Workers’ movements have always engaged in investigation, research, analysis, and publishing to aid organizing efforts. The historical record of its findings fills bookshelves, libraries, and archives. Today unions utilize bargaining surveys, networks of labor activists publish monthly magazines, movement publishers and academics produce a wide array of materials, as do workers’ organizations and individual workers themselves.

However, there are two forms common in the historical record but conspicuously absent from many of our contemporary efforts—first-person narratives written by workers themselves and workers’ inquiries. Unlike these aforementioned forms they are conducted either prior to formal organizing efforts or to challenge formal organizations when they no longer serve the workers’ themselves. First-person narratives and workers’ inquiry are strategic interventions to grasp the machinations of the production process, informal work groups and divisions within the class, forms of mutual aid and informal organization, natural and “organic” leadership, and the working-class’s power vis-à-vis capitalism as to further class struggle.

First-person narratives and workers’ inquiry can aid the recent uptick in new organizing efforts, launch of newly independent unions, renewal of solidarity unionism (or what has been called “pre-majority” or “minority unions”), success of grassroots rank-and-file caucuses, and expansion of demands beyond wages-hours-working conditions to prioritizing the fight against oppression and workplace democracy.

This workshop will introduce participants to the history and contemporary practice of first-person narratives and workers’ inquiry and recommend their use in organizing efforts and workers’ movements.