Labor Studies Journal
August 2026
Reviewed by: Rebecca Tarlau, Associate Professor of Education, Stanford
University, Stanford, CA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0160449X261469641
For many workers, from West Virginia teachers to Buffalo hospital workers, Vermont paraprofessionals to UC Santa Cruz grad workers, Ellen David Friedman has been a constant companion, jumping on one-on-one phone calls and organizing small-group discussions about how to shift power relations at their worksite—by forming a union, by reforming their current union, or by bringing coworkers together to take collective action around a concrete issue. I have had the honor of observing Ellen in dozens of organizing spaces over the past decade, including in meetings of the United Caucus of Rank and File Educators (UCORE), with teachers who led strikes in locations as diverse as West Virginia, Oklahoma, New York City and Los Angeles, and with faculty at Penn State University, who just this month succeeded in organizing a union.
Consequently, many of the lessons in her new book Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard, co-published by Labor Notes and PM Press this spring, felt familiar—advice that I have heard her give to rank-and-file workers over and over again. The novel and critical contribution of Keep Going is that it synthesizes this advice and arranges the many lessons that Friedman offers organizers in an easy-to-read format that will undoubtedly support the ongoing organizing efforts of workers in the United States and globally.
Keep Going builds on the Labor Notes tradition of publishing accessible texts of union organizing that draw on the wisdom that emerges from real organizing experiences. But the focus of this book is quite different from their others: it is not about how to organize a campaign, but rather, “the relationships, trust, dialogue, and decision-making practices” that make organizing possible over the long term (p. 156). The book is essentially about how to live our values through our organizing by making relationships with our coworkers the goal rather than the means to an end. This is not just about being performative, rather because democracy and radical respect for coworkers build stronger working-class organizations. Friedman emphasizes throughout the book that concrete wins are necessary for “long haul” organizing and that the goal of bringing people together should always be to take collective action together. However, as Friedman writes based on her own organizing experiences, “It’s not enough to have union leaders who want to fight the boss from the top down. If you bring members a campaign plan that has been beautifully designed by officers or staff, you might get compliant participation, even enthusiasm … but this doesn’t leave the members feeling more powerful” (p. 5).
The central contribution of Keep Going is that how we organize not just what and when we win matters for building workers’ power on the shopfloor. The flow of the argument is that even when unions successfully negotiate better salaries and healthcare benefits, or “common good” demands, like increased funding for schools and hospitals, bosses still often hold unilateral power over workers. The only way to transform the unequal power relations inherent in a capitalist system is to change the balance of power on the shopfloor. Changing that balance of power is only possible when workers come together and build meaningful relationships with each other and decide to take collective action.
In typical Labor Notes-fashion, every section begins with a story of an actual organizer who has attempted to change the power relationships at their worksite, from construction workers and autoworkers to educators, commercial actors, and sandwich shop workers. These stories focus on the concrete experiences of rank-and-file organizers, the challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned–stories that are brought to life by the beautiful illustrations of Ecuadorian-born political artist, writer, and housing activist Fernando Martí.
The first part of the book outlines what Friedman argues are the four most important principles for organizers: cultivating respect, organizing democratically, staying grounded in reality, and staying steady. In these sections, Friedman describes the importance of talking to people because you are genuinely curious about them, rather than approaching these conversations as a tool to get your coworker to take some pre-determined outcome. She also emphasizes the need to organize democratically. She encourages organizers to move beyond one-on-one conversations and organize small-group discussions, which become invitations for people to collectively reflect on their working conditions and make decisions together about future actions. Another important recommendation in this first part of the book is to focus on your fellow coworkers, not the boss, and to make sure that the values that bring people into organizing—“solidarity, fairness, equality, justice, compassion, or democracy”—drive every decision we make as organizers (p. 97).
The second part of the book is an overview of four key “ingredients” for successful organizing. These include helping coworkers understand power in the workplace, over-coming division and identifying common concerns, overcoming fear and taking collective action, and reflecting on the changing balance of power and then continuing to organize. In these chapters, Friedman focuses us back on our worksites, emphasizing that “if workers go on believing that the current balance of power is how it will always be, then organizing cannot succeed” (p. 109). The most important way to change that balance of power is to bring workers into genuine relationships with each other and replace “the feeling of tensions and mistrust among co-workers” with “friendliness, consideration, and respect.” It is only with a group of trusted coworkers that it is possible to take bottom-up action (aka, actions decided by that group and not single leaders). However, once again, the bottom-up action is not the end goal. The next step Friedman reminds us, is reflection: posing questions such as what we learned about ourselves and our coworkers through the action; what moments we felt scared or that trust was broken; and how and when we learned to build trust with each other (p. 165-166). These types of questions—a quintessential problem-posing approach that Friedman takes, in part, from Paulo Freire—are not about assessing what “worked” and “did not work” but rather the “new state of play: how have people’s thinking, attitudes, and relationships changed” (p. 165).
The first two parts of Keep Going include Friedman’s core recommendations for how to build the relationships and trust with coworkers that are the foundation of long-haul organizing. Part Three is on “getting unstuck,” with sections on specific issues (apathy, fear, griping and complaining, nobody comes to meetings, polarization, among others) that organizers can easily skim through and read based on the particular challenge they are facing. Part Four will perhaps be the most controversial section, with Friedman taking a strong stance against many of the organizing practices that are held up as the “gold standard” in unions. In this section, Friedman explains why she is opposed to common practices like selling the union (instead of asking coworkers about their experiences and what they want from the union), the “scripted ask” (rather than inviting coworkers into an ongoing conversation), a constant sense of urgency (versus slowing down and allowing for the reflection necessary to build a sustainable and democratic union culture), or running for union office (without first investing in a rank-and-file group that has already shown how it can create a more democratic organizing culture). Friedman argues that while the typical menu of organizing practices might be useful for top-down and short-term mobilizing, they are often not helpful in the long run because they do not reflect the core values of solidarity, fairness, equality, justice, compassion, and democracy that should be central to organizing. As she writes, “People come to the party they’re invited to. You’re not just trying to get co-workers to ‘do something’ but rather to join you in building a durable, democratic organization” (p. 233).
And returning to the core theme of the book, these typical organizing practices might be about winning a campaign, but they do not always help workers feel powerful. Friedman has written Keep Going because she believes that we need more democratic unions that build collective power that challenge employer domination. The many lessons in Keep Going are a product of Friedman’s dedication to that fight for her entire life with a constant smile and genuine love for the organizers who surround her, the ultimate long-haul organizer.
