Labor Notes — Secrets of a Successful Organizer (free handouts)
Summary
A full library of free, printable handouts, exercises, and worksheets for union and community organizers — workplace mapping, the organizing conversation, charting supporters, contract campaigns, and steward training. The single most-used US labor-organizing training corpus.
Body
Labor Notes’ Secrets of a Successful Organizer (free handouts) is the Labor Notes companion handout set for the Secrets of a Successful Organizer book by Alex Gershman and Susan Williams, published in 2015 and now distributed by Labor Notes as a free PDF/printable handout set [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts]. Labor Notes is a US nonprofit media and organising project that publishes a monthly newspaper and runs the Labor Notes conferences, which are among the largest cross-union organising gatherings in the US. The handouts are designed as a workplace-organising curriculum: each lesson includes an exercise, the exercises are intended to be run as group activities (download, share, start organising), and the lessons cover the Secrets in printable letter-size format [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts].
Coverage: the handout set mirrors the book’s three-part structure, covering the basics of organising your workplace - one-on-ones, identifying and recruiting worker leaders, mapping the workplace, running a meeting of workers, building a committee, choosing an issue, escalating a campaign, winning improvement [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts]. Sample handouts include Secret #2: Apathy Isn’t Real, Secret #3: Aim for the Bullseye, and Secret #5: Don’t Be a Hero, each with a printable worksheet [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts]. Labor Notes also offers three-part workshops based on the book and a free e-mail course (Beating Apathy) that walks through the same curriculum over six weeks [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts].
A campaigner reaches for it when designing a workplace-organising training, when running a Labor Notes-style shop-floor committee-formation workshop, or when needing printable one-page handouts for a union-organising drive [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts]. Treat as link-only; the underlying book carries publisher copyright. [source: labor-notes-secrets-handouts]
Use it for
Training union or community organizers; running a shop-floor mapping exercise; running a contract-campaign planning session.
Related
- affinity-groups
- coalition-building
- constructive-programme
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- leadership-development
- one-to-ones
- public-narrative
Sources & verification
- sources/labor-notes-secrets-handouts — grounding: secondary — RAW (free handouts verified)