Tomás A Madrigal

The role of Strategic Research to inform social movement and union campaigns has become compulsory when taking on MultiNational Global corporations. The crisis of a concerted action like a strike, uprising, blockade, or boycott often exposes the vulnerabilities of seemingly omnipotent and colossal forces that seem to operate with impunity across borders at first glance. Strategic Research systematically identifies leverage points, parties responsible, places and locations of production, governance mechanisms, and places and locations of distribution along global supply chains that can be used to inform a comprehensive campaign. This type of solidarity is often completed in the background, with little or no compensation or resources, and as such has been very difficult to reproduce. Unions have depended upon volunteerism since the late 1990s and in the U.S. there are two research institutes in the North East that train most of the individuals that have delivered strategic research to union campaigns based primarily on the experiences in the Bridgestone/ Firestone-Steelworkers, Justiice for Janitors-SEIU, and UPS-Teamsters campaigns (Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell and Tom Juravich at UMASS Amherst) This handout utilizes resources from these efforts as a primer and fills in the gaps with the specific subject matter expertise drawn from the farmworker unionization campaign of Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington State, that included an international berry boycott of Driscoll's.