It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

Organized labor, you might say, is having a moment right now. A 2024 Dallupol showed that 77% of

Americans think labor unions mostly help workers. That's up from an all-time low of just 48% in 2009,

so 48 up to 77% now. So if you're not already in a union, you may have asked yourself at some point in recent years, should my workplace unionize?

And if so, how do I actually do it?

As a lot of you probably saw, maybe you even heard about it on this show at the time, back in the spring of 2022,

an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, known asK-8 made history when workers voted to unionize.

It was the first successful unionization effort at Amazon anywhere in the country.

And it was a very David and Goliath-esque story.

You know, a completely independent worker-led union took on one of the most powerful

corporations in the world and won. Now, it hasn't exactly been smooth sailing since then. There's

been a fair bit of internal conflict within the Amazon Labor Union or ALU and Amazon

leadership, perhaps predictably, hasn't exactly been easy

to work with. But the ALU's victory was really symbolically significant, a moment where it became

clear that while it might be difficult, it's ultimately not impossible for organized labor to take

on a big corporation like Amazon these days. It sparked a ton of

national attention and raised a big question that labor activists are still parsing. Was this a one-off

or a model that others can follow? So our guest today, Derek Palmer, is one of the co-founders

of the Amazon Labor Union, and he has a new book. It's called Handbook for the Revolution,

building a more perfect union for the 21st century. In it, he lays out a practical guide as he sees it

to workplace organizing based on what he learned on the ground as an Amazon union leader. So we'll talk

about his experience founding that historic labor

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