Minority Report October 2002
by Alexis Buss
At the recent IWW General Assembly, I got a chance to be on a panel to share ideas on how to rebuild the labor movement. My talk was on minority unionism. Here are some excerpts:
If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8hour day and built unions as a vital force. One way to do this, is what has become known now as "minority unionism." It.s to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.
Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition. It is not about settling for creating a tiny clique of professional malcontents. It should aspire to grow, but in the short term gives an example of what kinds of organization is possible when we decide that our unions are going to exist because we need them to.
U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context, this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.
The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn.t have been. One hundred years ago unions had no legal status (indeed, courts often ruled that unions were an illegal conspiracy and strikes a form of extortion) - they gained recognition through raw industrial power.
When the IWW fought for the 8-hour day in the timber and wheat fields, they didn't decide to prove their majority to the boss through elections. Workers instead held meetings to decide what their demands were, elected shop committees to present those demands, and used tactics such as walking off the job at the end of an 8-hour shift to persuade recalcitrant bosses to agree to those demands. Union recognition in the construction crafts was built through a combination of strikes, direct action and honoring each others' picket lines .(the latter not often enough).
The wave of sit-down strikes that established the CIO in auto and steel, for example, was undertaken by minority unions that had a substantial presence in workplaces with a history of agitating around grievances. The unions then drew upon that minority presence to undertake direct actions that galvanized the larger workforce in their plants - and inspired workers across the continent.
Unionism was built through direct action and through organization on the job. But in the 1930s, the bosses found it increasingly difficult to keep unions out with hired thugs, mass firings and friendly judges. Recognizing that there was no way to crush unions altogether, and tired of the continual strife, they offered a deal: If unions would agree to give up their industrial' power and instead work through proper channels - the National Labor Relations Board in the United States, various provincial boards in Canada - the government would act as an "impartial" arbiter to determine whether or not the union was the bona fide representative of the workers.
In the short term unions were able to short-circuit the need to sign workers up one by one and collect dues directly. The bosses traded union busters in suits for the gun thugs they had previously employed. And after a short burst in membership, unions (particularly in the United States) began a long-term downward spiral. Under this exclusive bargaining model, unions do not attempt to function on-the job until they gain legal certification. That legal process affords the bosses almost unlimited opportunity to threaten and intimidate workers, and to drag proceedings out for years. It is a system designed to interfere with workers' right to organize-and the IWW pointed this out when the National Labor Relations Act was passed.
However, while the labor law regime is designed around this majority-designated majority status unionism, it does not actually require it. As long as workers are acting in concert, they enjoy the same basic legal rights - such as those are - whether or not they are in an officially certified union. Indeed, in certain cases they enjoy greater rights, as the courts have ruled that most union contracts implicitly surrender the right to strike. It is illegal to fire members of a minority union for their union activity, to discriminate against them, to fire them for striking, to refuse to allow union representatives to participate in disciplinary hearings, etc. An organized group of workers has legal rights, though it would be' a mistake to expect the labor boards to enforce them any more vigorously than they do for unions that have been certified. And an organized group of workers, even if it is a small minority, has much more potential power than unorganized individual workers.
For the most part you have as many legal rights as a minority union as a majority union does - with the single exception of being certified as the exclusive bargaining agent with the sole authority to negotiate a contract. A minority union has the right to present grievances (though there may not be a formal grievance procedure in place); to engage in concerted activity, to make demands upon the boss; to seek meetings, even to strike (though this isn't a great idea if you don't have majority support).
If you pick your issues well and use them as an opportunity to talk with and engage your fellow workers, you can simultaneously fight for better conditions and build the `union: In campaigning around issues that matter to your coworkers you are building the union's credibility, you are gaining experience in self organization, you are learning who can be relied upon you are establishing that the union is workers on the job and that were in it for the long haul.
The labor movement was built when groups of workers came together and began agitating over conditions: Sometimes they persuaded their fellow workers to approach the boss and demand that some problem be corrected. Sometimes they refused to work under unsafe conditions or in unsafe ways, and persuaded their coworkers to do likewise. Sometimes they acted on the individual job, sometimes they held citywide demonstrations over issues of common concern, such as working hours or unsafe-work.
The important point is that they acted. They identified key issues of concern; they met together, they decided upon a course of action, and they acted upon it. That is unionism-in action. It does not require official recognition, it does not require a contract. It requires workers to-come together and act collectively.
If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model and return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force. Minority unionism is about forming meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class. It is a process, a process that offers hope for transforming our greatest weakness--the fact that our members are scattered in many, largely disorganized workplaces--into a strength.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Minority Report July 2002
Minority Report July 2002
by Alexis Buss
For the past few years, I've been contributing an occasional column called "Wobbling the Works" focused on how labor law affects union organizing. I'll still be writing on this topic once in a while, but lately my attention has been on a concept which I'll call "minority unionism," a way to describe a method of organizing that does not wait for a majority of workers in a workplace to win the legal right to bargain. This month I'm going to share some of the things that piqued my interest and pointed me in this direction.
I recently had to redo the IWW's constitution for our fellow workers in IWW Regional Organising Committees, who were tired of American misspellings of words like labour and organising. Searching through the constitution got me thinking about the idea of job branches. A job branch is a group of five or more IWW members at a given workplace who are charged with getting together on a monthly basis. The plain implication is that they would discuss grievances, come up with strategies to resolve them, and build a union presence on the job.
I am working on a project that started out as a video version of the classic IWW pamphlet A Worker's Guide to Direct Action, but has grown a bit in scope since we started. Researching the video, I saw Miriam Ching Yoon Louie speak about her book Sweatshop Warriors, which provides some excellent examples of how immigrant workers centers have helped individual workers understand their rights and organize on a variety of work and community issues. I also got the chance to interview Barbara Prear, a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina and president of UE Local 150, when she visited support staff at Swarthmore College, who have been conducting a living wage campaign for six years. The UNC union has no legal right to bargain, but has been very successful in using pressure tactics to get administrators to the table and negotiate improvements for the lowest-paid workers on campus.
I have been thinking quite a bit about ways that workers who do not have a legal mandate to bargain and have no contract can act union, using the law to augment their work. This came up because Staughton Lynd asked me to work with him on a new edition of Labor Law for the Rank and Filer at a moment when I had become particularly cynical about the potential for using labor law in organizing. I've just come back from spending a weekend with the Lynds, people from the Youngstown Workers Solidarity Club and their rank-and-filer-troublemaking cohorts from near and not-so-near places, veteran activists, and student organizers.
The club developed as a "parallel central labor body" to fill a void when the local central labor council could not provide sufficient support for a strike. Hanging out with these folks was the antidote for the cynicism I was feeling; not that I now have more confidence in the law, but I feel more able to look at the possibilities... A month ago I saw a documentary on the Overnite trucking strike, "American Standoff," which I reviewed last issue. "Standoff" illustrated a lot of problems that labor has not adequately confronted. How do we deal with organizing in companies that are so anti-union that they are willing to spend millions of dollars to keep workers from even getting to the bargaining table? The Teamsters' Overnite campaign, which is now on a road so difficult that it isn't clear it can be salvaged, is one of a long string of campaigns that seem to have left labor scratching its collective head, wondering what to do in the face of self-destructive upper management and backwards labor law. Clearly, the answer is not to give up. It isn't to settle for a minority clique of agitators in each workplace. It's to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.
And last but not least, several fellow workers from across the water forwarded me an article on minority unionism that ran in a recent issue of The Nation. The article, by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, argues that the AFL-CIO should develop a plan for organizing that does not depend on having a majority at a workplace. The thing that was so great about getting multiple copies of this article in my inbox was the puzzlement of the non-American unionists who sent it. The way us backwards Yanks do things is absurd. Few countries do unionism the way it's done in the U.S., with the union being the sole bargaining agent of a declared majority. I think it would help if more workers I talk to knew how other places do it, and would also be good if folks outside the U.S. saw the implications of how it's done here.
So, that's the point of this column. I want to share these stories and experiences. I want to connect my fellow workers with resources that others have found useful to their work. I can't offer a recipe for success . not all of these examples will be appropriate for everyone. But smart thinking on a way forward isn't just possible, it is happening. And by developing resources to try these things out, we will give one another the confidence to turn comments like "what a good idea" into "I'm going to give that a try."
by Alexis Buss
For the past few years, I've been contributing an occasional column called "Wobbling the Works" focused on how labor law affects union organizing. I'll still be writing on this topic once in a while, but lately my attention has been on a concept which I'll call "minority unionism," a way to describe a method of organizing that does not wait for a majority of workers in a workplace to win the legal right to bargain. This month I'm going to share some of the things that piqued my interest and pointed me in this direction.
I recently had to redo the IWW's constitution for our fellow workers in IWW Regional Organising Committees, who were tired of American misspellings of words like labour and organising. Searching through the constitution got me thinking about the idea of job branches. A job branch is a group of five or more IWW members at a given workplace who are charged with getting together on a monthly basis. The plain implication is that they would discuss grievances, come up with strategies to resolve them, and build a union presence on the job.
I am working on a project that started out as a video version of the classic IWW pamphlet A Worker's Guide to Direct Action, but has grown a bit in scope since we started. Researching the video, I saw Miriam Ching Yoon Louie speak about her book Sweatshop Warriors, which provides some excellent examples of how immigrant workers centers have helped individual workers understand their rights and organize on a variety of work and community issues. I also got the chance to interview Barbara Prear, a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina and president of UE Local 150, when she visited support staff at Swarthmore College, who have been conducting a living wage campaign for six years. The UNC union has no legal right to bargain, but has been very successful in using pressure tactics to get administrators to the table and negotiate improvements for the lowest-paid workers on campus.
I have been thinking quite a bit about ways that workers who do not have a legal mandate to bargain and have no contract can act union, using the law to augment their work. This came up because Staughton Lynd asked me to work with him on a new edition of Labor Law for the Rank and Filer at a moment when I had become particularly cynical about the potential for using labor law in organizing. I've just come back from spending a weekend with the Lynds, people from the Youngstown Workers Solidarity Club and their rank-and-filer-troublemaking cohorts from near and not-so-near places, veteran activists, and student organizers.
The club developed as a "parallel central labor body" to fill a void when the local central labor council could not provide sufficient support for a strike. Hanging out with these folks was the antidote for the cynicism I was feeling; not that I now have more confidence in the law, but I feel more able to look at the possibilities... A month ago I saw a documentary on the Overnite trucking strike, "American Standoff," which I reviewed last issue. "Standoff" illustrated a lot of problems that labor has not adequately confronted. How do we deal with organizing in companies that are so anti-union that they are willing to spend millions of dollars to keep workers from even getting to the bargaining table? The Teamsters' Overnite campaign, which is now on a road so difficult that it isn't clear it can be salvaged, is one of a long string of campaigns that seem to have left labor scratching its collective head, wondering what to do in the face of self-destructive upper management and backwards labor law. Clearly, the answer is not to give up. It isn't to settle for a minority clique of agitators in each workplace. It's to form meaningful, organized networks of solidarity capable of winning improvements in individual workplaces, throughout industries, and for the benefit of the international working class.
And last but not least, several fellow workers from across the water forwarded me an article on minority unionism that ran in a recent issue of The Nation. The article, by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, argues that the AFL-CIO should develop a plan for organizing that does not depend on having a majority at a workplace. The thing that was so great about getting multiple copies of this article in my inbox was the puzzlement of the non-American unionists who sent it. The way us backwards Yanks do things is absurd. Few countries do unionism the way it's done in the U.S., with the union being the sole bargaining agent of a declared majority. I think it would help if more workers I talk to knew how other places do it, and would also be good if folks outside the U.S. saw the implications of how it's done here.
So, that's the point of this column. I want to share these stories and experiences. I want to connect my fellow workers with resources that others have found useful to their work. I can't offer a recipe for success . not all of these examples will be appropriate for everyone. But smart thinking on a way forward isn't just possible, it is happening. And by developing resources to try these things out, we will give one another the confidence to turn comments like "what a good idea" into "I'm going to give that a try."
Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union: Still Good Advice
Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union: Still Good Advice
by x361737
Some time ago Workers Power ran a column in which a Fellow Worker promoted the idea of “Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union” as way of explaining how a healthy campaign sustains itself and grows. Having participated in some organizing, I found myself often re-reading that piece as a source of inspiration and advice. I hope to expand the “Know the Union...” organizing approach by offering my thoughts on how to put it into practice.
In any workplace there are going to be some workers who will quickly be attracted to an organizing drive. Perhaps they’ve been involved in organizing before; perhaps they have some level of ideological agreement; or perhaps they simply have a high level of grievances. In any case, these workers “know the union” and typically come together to form the initial organizing committee.
For other co-workers, they’ll have to be persuaded to join the campaign through a series of one-on-one conversations. They need to “Hear the Union” to get agitated about workplace issues and realize they don’t have to face them alone.
Most workers, however, fall into the third camp: “See the Union”. They’ll have to see the power of collective action before they get involved. As our Fellow Worker summed up in the previous column:
"Here's how we move the workers who need to see the union in action. The workers who know the union organize and build relationships and leadership among the folks who hear about the union. Together both groups take action to change small issues. This demonstrates in practice what a union is. Other workers see the union in action and start to understand that change is really possible."
For our friend, “Know the Union...” proved helpful when organizing slowed and workplace militants got frustrated at the pace of growth. “Know the Union...” encouraged workers to get ‘back to the basics’ of successful organizing: one-on-one conversations and group meetings to plan and undertake winnable direct action grievances. It also demonstrated the role the existing leadership should play in instituting a continual process by which co-workers are led up the “hear, see, know” ladder until a culture of solidarity and collective activity is instituted in a workplace.
There’s another important lesson to take away from this: many self-identified radicals have little real-world organizing experience. This is okay. Like anything else, organizing takes practice. What we do have, however, is a wealth of grand arguments supporting class struggle and a vision for a post-capitalist future. Because of this there’s a temptation to ‘intellectualize’ the organizing process. Speaking from personal experience, I know what it’s like to feel unsure about doing something new, especially when it comes to organizing. It’s tempting to fall back on something we’re more comfortable with—like making the argument for why we need a revolutionary union.
Reality, however, is much more complicated than a well-phrased argument. Instead of trying to ‘win the organizing argument’ we’re much better off building relationships of trust with our co-workers. Through this relationship, we engage our co-workers in small scale winnable actions. These actions, in turn, lay the groundwork for larger struggles and deeper conversations.
To put it another way, workers—conscious of it or not—undertake individual anti-capitalist acts all the time. Workmates, however, often need to see collective activity in action before they’re willing to join a union. From there, it’s involvement in collective struggle that opens a space for us, as radicals, to begin having discussion about class, capitalism, and the labor movement.
As organizers, “Know the Union” not only helps us not only to remember that organizing is a process, but forces us to recognize that many times “action precedes consciousness”. The most important thing organizers do is not winning arguments or making rousing speeches, but actually building the relationships that form the basis of any successful campaign.
by x361737
Some time ago Workers Power ran a column in which a Fellow Worker promoted the idea of “Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union” as way of explaining how a healthy campaign sustains itself and grows. Having participated in some organizing, I found myself often re-reading that piece as a source of inspiration and advice. I hope to expand the “Know the Union...” organizing approach by offering my thoughts on how to put it into practice.
In any workplace there are going to be some workers who will quickly be attracted to an organizing drive. Perhaps they’ve been involved in organizing before; perhaps they have some level of ideological agreement; or perhaps they simply have a high level of grievances. In any case, these workers “know the union” and typically come together to form the initial organizing committee.
For other co-workers, they’ll have to be persuaded to join the campaign through a series of one-on-one conversations. They need to “Hear the Union” to get agitated about workplace issues and realize they don’t have to face them alone.
Most workers, however, fall into the third camp: “See the Union”. They’ll have to see the power of collective action before they get involved. As our Fellow Worker summed up in the previous column:
"Here's how we move the workers who need to see the union in action. The workers who know the union organize and build relationships and leadership among the folks who hear about the union. Together both groups take action to change small issues. This demonstrates in practice what a union is. Other workers see the union in action and start to understand that change is really possible."
For our friend, “Know the Union...” proved helpful when organizing slowed and workplace militants got frustrated at the pace of growth. “Know the Union...” encouraged workers to get ‘back to the basics’ of successful organizing: one-on-one conversations and group meetings to plan and undertake winnable direct action grievances. It also demonstrated the role the existing leadership should play in instituting a continual process by which co-workers are led up the “hear, see, know” ladder until a culture of solidarity and collective activity is instituted in a workplace.
There’s another important lesson to take away from this: many self-identified radicals have little real-world organizing experience. This is okay. Like anything else, organizing takes practice. What we do have, however, is a wealth of grand arguments supporting class struggle and a vision for a post-capitalist future. Because of this there’s a temptation to ‘intellectualize’ the organizing process. Speaking from personal experience, I know what it’s like to feel unsure about doing something new, especially when it comes to organizing. It’s tempting to fall back on something we’re more comfortable with—like making the argument for why we need a revolutionary union.
Reality, however, is much more complicated than a well-phrased argument. Instead of trying to ‘win the organizing argument’ we’re much better off building relationships of trust with our co-workers. Through this relationship, we engage our co-workers in small scale winnable actions. These actions, in turn, lay the groundwork for larger struggles and deeper conversations.
To put it another way, workers—conscious of it or not—undertake individual anti-capitalist acts all the time. Workmates, however, often need to see collective activity in action before they’re willing to join a union. From there, it’s involvement in collective struggle that opens a space for us, as radicals, to begin having discussion about class, capitalism, and the labor movement.
As organizers, “Know the Union” not only helps us not only to remember that organizing is a process, but forces us to recognize that many times “action precedes consciousness”. The most important thing organizers do is not winning arguments or making rousing speeches, but actually building the relationships that form the basis of any successful campaign.
Solidarity and the service model
Solidarity and the service model
by P. Gage
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ unionism is one of worker organizers servicing a contract that is negotiated with the employer. A large body of volunteers and a handful of paid staff provide a service to workers who are expected to come to the union with their grievances.
Servicing a contract is pointless if the union doesn’t know who is in the shop, how many workers are in the shop and what the issues are. A contract is even more useless if the workers don’t know it exists. In this shop the collective agreement required the employer to come to us when they hired new people. They pulled a fast one on us, as the grievances roll in it is becoming apparent they have pulled a fast one on us for three years.
The point of a contract is to mark gains negotiated by the bargaining committee. In exchange we trade off our right to strike and submit to a grievance procedure where issues are settled off the floor allowing the business to run smoothly. Most of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is based in the post office and we have a large volunteer steward body that can help people with filing their own grievances in our postal sector bargaining units. A situation like this can’t happen at the post office because the union is institutionally a part of the culture of the workplace.
Small shops face a real challenge to this model because there isn’t a concentration of shop stewards to enforce the contract. When these workers took action they acted as most workers in most industries do when confronted with an injustice at work, they withheld their labour. Trade unionists tend to see non-union industries as static and without struggle but in a lot of cases the struggle is far more direct and personal in nature when the union is not there. In fact the union, through the contract is what puts limits on this struggle and determines its course.
Al seemed to think that if we had better contact with the shop we could have filed a grievance and these guys would still have their jobs. Al’s probably right. But the problem was that a contract cannot enforce itself, a contract does not make a union. Contracts are pieces of paper; unions are relationships between workers and their work. The reason we didn’t have better contact with the shop is all the workers who voted for the union were gone and replaced with new workers who weren’t told about the union. These workers did not have the chance to struggle together as a group to get the organization needed to enforce the contract.
When they did struggle they did the one thing the contract says you can’t do, they struck and then got fired. Next week they will be working at another courier firm and a new batch of drivers will be working at this company. When these new drivers are hired they will be union members as soon as they walk in the door, the company will inform us of their membership and their contract and everyone will follow the rules. Not because they want to but because the company wants to avoid this from happening again too.
What is most ironic about the whole situation is that it was these workers did not know about the contract and so they went out and acted against the contract and were fired for violating the contract and that is what gave the contract life again. It was no longer a piece of paper but a document that outlined a relationship between a group of workers and their boss. It also ensures that as long as the contract is followed what gave the contract any real meaning on the job won’t happen again.
by P. Gage
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ unionism is one of worker organizers servicing a contract that is negotiated with the employer. A large body of volunteers and a handful of paid staff provide a service to workers who are expected to come to the union with their grievances.
Servicing a contract is pointless if the union doesn’t know who is in the shop, how many workers are in the shop and what the issues are. A contract is even more useless if the workers don’t know it exists. In this shop the collective agreement required the employer to come to us when they hired new people. They pulled a fast one on us, as the grievances roll in it is becoming apparent they have pulled a fast one on us for three years.
The point of a contract is to mark gains negotiated by the bargaining committee. In exchange we trade off our right to strike and submit to a grievance procedure where issues are settled off the floor allowing the business to run smoothly. Most of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is based in the post office and we have a large volunteer steward body that can help people with filing their own grievances in our postal sector bargaining units. A situation like this can’t happen at the post office because the union is institutionally a part of the culture of the workplace.
Small shops face a real challenge to this model because there isn’t a concentration of shop stewards to enforce the contract. When these workers took action they acted as most workers in most industries do when confronted with an injustice at work, they withheld their labour. Trade unionists tend to see non-union industries as static and without struggle but in a lot of cases the struggle is far more direct and personal in nature when the union is not there. In fact the union, through the contract is what puts limits on this struggle and determines its course.
Al seemed to think that if we had better contact with the shop we could have filed a grievance and these guys would still have their jobs. Al’s probably right. But the problem was that a contract cannot enforce itself, a contract does not make a union. Contracts are pieces of paper; unions are relationships between workers and their work. The reason we didn’t have better contact with the shop is all the workers who voted for the union were gone and replaced with new workers who weren’t told about the union. These workers did not have the chance to struggle together as a group to get the organization needed to enforce the contract.
When they did struggle they did the one thing the contract says you can’t do, they struck and then got fired. Next week they will be working at another courier firm and a new batch of drivers will be working at this company. When these new drivers are hired they will be union members as soon as they walk in the door, the company will inform us of their membership and their contract and everyone will follow the rules. Not because they want to but because the company wants to avoid this from happening again too.
What is most ironic about the whole situation is that it was these workers did not know about the contract and so they went out and acted against the contract and were fired for violating the contract and that is what gave the contract life again. It was no longer a piece of paper but a document that outlined a relationship between a group of workers and their boss. It also ensures that as long as the contract is followed what gave the contract any real meaning on the job won’t happen again.
On Contracts
On Contracts
by P. Gage
I was in for one hell of a shock today. I finally got the names and addresses of the four ‘Rand’[1] members working at the courier company I was re-organising. In the same day I saw them threaten to wildcat and then get fired. I had the pleasure of introducing them to the glories of union representation only ten minutes before Sylvain, the boss, accused the workers of blackmailing him and then fired them.
By talking to the workers I pieced together what had happened. The boss used to run a thirty-person outfit that was unionized under the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). When they lost their major contract the company shrank down to one driver. Now they are building their business back up; as they hire new drivers they do not tell them about the union. There are now eleven people working in the shop, well eleven minus four fired men. These guys will likely be replaced by a new batch on Monday.
The boss was bullshitting the union too, he never told us when he hired more guys on. Even though the contract said that they had to inform us of any new workers, they also had to send them over to the union office to sign cards as a condition of work. The employer also had to provide us with regular seniority lists. In every instance they simply ignored the contract. They even hired these four guys on as independent contractors under a separate deal than the collective agreement we negotiated with the company. They pretended the union didn’t exist and the strategy worked for them for three years.
While the workers were getting their letters one of the fired workers looked across the room at me as he took his dismissal letter out of the boss’ hand. He smirked at me and winked. That’s when it hit me- these guys didn’t care. They agreed to certain terms and conditions and the employer broke their side of the deal. They didn’t have a union as far as they knew so they created one on the spot. They drafted up a letter with a list of demands, all four signed the bottom and handed it in. If Sylvain didn’t meet their demands they said they would try and convince the courier company’s clients to stop using them as a courier and would show up for work Monday but refuse to do anything until their demands were met.
These workers didn’t know about the union, then we show up saying we ‘represent’ them. I looked across the room at Al the local president who was negotiating with the boss. He was a model of restraint; Sylvain on the phone was not. I could hear words not fit for print from 15 feet away. For a brief moment I saw how comical this all was, I saw things from the point of view of the four guys who just got fired. The workers invited us along for the ride; they didn’t need us to represent them, they wanted outside witnesses to support a struggle that they took on themselves. We were frowning; to us this was serious business. They were smiling; to them it was a joke.
We all had a conversation in the parking lot afterwards. I told them that we would grieve the firings, and our reps would also bring up their return to work at negotiations for the new contract. Their odds of getting their jobs back were pretty good, and the odds of them getting back pay were even better according to our regional office. They said a settlement would be nice and they would think about their jobs, but what they really wanted was to cause as much trouble for that business as humanly possible. I said I would see what I could do, returning the smirk.
Later that day while driving back to the union office Al was horrified to hear me call the situation funny. He didn’t like my take on things at all; he said I enjoyed the conflict too much. Al and I have been through a lot and I respect him, he’s got thirty years at the Post Office under his belt and hasn’t been afraid encourage workers to take action. I told him I would think about what he had to say.
[1] A Rand member is someone who is paying dues to a union but has not signed a union card. Named after justice Rand who set the precedent for dues checkoff for unions in Canada.
by P. Gage
I was in for one hell of a shock today. I finally got the names and addresses of the four ‘Rand’[1] members working at the courier company I was re-organising. In the same day I saw them threaten to wildcat and then get fired. I had the pleasure of introducing them to the glories of union representation only ten minutes before Sylvain, the boss, accused the workers of blackmailing him and then fired them.
By talking to the workers I pieced together what had happened. The boss used to run a thirty-person outfit that was unionized under the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). When they lost their major contract the company shrank down to one driver. Now they are building their business back up; as they hire new drivers they do not tell them about the union. There are now eleven people working in the shop, well eleven minus four fired men. These guys will likely be replaced by a new batch on Monday.
The boss was bullshitting the union too, he never told us when he hired more guys on. Even though the contract said that they had to inform us of any new workers, they also had to send them over to the union office to sign cards as a condition of work. The employer also had to provide us with regular seniority lists. In every instance they simply ignored the contract. They even hired these four guys on as independent contractors under a separate deal than the collective agreement we negotiated with the company. They pretended the union didn’t exist and the strategy worked for them for three years.
While the workers were getting their letters one of the fired workers looked across the room at me as he took his dismissal letter out of the boss’ hand. He smirked at me and winked. That’s when it hit me- these guys didn’t care. They agreed to certain terms and conditions and the employer broke their side of the deal. They didn’t have a union as far as they knew so they created one on the spot. They drafted up a letter with a list of demands, all four signed the bottom and handed it in. If Sylvain didn’t meet their demands they said they would try and convince the courier company’s clients to stop using them as a courier and would show up for work Monday but refuse to do anything until their demands were met.
These workers didn’t know about the union, then we show up saying we ‘represent’ them. I looked across the room at Al the local president who was negotiating with the boss. He was a model of restraint; Sylvain on the phone was not. I could hear words not fit for print from 15 feet away. For a brief moment I saw how comical this all was, I saw things from the point of view of the four guys who just got fired. The workers invited us along for the ride; they didn’t need us to represent them, they wanted outside witnesses to support a struggle that they took on themselves. We were frowning; to us this was serious business. They were smiling; to them it was a joke.
We all had a conversation in the parking lot afterwards. I told them that we would grieve the firings, and our reps would also bring up their return to work at negotiations for the new contract. Their odds of getting their jobs back were pretty good, and the odds of them getting back pay were even better according to our regional office. They said a settlement would be nice and they would think about their jobs, but what they really wanted was to cause as much trouble for that business as humanly possible. I said I would see what I could do, returning the smirk.
Later that day while driving back to the union office Al was horrified to hear me call the situation funny. He didn’t like my take on things at all; he said I enjoyed the conflict too much. Al and I have been through a lot and I respect him, he’s got thirty years at the Post Office under his belt and hasn’t been afraid encourage workers to take action. I told him I would think about what he had to say.
[1] A Rand member is someone who is paying dues to a union but has not signed a union card. Named after justice Rand who set the precedent for dues checkoff for unions in Canada.
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses' Offensive Look Like?
The Battle of the Sandwiches: What Does the Bosses' Offensive Look Like?
by Erik Forman
If you read stuff about the labor movement of the 1970s and 80s, there is a lot of talkabout the “bosses’ offensive,” an aggressive attack on workers movements by capital.
A friend of mine from Italy told me that in 1977, the bosses and pro-boss workers (we call these people ’scissorbills,’ because their words cut you) staged a march of several thousand people in opposition to the continued wildcat strikes, sabotage, and occasional kneecapping, kidnapping, or assassination of bosses in the plants of northern Italy. This action was sufficient to change the climate and turn the cultural tide against the workers’ insurgency.
In my own workplace, we have seen an ebb and flow of class struggle on a micro-level. Initially, when the union went public, the boss was so afraid of us that he would sneak in and out the back door of the store without us knowing. We actually had a hard time planning actions because we could never find the boss to make demands.
The company replaced our boss with a new, more authoritarian manager. She set about breaking the union. Many of our fellow workers quit of their own volition before the union-busting really started, so we were already weak when the boss went on the offensive against us.
How did our new boss attack us? The same way we attacked our boss. She picked a winnable issue- something that we cared about but that we would be unable to defend. An issue that would isolate us from our coworkers, where we would not have “common sense” or the moral high ground behind us. In this case, it was the day-old sandwiches. We used to keep the sandwiches we didn’t sell at the end of the night for the workers who would come in the next day to have for lunch. Since we’re all so damn poor, this small gesture of solidarity meant a lot- it saved us money, and sometimes meant we got to eat when we would otherwise miss a meal.
The boss took away our sandwiches and put a note in the back room instructing us that we were no longer allowed to keep the sandwiches.
We were outraged. She was taking food out of our mouths. Immediately, two workers confronted the boss and demanded we be able to keep the sandwiches, explaining how important it was to us, how we didn’t make enough money to buy lunch every day, and how upset all the other workers would be.
The boss had prepared an answer in advance. She said it was against health code to keep the sandwiches, and that her boss would not allow it. We went back and forth a bunch of times to no avail.
The next day, I packaged up the sandwiches and put them in a stapled-shut bag, labeling it for a coworker who worked the next morning. He got the sandwiches and shared them with others on his shift. This was a direct action, directly contradicting the boss’ wishes.
I got called in the back room the next day. I was informed that if I did this again, I would be written up. Two writeups and I would be fired.
What could we do? We could do another march on the boss. A strike? A picket? A phone-in? We couldn’t figure out how to escalate. Our coworkers were not comfortable openly disobeying the boss, especially with the supposed legitimacy of “health code” behind her.
Our boss won. We lost the sandwiches. We did not have the organization we needed to defend ourselves.
This was the first defensive battle of a long retreat. Once you lose once, the effect can be devastating. People lose confidence in their ability to win and your organization crumbles. The boss gets increasingly brazen in their attacks.
But their brazenness generates agitation. You might have to bide your time, but eventually, the time will be ripe for a counterattack. It’s important to understand this dynamic in order to be able to beat back the bosses’ offensive, but also to be able to take the occasional loss in stride, pick our battles, and stay on the offensive more effectively.
by Erik Forman
If you read stuff about the labor movement of the 1970s and 80s, there is a lot of talkabout the “bosses’ offensive,” an aggressive attack on workers movements by capital.
A friend of mine from Italy told me that in 1977, the bosses and pro-boss workers (we call these people ’scissorbills,’ because their words cut you) staged a march of several thousand people in opposition to the continued wildcat strikes, sabotage, and occasional kneecapping, kidnapping, or assassination of bosses in the plants of northern Italy. This action was sufficient to change the climate and turn the cultural tide against the workers’ insurgency.
In my own workplace, we have seen an ebb and flow of class struggle on a micro-level. Initially, when the union went public, the boss was so afraid of us that he would sneak in and out the back door of the store without us knowing. We actually had a hard time planning actions because we could never find the boss to make demands.
The company replaced our boss with a new, more authoritarian manager. She set about breaking the union. Many of our fellow workers quit of their own volition before the union-busting really started, so we were already weak when the boss went on the offensive against us.
How did our new boss attack us? The same way we attacked our boss. She picked a winnable issue- something that we cared about but that we would be unable to defend. An issue that would isolate us from our coworkers, where we would not have “common sense” or the moral high ground behind us. In this case, it was the day-old sandwiches. We used to keep the sandwiches we didn’t sell at the end of the night for the workers who would come in the next day to have for lunch. Since we’re all so damn poor, this small gesture of solidarity meant a lot- it saved us money, and sometimes meant we got to eat when we would otherwise miss a meal.
The boss took away our sandwiches and put a note in the back room instructing us that we were no longer allowed to keep the sandwiches.
We were outraged. She was taking food out of our mouths. Immediately, two workers confronted the boss and demanded we be able to keep the sandwiches, explaining how important it was to us, how we didn’t make enough money to buy lunch every day, and how upset all the other workers would be.
The boss had prepared an answer in advance. She said it was against health code to keep the sandwiches, and that her boss would not allow it. We went back and forth a bunch of times to no avail.
The next day, I packaged up the sandwiches and put them in a stapled-shut bag, labeling it for a coworker who worked the next morning. He got the sandwiches and shared them with others on his shift. This was a direct action, directly contradicting the boss’ wishes.
I got called in the back room the next day. I was informed that if I did this again, I would be written up. Two writeups and I would be fired.
What could we do? We could do another march on the boss. A strike? A picket? A phone-in? We couldn’t figure out how to escalate. Our coworkers were not comfortable openly disobeying the boss, especially with the supposed legitimacy of “health code” behind her.
Our boss won. We lost the sandwiches. We did not have the organization we needed to defend ourselves.
This was the first defensive battle of a long retreat. Once you lose once, the effect can be devastating. People lose confidence in their ability to win and your organization crumbles. The boss gets increasingly brazen in their attacks.
But their brazenness generates agitation. You might have to bide your time, but eventually, the time will be ripe for a counterattack. It’s important to understand this dynamic in order to be able to beat back the bosses’ offensive, but also to be able to take the occasional loss in stride, pick our battles, and stay on the offensive more effectively.
Charting
Charting
Anyone who works out regularly knows that results in physical fitness pretty much come from only two things: persistence and time. The same thing is true in organizing. Organizing gets results when it’s persistent over the long haul. Persistent long term organizing must be systematic. A key to being systematic is putting things in riting.
In recent times the IWW has mostly organized relatively small workplaces or small units within larger workplaces. With small groups of people it’s pretty easy to remember everyone’s name, what they do, what experiences we’ve had with them. As a result, many of us have gotten into the habit of keeping a lot of information in our heads. This works in smaller settings. This won’t work once we get much beyond 20 or 30 people, because it all gets to be too much to remember. What’s more, when we make a habit of storing information in our head, it’s harder to assess what’s really happening at work, because our feelings shape our perceptions of what’s in our heads even more than what’s in writing. Depending on whether we’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic, this can lead us not to see real progress, or to overlook important steps that we fail to take.
One key activity to systematic organizing is charting regularly. By “charting” I mean when the organizers on a campaign get together and do a written assessment of our current presence on the job. Start with one sheet of paper. List all the facilities or departments in our campaign. Then list all the IWW members in each facility or department, followed by the names of other people we have contact with, and the total number of people in each place. Next to every name, write down whether or not someone has done a good one on one with them, when this was, and how it went. There will be more to say that doesn’t go on the chart, of course, as people talk about what worked and didn’t work in their one on ones. (This is also a good opportunity to do a roleplay about what the organizer might have said differently, but that’s a subject for another time.)
The process of charting helps us make decisions about who to talk to – the people we haven’t talked to in a long time, the people who are slipping, the people we haven’t talked to at all. That can sound obvious, but charting tells us exactly who those people are. It also helps us identify the gaps in our knowledge. (“I just realized, I don’t know how many custodians work third shift. We should find out.”) Getting that information is a task that someone new to the campaign could take on with the help of a more experienced organizer.
On another sheet of paper, write down the tasks that have come up based on the chart. Write down who is going to do each task, and who is going to check in with everyone to make sure they did their task.
Written charts and task lists should be kept after the meeting, and ideally they should be typed up. The next time the organizers chart, get out the old ones and compare. Get out the task list too, to make sure everyone did their tasks, and to discuss how the tasks went. This helps show progress -- “In the last month we’ve talked to 15 more people, this means we have talked to half the workers by now!” -- which can keep our inspiration going. It also helps show patterns we might not have noticed -- “We’re talking to a lot more of the white workers, and to day shift workers, let’s figure out how to break out of those networks and talk to more people” -- which can in turn help us identify new tasks.
Unless organizing is systematic, it will most likely rely too heavily on the social groups at work that we are most comfortable with. Charting is not the only part of organizing systematically, but it's one key piece of the puzzle.
Anyone who works out regularly knows that results in physical fitness pretty much come from only two things: persistence and time. The same thing is true in organizing. Organizing gets results when it’s persistent over the long haul. Persistent long term organizing must be systematic. A key to being systematic is putting things in riting.
In recent times the IWW has mostly organized relatively small workplaces or small units within larger workplaces. With small groups of people it’s pretty easy to remember everyone’s name, what they do, what experiences we’ve had with them. As a result, many of us have gotten into the habit of keeping a lot of information in our heads. This works in smaller settings. This won’t work once we get much beyond 20 or 30 people, because it all gets to be too much to remember. What’s more, when we make a habit of storing information in our head, it’s harder to assess what’s really happening at work, because our feelings shape our perceptions of what’s in our heads even more than what’s in writing. Depending on whether we’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic, this can lead us not to see real progress, or to overlook important steps that we fail to take.
One key activity to systematic organizing is charting regularly. By “charting” I mean when the organizers on a campaign get together and do a written assessment of our current presence on the job. Start with one sheet of paper. List all the facilities or departments in our campaign. Then list all the IWW members in each facility or department, followed by the names of other people we have contact with, and the total number of people in each place. Next to every name, write down whether or not someone has done a good one on one with them, when this was, and how it went. There will be more to say that doesn’t go on the chart, of course, as people talk about what worked and didn’t work in their one on ones. (This is also a good opportunity to do a roleplay about what the organizer might have said differently, but that’s a subject for another time.)
The process of charting helps us make decisions about who to talk to – the people we haven’t talked to in a long time, the people who are slipping, the people we haven’t talked to at all. That can sound obvious, but charting tells us exactly who those people are. It also helps us identify the gaps in our knowledge. (“I just realized, I don’t know how many custodians work third shift. We should find out.”) Getting that information is a task that someone new to the campaign could take on with the help of a more experienced organizer.
On another sheet of paper, write down the tasks that have come up based on the chart. Write down who is going to do each task, and who is going to check in with everyone to make sure they did their task.
Written charts and task lists should be kept after the meeting, and ideally they should be typed up. The next time the organizers chart, get out the old ones and compare. Get out the task list too, to make sure everyone did their tasks, and to discuss how the tasks went. This helps show progress -- “In the last month we’ve talked to 15 more people, this means we have talked to half the workers by now!” -- which can keep our inspiration going. It also helps show patterns we might not have noticed -- “We’re talking to a lot more of the white workers, and to day shift workers, let’s figure out how to break out of those networks and talk to more people” -- which can in turn help us identify new tasks.
Unless organizing is systematic, it will most likely rely too heavily on the social groups at work that we are most comfortable with. Charting is not the only part of organizing systematically, but it's one key piece of the puzzle.
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