I taught in various colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay Area for a dozen years, during which time I became active in my union (California Federation of Teachers, AFT, AFL-CIO) and shifted from classroom teaching to organizing, relying heavily on the common sense of Vygotskian learning theory, especially as it evolved into Activity Theory in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Above all, the concepts of collective learning, learning as a component of social change, and the conflicting purposes of embedded or adjacent activity systems allowed me to both understand and explain the behavior of workers in their unions (or lacking unions) and employers.  I wrote about this for MCA and various labor-related journals and eventually published a book titled What Did You Learn at Work Today? The forbidden lessons of labor education, appropriate for unions in the US labor relations system. This book was reviewed in MCA sometime around 2014. Most recently I published (with Joe Berry) a book about contingent work (work lacking job security, and secondarily many other kinds of support including the possibility of exercising academic freedom) in higher education: Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education, from Pluto Books. Now I am very active with a new formation, Higher Education Labor United (higheredlaborunited.org) that aspires to organize workers in higher ed across job status lines: "wall to wall and coast to coast" is the motto.