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There’s
a familiar refrain in the labor movement: our
members would never do that; they’re just not there.
Most recently, at the Labor For Single Payer digital conference, some
attendees complained that their union leadership assumed the members
were too invested in their negotiated benefits to support Medicare
for All.
The
truth is, rarely are these concerns grounded in actual conversations
with members. I recently spoke with a coalition organizer about how
the straw man of member readiness was hampering debate within their
coalition. I suggested that, before the debate continued, everyone at
the table needed to share the list of members they had spoken to
about the issue and what their members thought about it.
This
should be a common practice in the labor movement. Before making
decisions that will impact our membership, leaders must ask: How many
members did I speak to about the decision at hand? (Seriously, what
are their names?) What did they say? What kind of conversation did I
have with them? Did I take their temperature, or did I have an
organizing conversation where I moved them past their fears and
concerns?
Too
often, leaders magnify the voices of a very small, often
unrepresentative group of members, if they even cite members’
views at all. This reality reflects significant weaknesses in unions
and their organizing practices, and illustrates how shallow and
limited our understanding of democracy is. Ultimately, the failure
among broad swaths of the labor movement to truly engage with members
holds us back from deeper, more transformative wins.
Weaknesses
in Organizing Culture and Practice
The
state of decision-making processes in leadership bodies is in direct
relationship to the organizing structures of the unions in question.
This is a vicious cycle. If decision-making is not rooted in
organizing, members become more and more alienated from the direction
of the organization and the work of building it. That then further
influences leaders’ sense of hopelessness about their members’
willingness to participate in decision-making.
In
other words, when our unions do not have strong organizing practices,
leaders do not have organizing infrastructure to lean on to answer
questions like: how many members support this? How do we know? When
leaders do not use organizing practices to answer these questions,
they miss the opportunity to develop their members’ capacity to
participate and lead, and the union becomes further disorganized and
stagnant.
Jane
McAlevey has discussed at length the labor movement’s shift
away from strong organizing practices. Many more unions once had
robust and deep organizing infrastructure through “one to ten”
structures - that is, a militant ten percent of members who organized
and activated the larger membership through regular one-on-one
organizing conversations. That structure is what enabled many strike
campaigns to succeed and secure the wins we now cling to, like
pension funds, annual wage increases, and better health care. As
business unionism became the dominant ideology within labor during
the 1970s and 1980s, fewer and fewer unions maintained those
structures. In place of deep organizing, many unions have adopted
shallow mobilizing practices, where a small number of familiar
supporters turn out to one-off actions, and advocacy models, where
individuals lobby elected officials on niche legislation that only
affects their members.
There
are a number of reasons for this shift away from deep organizing, but
the result is that many unions now lack basic organizing structures
that facilitate good organizing practices. Leadership bodies are
often small, unrepresentative, and very far apart from their members;
those leaders rarely talk to their fellow members, much less engage
them in campaigns. Many leaders don’t regularly assess their
members. That is, they do not rate their members’ participation
in and support for their actions and campaigns. Therefore, they
cannot gauge the strength of the organization and whether its power
is growing over time. Few engage in structure tests - low-level
actions to assess weak spots and overall support for a campaign
before escalating - that ground those assessments in reality. Many
leaders, if they do talk with their members, view those conversations
as a thermometer, not a thermostat. They simply take their members’
temperature on an issue, rather than actively moving members to
support an issue fight or campaign.
Unions
are not the only membership organizations that suffer from these weak
organizing practices. I was for several years a member of an
immigrant rights organization that claimed to build the leadership of
its members but in fact had no infrastructure for doing so. The
direct actions led by the organization were the result of shallow
mobilizing, like posting about rallies on social media and seeing the
same twenty people turn out week after week for a symbolic action.
There was no concerted effort to track member support and
participation in active campaigns over time, or to engage with and
push past the very valid fear that many immigrant members had about
participating in direct actions that could lead to their arrest. The
result was that the non-immigrant members of the organization had a
much easier time participating in the work, and leadership did little
to bring immigrant members into more active roles or overcome that
fear. The leader of the organization then made decisions based on his
own personal interests in every campaign, and almost never asked
questions like those I offered above: How do my members feel about
this issue? How do I know? What kind of conversations have I had with
them to bring them into a campaign?
It’s
no wonder leaders of unions and other membership organizations make
decisions based on their gut feelings, untested hypotheses, or
knowledge of a limited group of members. If you don’t have an
organizing infrastructure, it’s impossible to make more
informed assessments to guide your decision-making. Rebuilding
organizing infrastructure in our movement is a crucial task for
developing better leadership bodies, which in turn will help develop
our collective understanding of what democratic practices look like -
and enable more transformative wins.
Practicing
Democracy, Not Just Voting
Too
often, we view democracy as the process of voting for an elected
official and then lobbying said elected official to act in our
interests.
But
Marta democracy is also a practice of developing the full potential
of those who participate in it.Harnecker writes at length about this
topic in her book, A
World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-first Century Socialism.
She details the various ways that South American socialist countries
transformed the political process to invite in masses of people in
order to develop their leadership and skills. Harnecker calls this
approach - in which elected leaders cultivate popular participation
in decision-making - “governing by obeying.”
Governing
by obeying does not simply mean leaders take what members say at face
value and act on that information. Leaders should instead act as
organizers in these conversations: first, listen to the issues and
concerns members share, then educate members on what is possible if
we act collectively, and, finally, organize members into
participating in an active struggle by asking them to do a concrete
task. In other words, participatory democracy means we must push past
simply polling our members about how they feel about a given issue
without taking the time to educate them or organize them past their
fears.
When
I was the chair of a nonprofit union, I would ask my coworkers, “What
do you think we should fight for in our contract negotiations?”
One responded, “I’m afraid I’ll lose my job because
my boss never seems to think I can do anything right, but a contract
won’t change that.” If I had left the conversation there,
this member wouldn’t have known how her fellow union members
could support her in changing her situation by fighting for just
cause protections. Even once she understood just cause, her fear
still kept her from weighing in on the process. It took a series of
conversations with someone she trusted for this member to move past
those fears and get more involved in negotiations.
True
democracy requires that we have structures in place that can educate
members on what is possible and
build the strong relationships that move members past their fears.
Once
we make this a regular practice, something beautiful happens: we
start to see so much more possibility in our membership and in the
fights we can take on. Strong organizing practices enable us to
regularly witness the people around us in the process of
transformation. As our members move past their fears and change their
minds, we see our ranks, our power, and what we can achieve begin to
grow. We realize that change is possible and that our members can and
will fight for the things that matter once they are organized. This
is why elected leaders must see their roles through an organizing
framework: without organizing, we leave so much possibility untapped.
Bigger
and More Transformative Wins
Why
build this organizing infrastructure and take such an intensive
approach to organizational democracy? This path is certainly much
more work than the alternative. But with stronger organizing
structures and practices in place, a whole new world of possibilities
opens up to us, with more power to achieve much more exciting wins.
Our
power in the workplace comes from our ability to take collective
action, which only works when done en masse. Members will participate
in actions if those actions target issues they care about, and if
they have been asked to participate through a one-on-one organizing
conversation that moves them past their fear and builds their
connection to their fellow coworkers. Once we have mastered the
basics of good organizing practices - one-to-ten organizing
structures, escalating campaigns, and regular assessments and
structure tests - our ability to threaten and use our power is much
more real. We can then demand what we really want rather than
settling for disappointing compromises and concessions. But without
organizing structures in place, we will (often correctly) assume that
our members “aren’t there yet,” and we will follow
a weak agenda rather than pushing an increasingly ambitious one.
Deep
organizing that facilitates true democratic participation is still a
practice in some unions. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and United
Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) spent years doing deep
leadership development and base building
in the leadup to their respective strikes. Both unions rebuilt their
organizing structures and invested in engaging members, putting the
unions in the position to make dramatically bolder demands. Those
demands are now heralded as some of the most ambitious and
agenda-setting wins in the labor movement, from dramatically improved
staffing in every school to improved resources to combat student
homelessness. The unions’ ability to win these demands was
directly related to the strength of their organizing practices. In
turn, those practices produced deeper democratic practices. At the
end of CTU’s 2012 fight, after the union’s bargaining
committee had reached a deal, the members chose to stay out on strike
an additional day so that every member could read the full Collective
Bargaining Agreement before voting on its ratification. Members were
so invested in the process that they took the time to ensure that
teachers had an informed, deliberate say in the outcome of the
strike.
The
refrain that “members won’t fight for that” is, in
some ways, true. Without organizing structures to move them, they’re
right we won’t win Medicare for All, we won’t save our
planet, and we won’t have the power to create a society that
works for people and not profit. If we want to win big, we will need
to take collective risks. To do that, we need to build structures
that strengthen our relationships with one another, educate each
other on what is possible when we organize, and develop the
leadership of many more people through escalating campaigns. Imagine
what could be possible for our unions and the world once these
practices are the norm - doing so gives me the hope and energy to
work towards that future.
This
commentary was originally published by The
Forge
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