General Organizing Discussion

I’ve been a labor organizer for the past 3.5 years, and some other frequent politics forum folks may have their own experiences as well. Figured we should put together a thread for sharing tips, answering questions, and generally discussing how to do direct action to affect change. Hopefully it’ll get some use!

Ask questions, share stories, post news about organizing efforts, whatever!

 

This is a fantastic idea and would love to hear, when you have the time, some stories of both successes and failures you've seen in your time organizing.

 

hm my best idea for action for myself at the moment is to move out of Florida /s

good thread idea

 

I think part of what feels so empowering about organizing as opposed to electoral politics work (which was what i did for work before going into organizing; a deeply depressing experience that was ultimately what “radicalized” me) is that failing usually doesn’t mean you’ve lost, it just means you retool and find another way to attack the issue. Because your faith isn’t in any given person or party (at least, when it’s being done right - cults of personality absolutely occur), it’s in a broader movement and in your coworkers or community. There’s no dead end.

In my experience, when we lose a Union drive it’s typically because union leadership gets out of step with the workers they’re trying to organize. I used to be the representative for hospital workers - custodial staff, nursing assistants, nutritional services, etc. Eventually, the nurses also wanted to join the Union. We got to about 60-65% of the nurses signed up on authorization cards. Our leadership was focused on not wanting to hold an election for the nurses, but instead demanding recognition and possibly taking the nurses on strike to win their union. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good strategy, but at the end of the day our “member organizers” (IE the actual nurses who were most involved with the Union drive) felt like it was maybe a bit too aggressive for where the majority of nurses were at, and they’d rather hold an election so as to not intimidate the membership. Going on strike is a big decision, and I absolutely understand why it may be intimidating to people who don’t have much experiences with Unions. So the Union missed its initial target date of getting them organized because it was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - the majority of nurses were not ready to go on strike, wanted an election, and the Local’s leadership was not responsive. So the first drive was unsuccessful. The good news is, we regrouped, held another drive the following year, and the election was successful.

I think the victories that feel best to me are when you go up against Employers who are so cocky about their power and control, and you beat their ass anyways, either in a contract fight or organizing drive or grievance/arbitration case. I have been working with one bargaining unit whose employer is absolutely nuts. They came into office and then immediately began terminating people left and right, thinking they’d get away with it. If the 19 people they fired in their first year, we’ve gotten 17 back to work and have arbitration cases scheduled for the remaining two. It just feels good to tell these employers to fuck off, you know what you do/did is wrong and we’re going to make you bring people back to work and award them all backpay. You can have your attorneys and play a bunch of stupid games, but you won’t bust the Union and you won’t get workers who understand their rights and their leverage to back down.

If any of this is jargon-y, let me know and I can get more in the weeds and explain what certain terms or procedures mean. The bottomline of it is this: Unions fuck up with they get top-heavy and make decisions for people, rather than allowing the “rank-and-file” to determine best strategies specific to their workplace. They do well when they empower and support members. It builds confidence and prevents what we call “third-partying” of the Union, or thinking of the Union as some kind of outside entity that provides concierge service rather than a tool they come together to use as a way of forcing decision-makers to do things they wouldn’t do on their own.

As the old expression goes “Agitate. Educate. Organize.” Help people believe and understand that they deserve better, educate them on what it will take to get that, and then put a plan in place and execute.

 

Only loosely connected, but I'm part of a public sector union (teachers) and while our local union has gotten us some of the best pay and perks in the state, statewide our power as a union is kinda weak unfortunately. Delaware passed a law back in the 80s I believe to ban public sector unions from striking. It's kind of my life's mission right now to get that law reversed.

 

Navigating the laws in different states and reversing the shitty ones is definitely a necessary / frustrating process. The Local i currently work for is public sector employees, and my wife is a teacher. But we’re in Illinois, which is one of the best states for labor in the country (not entirely without its backwardness, of course). Where I’m from in Ohio though, there’s a lot more restrictions on labor specifically for teachers. And when we lived in Georgia, they didnt even have teachers unions.

I think wildcat strikes are really cool, like the ones they put together in West Virginia a few years ago. There’s the law, and then there’s what can actually be enforced. In a state like West Virginia, there aren’t thousands of people ready/willing/waiting to walk in and take your teaching job, so you have a certain amount of leverage to do something like that. I’m unsure if those conditions are similar in Delaware or not. And then it’s a question of how agitated your coworkers are too. Things were so bad in W Va that people were willing to say “fuck it, what’ve we got to lose” but if you’re paid well enough and have decent benefits, you may put up with a certain amount of abuse and disrespect to preserve all of that. I’ve seen employers throw huge raises at our bargaining units if we agreed to drop proposals that would put members at the decision making table, which tells you about those employer’s priorities. I’ve also seen bargaining units vote down those raises and say that getting that foot-hold in the process matters more to them, because it will help them ensure their job and safety in the long run.

 

The grad students at my school (including myself) are trying to unionize at the moment after the school engaged in a pretty malicious union busting campaign last time they tried in 2017. The card campaign is pretty close to reaching 60% of all PhD students which is pretty exciting. Unsurprisingly, it's the business school that's really holding us back (was at a union meeting last night and like half the meeting was about what to do with the business people).

But, yeah, it's my first year here so it's pretty exciting to just be able to jump right into this big organization campaign that seems to be having quite a bit of success. We'll see what ends up happening once the university decides it's gone too far though...

 

Thats awesome! Do you all plan to continue to try and convince the business school, or try to win without them?

 

There were definitely people last night who were questioning why we were even trying with them (for comparison, every division of the university has had over 50% of students sign a card except for the business school, which is only at around 25%). But the lead organizing committee people were trying to make the argument that the low response is more due to poor organizing there in the past than active resistance to the union. We'll see though.

The sense I got is that we're in really good shape in any case and should be able to have/win an election some time in the winter. The concern is more with how the administration will respond (they have certainly tested the bounds of legality before) than with overall support at the moment

 

I think that’s a good distinction to make - are they not signing on because that’s where the organizing is weakest, or because they’re just more ideologically opposed to unionizing. If it’s the former, absolutely worth extra efforts. If it’s the latter then might as well focus on running up the margins elsewhere.

Are y’all in the process of inoculating your coworkers now to the BS management will say/do? That’s usually the most crucial part of preventing drop-off down the stretch in my experience. Luckily Management is almost always playing from the same playbook lol but if they defeated a drive 5 years ago, clearly things have not gotten better or else there wouldn’t still be such an interest in unionizing now.

 

Yeah, I think the addressing the inevitable anti-union campaign is where things are moving right now. I really only know bits and pieces of what happened during the previous campaign, but there's a lot of hope that 1. other grad student unions having success in recent years (MIT being one of the most recent) will make things easier and 2. going to a Biden-run NLRB vs. a Trump-run one will lead to less problems. In general though, the people who weren't around in 2017 seem quite a bit more optimistic than those who were

 

I’m a defense attorney/contract public defender, and the PDs in my state have a statewide union (that as a contractor I am not in sadly) but it’s so frustrating because so many of them are all so afraid of flexing any actual muscle despite (1) being given increasingly shitty conditions (shitty pay to start with but not even a proper cost-of-living adjustment so just inevitably shiftier, plus increases in case loads due to people leaving from burn out, and a whole host of other things since covid, both for them as workers and for their clients), and (2) they have so much muscle to flex! Imagine not just your direct employer having to deal with a strike, but literally the entire legal system and everyone involved in it grinding to a halt! And it is *way* too complicated of a job, in a million different ways, for there to be even any possibility of scabs

I forget the term for it (“fear of falling,” maybe?) but it really is a case of professional-class people thinking to themselves like “well things suck, yes, but if we try to do anything to seriously challenge the status quo, that could risk things getting worse, if not generally then at least for me personally, and we can’t have that…” And some will cite concerns about their clients, like leaving them out to dry, but that’s completely short term thinking because as time goes on and the situation gets shittier for PDs generally, then the same is going to be true for the clients as well. And so it’s truly a question of: would you rather just rip the bandage off now, or do you want to keep it on and never seek any treatment and simply hope beyond all reason that the injury just magically goes away?

There are a decent handful of them statewide who are genuine leftists and understand all this clearly. But it is endlessly disheartening seeing just how many end up being very baseline libs afraid to actually do anything to shake things up, given how they’re all perfectly aware of just how fucked up and unjust the criminal/PD system is. Like they really reduce themselves to being “troublemakers” only in the narrow framework of the legal system itself, where it is the simplest thing in the world for the judiciary/prosecutors to just ignore and dismiss.

 

I definitely think a lot of professional-class unions/workers forego the leverage they have because they don’t all the way see themselves as workers. They don’t think going on strike is something they could do because they don’t work types of jobs historically associated with militancy. I think you’re starting to see that change in the world of education. Hopefully it changes with a lot of other “white collar” jobs as well.

For defense attorneys, you hit the nail on the head. A lot of workers have been fed the line that demanding more for themselves means hurting the people they are invested in helping. But you’re exactly right: poor conditions for nurses, teachers, and in your case defense attorneys wind up resulting in poor conditions for the people you advocate for. It’s part of why i feel Chicago Teachers Union has been so successful - they’ve gone out of their way to explain this to the community, and when they strike they aren’t just striking to be paid more, but also to get librarians and counselors and support staff victories as well. True solidarity that has allowed them to take on and beat our past two bullshit mayors (Rahm and Lightfoot).

 

Regardless of what goes on tonight, this is a “We’re So Fucked!”-free zone.

 

i officially just got my card...im a union man now

 

https://fox2now.com/news/illinois/workers-wages-on-the-ballot-heres-what-happened/amp/

Let’s goooo

 

Wrong thread. Go, Unions!

 

@David87 you’ve got your threads mixed up my dude

 

o

 

It’s fuck electoral politics hours once again, anyone interested in talking about rail workers/strikes?

 

I can't believe there's all this shit happening because rail workers are asking for a week's worth of sick days

 

There was a time in history where they’d just go on strike anyways, and until we get back to that point this will just continue to happen. A Congress that was legitimately worried you might just walk anyways would give you those sick days.

 

Don’t use them NYT apps today, folks