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For example: A group of workers has identified “Sally” as the most influential rank-and-file person on their shift and in their work area. The organizer has successfully gotten Sally, in a one-on-one conversation, to explain that she is overwhelmed and frustrated by how much her employer automatically takes from her paycheck each month to pick up the cost of an expensive family health-care plan. But she still hesitates when asked if she is willing to “join up with her coworkers to form a union by signing this membership card.” Sally knows that signing the card is a big decision. In the United States, employers routinely fire workers for taking such actions, or punish them in other ways. A good organizer understands this, and at this point will say something like, “So, Sally, I want to be clear about what I am hearing. You are good with the boss continuing to charge you $440.00 per month, deducted from your paycheck, just to keep your kids healthy and you healthy enough to show up for work, for the rest of your life?”
The best organizers in the CIO tradition call the moment that follows “the long uncomfortable silence,” because the organizer is trained to say nothing until the worker responds—and that can take several long minutes of dead silence between two people sitting face-to-face. The organizer respects that silence and waits it out, because the decision Sally is being asked to make is huge, and must be treated that way. Sally is not being lied to, she is not being promised anything, she is not being manipulated, and she is being advised that the employer will take swift and direct action against her and her coworkers. She is having a discussion about going on strike. This is worker agency. An axiom of organizers is that every good organizing conversation makes everyone at least a little uncomfortable. And it’s a conversation that must be had. All other actions come from this one.
damn
The two movement-imposed costs are what he calls the concession cost, that is, how much it will cost a business to agree to the movement’s demands, measured against the disruption cost, or the ability of the movement to create highly effective actions against the target.
Luders’s concession and disruption costs are central to my overall analysis about power. I build on Luders’s thesis, situated in the social movement theory literature, by unpacking it and showing that it can function as a tool for power analysis in workplace and nonworkplace settings. It makes sense that he drew on labor literature to arrive at his framework, because the same framework is routine in successful, high-stakes union negotiations. When I was a labor negotiator, we called Luders’s concession costs the cost of settlement. And what he calls disruption costs we called the ability to create a crisis for the employer.62 The two are always seen in relation to each other. I am using Luders’s “concession costs” as a broader “power required” variable in this book’s discussion of relative success (and relative defeat) in the new millennium. Success in any fight or any contestation waged by movement activists across sectors absolutely requires making an accurate assessment of Luders’s concession costs before the fight begins. Movement actors can and must reasonably predict the concession costs in advance; otherwise, they enter the fight without knowing which strategies to deploy. As Luders says, different economic actors are unequally vulnerable and concession costs are not static—they are variable and contingent on the ability of actors to force disruption costs.
On the other hand, janitors, for example, are low-wage workers and represent a tiny fraction of the overhead of the corporations whose buildings they clean. If the demand on the part of the union is also low, a mobilizing model with only a minority of workers and a handful of not very powerful community allies can “win.” This is a typical Justice for Janitors campaign model, and too few people understand that it can’t simply be exported to other sectors, especially not to higher-wage sectors where wage and benefit costs alone are literally 60 to 70 percent of the employer’s overall expenses, for example teachers with public pensions or nursing home workers with classic defined-benefit pensions. In the mobilizing approach used in the far lower-cost Justice for Janitors model, essentially all the employer needs is the union’s guarantee that it will negotiate a “trigger agreement,” meaning that the small wage increase for the workers—fifty cents or one dollar per hour—won’t take effect until the union succeeds at getting all cleaning contractors in the area to agree to the same terms. Such a settlement is very inexpensive to the corporation, taken as a ratio of cost to overall expenses (concession costs). It’s considerably easier to shift even a conservative, anti-union corporate owner to the practical business decision to settle these low-cost workers’ demands. I argue that little real power is built by this version of mobilizing. Although the union expands its membership and some janitors get a raise, it is not a life-altering change, and the process develops few real worker leaders, or none. Equally significant, such a fight rarely develops new organic community leaders—those involved are generally already involved, already pro-union priests and pro-union self-selecting activist types. They have not been recruited or trained systematically, and, so, this approach is not an organizing approach in the community, it is a mobilizing approach in and outside the workplace and isn’t expanding the worker army.
The list below represents the key postulates taken from the characteristic 1199 organizing “manual”—a handwritten, dated, single sheet of paper that hangs on the door or is pinned on the bulletin board of most 1199 organizers’ offices. It is often covered with coffee stains and marking-pen notes and is called, simply, “Advice for Rookie Organizers.”
- Get close to the workers, stay close to the workers.
- Tell workers it’s their union and then behave that way.
- Don’t do for workers what they can do.
- The union is not a fee for service; it is the collective experience of workers in struggle.
- The union’s function is to assist workers in making a positive change in their lives.
- Workers are made of clay, not glass.
- Don’t be afraid to ask workers to build their own union.
- Don’t be afraid to confront them when they don’t.
- Don’t spend your time organizing workers who are already organizing themselves, go to the biggest worst.
- The working class builds cells for its own defense, identify them and recruit their leaders.
- Anger is there before you are—channel it, don’t defuse it.
- Channeled anger builds a fighting organization.
- Workers know the risks, don’t lie to them.
- Every worker is showtime—communicate energy, excitement, urgency and confidence.
- There is enough oppression in workers’ lives not to be oppressed by organizers.
- Organizers talk too much. Most of what you say is forgotten.
- Communicate to workers that there is no salvation beyond their own power.
- Workers united can beat the boss. You have to believe that and so do they.
- Don’t underestimate the workers.
- We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.
Organizers went from school to school attending as many school meetings as they could and blowing the debate about strategy wide open. Luskin recalls that they’d start by saying, “If any of you think the next contract is about a percentage-point raise, tell us, because we think we know it’s about the future of public education as we know it: that’s what’s on the table.”48 If the labor movement’s instinct has been to reduce demands in order to sound reasonable, the new CTU took the opposite approach: They led every meeting with school-based discussions of billionaires, banks, and racism. (Note to other teachers’ unions: they got reelected.) Mass political education of the existing base was their primary focus. Along with all of CTU’s leaders, they were creating a sense of urgency, a burning platform, and framing the choice ahead in very clear and unambiguous language. They were being as mindful with semantics as 1199NE.
<3
The union in those years could gently be characterized as inept. Its leadership seemed to have missed Reagan’s election and big business’s clarion call to wipe unions out of the private sector through union busting, trade deals, automation, and plant relocation to nonunion states. Joseph Luter III, the third-generation family CEO at Smithfield, met with a senior official of the UFCW shortly after the NLRB ruling and made a personal promise in writing not to break the law as union and company headed into the second round.
lol. pano inspo maybe
In campaigns to help workers form new unions where none exist, the full-time staff of the union determines how union resources will be used, as there is not yet a local union run by rank-and-file workers. The staff at this stage, therefore, plays an outsize role in encouraging or discouraging worker activism, participation, levels of militancy, and more, in addition to setting the framework for what a union will mean to workers who have never had one. In North Carolina, the state with the lowest union density in the United States, just 3 percent, no workers interviewed for this investigation had had any prior involvement in—or in many cases, even any knowledge of—such a thing as a union. Under such circumstances, how the staff talks about the union, literally the semantics used, in addition to key decisions made, will condition the future and set the terms for what kind of union will be created by the workers. In Chapter Three, I discussed how and why union organizers pay very close attention to semantics. In the case of the Smithfield fight, set in a rural region of a state where few unions have ever existed, workers really were literally learning about unions for the first time, so every word of these conversations mattered.
luke realises this
Once you have been organizing for enough years, and seen enough efforts succeed and fail, you realize that there are “movement moments.” These happen when large numbers of people are willing to drop what they are doing, forget that the utility bill won’t be paid on time or that they will miss their favorite TV shows or their daughter’s soccer games or their gym session or whatever, forget about how many hours of sleep they think they need every night, and go do some stuff they would never have imagined they could, like facing down cops or bosses or Aryan Republicans carrying The Christian Militant’s Bible, or talking to TV cameras, or approaching total strangers about their concerns, or rounding up their neighbors to go to an event with something real at stake instead of the weekly bridge game. People get in this unusual state either because they are truly pissed off and there is no other option, or because for some reason the horizon of what they think they are capable of achieving suddenly expands—or, most likely, a combination of both.
Raising Expectations. Who in the world would give such a name to a book? An organizer, that’s who. At its core, this is a book about organizing. And organizing, at its core, is about raising expectations: about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their union. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.
Of course, there is much more to organizing, but everything else flows from raising expectations. In the normal course of human events, workers don’t expect much from their jobs, government, or unions, because the reality is they don’t get much. The job of the organizer is to fundamentally change this.
Whole-worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives, one beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another when they punch out at the end of their shift. The pressing concerns that bear down on them every day are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which is of concern to unions. At the end of each shift workers go home, through streets that are sometimes violent, past their kids’ crumbling schools, to their often substandard housing, where the tap water is likely unsafe.
Whole-worker organizing seeks to engage “whole workers” in the betterment of their lives. To keep them consistently acting in their self interest, while constantly expanding their vision of who that self interest includes, from their immediate peers in their unit, to their shift, their workplace, their street, their kids’ school, their community, their watershed, their nation and their world.