Just a quick lil draft because i want to make this right. I also used the advice i got here to help me make it so thank you all!
Just a quick lil draft because i want to make this right. I also used the advice i got here to help me make it so thank you all!
I truly cannot express how much I hate saying what I’m about to say but I’m going to do it anyway because I was once a bright eyed service worker hoping to make the world a better place for people like me and I was crushed by the experience of it. Hopefully you can take some of what I’m saying to heart and use it to guide your efforts and not end up as burnt as I did.
First and foremost, if you do work where I think you work (since you mentioned it a couple posts ago) then you need to understand how your employer fights union efforts. Specifically the fact that they might be indifferent to shutting down a union shop. If that happens you might be able to reach a settlement in court but someone has to bankroll the lawyers for that. The legal system is not designed to help you in this regard and will not support you until you have won. The current NLRB is arguably not even on the side of workers. Even if this doesn’t happen your employer will not bargain with you unless you can force them too. The government effectively cannot or will not coerce them too. The big unions will probably not be helpful. Only a large amount of their employees being willing to fight can.
This brings us to our second issue — the unions. It varies a little bit regionally but there’s a reason why your industry, and large national or international service economy employers don’t typically have union presence in them. It’s partly because of the companies but it’s also partly because of the unions. Unions rarely show solidarity across workplaces or industries. Usually they look at new organizing as an investment. The common argument unions use against “right to work” laws is that they provide a service and should be compensated for it. Whether or not this is an effective framing is a digression but suffice to say, if you ask a union to invest resources into you the return on investment will factor into their decision at least somewhat. The unions will look at where you work, a small isolated shop with few employees and little to no chance of winning a contract on your own, and will probably not invest heavily. I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. You would probably be working with the Teamsters since you’re employer is sort of their turf now (due to the opportunism of one of their locals) but UNITE-HERE also represents people in your industry. Maybe an SEIU local would take you. Workers United might opportunisticly work with you but I’d advise you steer clear of them and UFCW. A lot of unions are pretty incompetent too so beware of that.
If you have things built out already the unions will be more likely to invest. The most valuable resource you could have is a network with other locations, especially a geographically focused one. A pre-built organizing committee at your location is also valuable. If you do have either of these, do not freely hand it over to a big union. The actual valuable thing in this struggle is the allegiance of workers and their labor-power. The company is trying to win it. The big unions are trying (trying might be too generous) to win it. Neither of them is necessarily putting the interests of you and your coworkers first.
Finally, you’re going to learn the apathy and nihilism of the American service worker. It’s going to hurt. When I was organizing it wasn’t the company trying to quash our efforts or the union that fucked us over that broke my heart, it was the apathy and downright hostility workers had to improving their own lives. I don’t know how to overcome it. I have ideas that are not the orthodox “sign cards, win election, bargain contract” strategy the unions have been losing with for the last eighty years, but they’re untested. The unions will tell you it’s all about one on one conversations and leaders which is partly true but from a different era of organizing and nowhere near as effective as they frame it.
I hope for the sake of you and your coworkers that I’m wrong about all of this. My message here is not to discourage your organizing, but I hope can innoculate you to some of the disappointments you might face. I’m happy to elaborate on any of this or anything else labor organizing if you want. Sorry for the long post.
Please share your untested ideas!
I think the fact that most folks aren’t unionized is evidence enough that the old strategies aren’t working.
Personally, I think the internet seems underutilized in getting folks organized (though I might just be ignorant). Shouldn’t there be an app for that?
I’ve been interested in three things in particular, Firstly Eric Blanc has been writing about “worker to worker organizing” which I think is a silly term and Eric Blanc still doesn’t seem to really grasp what he’s talking about but he’s got the beginnings of a good idea which is that we need a huge mass of workers with a basic training in labor issues.
Secondly we need to move away from security agreements in union contracts. It turns out, telling regular people they have to pay union dues as a condition of employment is incredibly fucking unpopular. It’s why the public sector unions have disintegrated in the wake of Janus and now Trump, because all they did was collect dues and have staff negotiate CBAs. The industrial unions also tie membership to their contract which means you can’t actually join a big union unless you can get your employer to agree to a contract. I’m not sure if SBWU actually does this so they might be a poor example but if they work the way most unions work then not a single Starbucks worker is a voting member of SBWU right now. None of them pay dues to the union. Imagine that, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Starbucks workers that want to join the Starbucks workers union and pay dues and the union says they have to wait until their boss says it’s okay.
My third idea is that militant minorities are actually what drive unions. They are what have always driven unions and the labor movement has tied its hands behind its back by swearing to pacifism, following the law, and NLRB elections. If they want to fight Amazon or OPs employer or Starbucks or any of these large national publicly traded semi-financilized brands then you need to interrupt production and you can do that with militant minorities. You cannot organize enough workers to win strong majorities shop by shop and convince the employer to bargain a contract in good faith though.
It’s not really in my big three but I also think UFCW has to die or be totally overhauled. It’s a particularly bad union and it’s stranglehold over entry level service jobs means that lots of young people join when getting a job at Kroger or a hospital or wherever and then are turned anti-union by how bad UFCW is.
Also in general we shouldn’t let the AFL-CIO dominate the labor movement.
Those absolutely make sense to me, thanks for sharing!
The first two kinda dovetail with something I’ve heard elsewhere - that unions are becoming a service that a worker subscribes to, and not something that they’re actively participating in.
I think a militant minority would definitely get workers more leverage with corporations, but I understand why unions as a legal entity need to do things by the book. I think there’s a balance to strike between the weak “we will follow all laws, regulations, and norms” and the mob-boss “it’d be a shame if something were to happen to production timelines,” and I agree that things currently seem to skew too far towards the former.
I don’t even necessarily mean breaking the law with respect to minority tactics. All of these large (inter)national corporations have choke points that can be shut down by minority walkouts or even concerted slowdowns. If they are the whole production chain withers.
For instance, the Flint sit down strike was impactful not because of how they shut down the operation, but because the factory they occupied was highly specialized and essential to the production of the cars. Even without getting every worker in the industry to join the union, UAW beat the auto industry.
When looking at a corporation like Amazon, we aren’t going to convince the hundreds or even thousands of workers in any given warehouse to be militant and engaged in their union. Even if we could there’s thousands of warehouses that they can just reroute stuff through. That’s tens of thousands of workers that need to be organized.
There are people in each warehouse that are essential though, probably in the unloading and loading of trucks and maybe other roles as well. If these people walk of the job suddenly everything grinds to a halt. If these people walked off the job at every Amazon warehouse at the same time Amazon’s retail operation is fucked for at least a few weeks. Now you’re only looking at organizing hundreds of workers across the US instead of tens of thousands. This is critical because what the labor movement really needs to convince the great mass of workers is big wins they can point to, not one-on-ones or organic leaders or any of that.
The current orthodoxy though is for whole shops to act in concert which is undoubtedly effective when it happens but rarely actually happens.