Volume 44, Issue 1 (winter 2025)
By Michael M. Oswalt*
How might ambitious but inexperienced, low-resourced groups succeed where mature organizations have already failed? This Article considers that question through the lens of the U.S. labor movement. Between 2022 and 2023, workers at companies thought to be unorganizable launched seemingly quixotic do-it-yourself unionization campaigns—and sometimes won. A key factor may have been workers’ reliance on bricolage, an approach to formidable challenges shown to differentiate start-ups that fizzle from those that innovate to surpass richer, more established competitors. Lacking the assumptions and expectations accompanying traditional campaigns, workers at Trader Joe’s, Apple, Amazon, and hundreds of Starbucks cafés experimented with tactical combinations, resurrected discarded resources, and took action where standard scripts urged caution. The result was a fundamental reordering of labor institutions, labor personnel, and labor financing. But the most enduring impact of the disorganized era may be on labor law itself. Where workers who defy advice (or are denied advice) start their own organizations, run their own campaigns, and file their own legal documents, doctrinal and procedural “truisms” in critical areas like property access, speech, and remedies can become provisional, contingent—or not even true.
*Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School. Thanks to Steven Winter, Michael Z. Green, Shirley Lin, Mike Wishnie, Will Ortman, Chris Lund, and participants at the 19th Annual Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law and the Labor Law Group’s June 2024 meeting for helpful comments on early drafts. The Article is dedicated to Mac, the best tinkerer—and dad—a kid could ever hope to have around. All errors are my own.
