This creates mass campaigns that aren’t based on real relationships. Workers involved in organizing campaigns around ethics issues at multiple major tech companies have told me that they hoped their coworkers would be “agitated” when they read new stories about other workers being fired unjustly for being outspoken on these issues. This kind of agitation, though it may get workers upset, isn’t the same as agitation that comes out of their own story about their own experiences at work.

Simple narratives of collective action are essential to any worker-centered campaign but these are fundamentally different from sensationalist exposés or human-interest stories. No amount of “earned media” will help workers build power.

In an interview in The American Prospect, an organizer in the Amazon campaign explained that they were not house-calling, because of the Covid pandemic. But in a hard-to-win campaign, you should put on a mask, ring the doorbell, have your sanitizer dangling from your chest or in your hands so it’s obvious, and step back and engage the worker, socially distanced but securely.

One possible exception to the plant gate rule would have been if large numbers of actual Bessemer Amazon workers were the people standing at shift change at the plant gate. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, what workers saw was the paid staff of the union and outside supporters.