of all major workers' organizations: the role of the organizing activist.
The person who transforms individual problems into collective action. The person who transforms members into comrades. The person who develops new organizers. The person who leaves an organization stronger than they found it.
Perhaps the term "organizer" isn't new. Perhaps it's simply the contemporary name for something the Spanish labor movement knew very well for decades. And perhaps the most important question isn't what we can learn from American "organizing," but rather:
Have we forgotten how to build activists capable of organizing other workers?
If the answer is yes, then the debate about the "organizer" isn't really about where it comes from or its context. It's about us.
Julio F., a CNT militant and currently a member of the Anarchist Communist Group ( United Kingdom )
Recommended bibliography
- Anna Monjo, Militantes. Democracy and worker participation in the CNT of the 1930s .
- José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution .
- Chris Ealham, The Struggle for Barcelona: Class, Culture and Conflict 1898-1937.
- Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age .
- Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter, Secrets of a Successful Organizer .
- Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), "Weakening the Dam: The Principles and Practice of Workplace Organizing."
- Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism .
- Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor's Untold Story .
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/07/09/organizer-la-nueva-palabra-para-el-viejo-militante-cenetista/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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