Daniel Gross

Coaching and writing for workers to build the unions they imagine

I invited you here because I think that, like me, you believe that we are in an extraordinary and precious moment of working class upsurge. A rising with incredible energy and opportunity to advance racial and gender justice, and to confront capitalism in a big way. A moment like this has not occurred in our lifetimes. It's a once every several generations occurrence that won't last forever.

I'm Daniel Gross and I've been a labor organizer and strategist for over twenty years. My focus has been unions that are directly controlled and operated by workers themselves, prioritize anti-oppression, and win victories in the hardest to organize parts of the economy. Most recently, I wrapped up a leadership transition from Brandworkers, the worker center I founded and of which I served as executive director. It was an honor of a lifetime to serve the immigrant workers who feed NY in the food manufacturing industry.

Now, I am incredibly humbled that workers in a variety of industries across the country have invited me to go to deep with them in support of their efforts to build the unions they imagine and achieve the jobs they deserve. I'm also writing a major follow-up to Labor Law for the Rank & Filer, a book I co-wrote with Staughton Lynd. That book has found a passionate community of working class readers, in these times more than ever. This next book will offer workers a complete framework to design and build unions that make fundamental change and express their values.

I want to go all in with workers, full-time, while this moment lasts to help them build truly game-changing unions that transform their jobs and the labor movement. I don't want to commodify my coaching work with workers nor have to make decisions about who to work with based on their ability to pay. I refuse to shape my book to suit a corporate publisher or waste precious organizing time on fellowship or foundation bureaucracies. I'm asking you, working people who believe in visionary union struggle, to enable this work through an invitation-only sustainer community.

My Mission

  • To provide deep support for workers to build the unions they imagine

Worker Focus

  • My focus in this mission is workers who are:

    • People of color and their committed accomplices

    • Looking to build unions with racial and gender justice at the heart

    • Open to unionism that aims at transformation and abolition, rather than reform

    • Taking on some of the hardest organizing challenges in the economy where traditional strategies fall short

What I'm Doing

  • Providing intensive coaching to emerging worker groups and individual workers on the full scope of building radical unions at their jobs

  • Writing another book, something like a follow-up to Labor Law for the Rank & Filer. Instead of law, this one will be about a comprehensive framework for workers to design, test, and build sustainable and effective unions.

  • Developing, refining, and sharing high-impact tools for rank & file union building

The Moment

  • Working people are stirring with a intensity and scope unseen for many decades in the United States. There's an opening right now to make real and lasting gains against racial capitalism and its domination of workers, community, and climate.

  • This opening won't last forever and just rebuilding business-as-usual organized labor would be a terrible squandering of the rare opportunity at hand.

  • Moved by years of economic insecurity, by climate crisis, by the threat of fascism, by a pandemic, and by the movement risings in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, workers are turning to unionism. Many of these workers are drawn to exploring a unionism that goes all in on racial and gender justice and that explicitly contests capitalism. But they struggle to access sufficient support.

Philosophy

  • Workers have the wisdom and insight to build unions in the vast unorganized swaths of the economy. However, without a comprehensive framework and deep support to help surface and piece together that wisdom, far too many of these efforts will fail.

  • Union organizing is the heart and soul of the work to create a union. But as important as organizing is, it's just one part of the larger work of union building. Union building is the total mission of creating a union. It requires arriving at a complete union model: the 9 fundamental building blocks of an effective union which need to work in their own right and in harmony with the others.

Who I Am

  • I'm a union organizer, strategist, (no longer practicing) labor lawyer, author, and coach with over twenty years of experience in worker led-and-operated unionism. From core leadership roles to shorter-term capacity building projects, I've organized with, advised, or coached workers in retail, fast food, logistics, food manufacturing, tech, day labor, laundry, sex work, restaurants, non-profits, video games, rideshare, and other industries.

  • Most recently, I founded and was executive director of Brandworkers, the country's first worker center for specialty food manufacturing workers and a founding organization of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the nation's largest coalition of food worker unions and worker centers. As a barista at Starbucks, I co-founded the IWW Starbucks Workers Union in 2004, which for over ten years achieved groundbreaking gains in wages and working conditions at the world's largest coffee chain and set a high water mark for solidarity unionism in modern times.

  • I've served on the board of directors of the National Lawyers Guild and the Food Chain Workers Alliance. I was a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics at Fordham Law School, which I graduated from in 2007.

  • I'm the co-author with Staughton Lynd of Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law. LLRF has long been a go-to resource for workers in a wide range of industries to gain know-how and confidence to do their own unionism. The growth in openness to radical justice solutions in the last few years has resulted in exploding interest in the book's conception of unionism of, by, and for workers.