A Troublemakers Handbook

How to Fight Back Where You Work and Win!

by Dan La Botz

This oversize manual is for workers who want to take control over their lives at work. In hundreds of first-person accounts, workers tell in their own words how they did just that.

The stories run from how to ridicule a pompous boss to a years-long campaign against a multinational corporation. The workplaces represented include factory and white collar, public and private, in the U.S. and Canada.

Each chapter ends with questions designed to get you thinking strategically about how to apply what you've read in your workplace.

Dan La Botz was a truck driver during the 1970s and a founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He has worked as an organizer for several unions in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Contents include:

• Shop Floor Tactics
• Community Coalitions
• Contract Campaigns and Strikes
• Planning a Wildcat Strike
• Sitdowns and Takeovers
• Inside Strategies -- "running the shop backwards"
• Corporate Campaigns
• Organizing Against Racism
• Organizing in the Non--Union Workplace
• Organizing Around Women's Issues
• Taking Power in Your Local Union
• Strategic Planning for Unions -- get your ducks in a row before management does
• Researching Your Employer
• Union Newspapers and Rank and File Newsletters
• Resources

From the forward:

"Today, more than ever, we need to relearn the basics -- to re-create our unions from the bottom up. The people whose stories we read in A Troublemaker's Handbook are beginning this process. They increase my confidence that the labor movement's current stagnation cannot last much longer."

— Genora Johnson Dollinger
organizer of the Women's Emergency Brigade
during the 1937 Flint Sitdown Strike in Flint, Michigan

What others are saying about A Troublemaker's Handbook

"A treasury of ideas...."

— Lucille Dickess,
HERE Local 34

"A Troublemaker's Handbook addresses the needs of activists who believe that the best defense is a good offense."

— Caroline Lee,
Canadian Union of Postal Workers

"Anywhere you open this book it has a lesson."

— Mike Ruscigno,
Teamsters Local 802

"...like being at a conference on workplace strategies and getting to go to every workshop."

— Nathanette Mayo,
AFSCME Local 1194

"For anyone who wants to participate in building a revitalized trade union movement, reading A Troublemaker's Handbook 1 is a good way to begin. Labor's alternative to "business unionism" is laid out clearly in this handbook."

— Amy Newell, former secretary-treasurer
United Electrical Workers

"This book is one that every labor union activist should have at their work station and every union representative should have on their desk."

— Dave Yettaw,
UAW Local 599

258 pages