Reports
Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon
Amazon’s operations are changing the very nature of work regimes, communities, and industries. They are transforming businesses and are a direct threat to unionized workers across numerous fields.
In this strategy paper, Michael McQuarrie, Jonathan Rosenblum, and Benjamin Y. Fong build on the convenings of the CWD’s Labor and Logistics project and make the case for a CIO-style organizing campaign at Amazon. To organize Amazon, the report argues, the labor movement will have to fundamentally change the way it prioritizes and undertakes campaigns.
Unions and Electoral Politics: Can Union Candidates Make a Difference?
A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin reveals that politicians with union backgrounds campaign more aggressively for workers and vote further left — but unions rarely recruit them.
Majority Rules 2025: Trends in State-Level Ballot Initiative Voting
In the 2024 election, voters appeared to swing to the right in virtually every region and demographic. The results of ballot initiative votes tell a very different story. Americans are trained to see politics in terms of Democrats and Republicans, but when people are allowed to vote directly on policies, they often make different choices from what you might expect looking through the “red-vs-blue” lens.
We gathered data on every state-level initiative over the past 15 years and one thing stands out: voters consistently support policies that equalize rights, resources, and decision-making power in society. Ballot measures that redistribute wealth from the rich to the rest are the most popular of all. CWD’s new report, Majority Rules 2025: Trends in State-Level Ballot Initiative Voting," provides updated research and analysis of ballot measures and the struggle for popular democracy in the United States.
Beyond the NLRB: Contemporary Strategies and Practices for Labor Movement Renewal
This report on the non-traditional paths of organizing in the contemporary American labor movement is animated by a central question: What will it take to reverse organized labor’s decline? As we interviewed sources across the United States about the landscape of twenty-first century labor, that question flowed into several secondary ones: What strategies are workers’ organizations trying out? Do those strategies redistribute wealth? Do they build workers’ power? What conditions will it take for the strategies to work? Can they scale up, or translate to different contexts? And lastly, are they sustainable?
Given the severe constraints of existing labor law in contrast to the clear enthusiasm for labor unions and organizing today, it behooves unionists and other organizational leaders to be searching for and assessing new means of empowering workers. This report is thus not simply a survey of all existing practices of worker empowerment, but rather an analysis of strategies and innovations that bear potential for labor movement revitalization.
Majority Rules: The Battle for Ballot Initiatives
"Majority Rules" explores the current fight over voters’ access to the ballot initiative process. In recent years, labor unions, rights advocacy groups, and grassroots organizations in multiple states have used citizen initiatives to pass policies that redistribute wealth, rights, and decision-making power to working people and marginalized communities—policies that are often treated as unrealistic or impracticable in partisan politics. Initiative wins demonstrate that there is far more popular agreement on policy than escalating partisan polarization would indicate across red, blue, and purple states alike.
Now the initiative process is coming under attack from corporate interests and state legislators who stand to lose power to the popular vote. The fight over ballot initiatives is one of the most consequential voting rights struggles of our time, with deep implications for the future of the United States political system. This report from Case and McQuarrie explores the fight over voters’ access to the ballot initiative process and the potential it has to shape American politics.
You can learn more about the ballot initiatives project here.
