Why Organizing?
I’ve spoken and heard so much about “organizing” recently that I’ve come to realize the term itself really means different things to different people. I sometime catch myself getting caught up in the corporate-speak sound bites we have all been forced to use at times, so I’d like to clarify what is different about my view of organizing.
During my first couple years as President of Local 6 I made a careful study of as many organizing campaigns as I could find. I wanted to understand why some succeeded and why some failed. Because I was trying to explore as many different situations as possible, I expected to find a diverse range of activities that were successful and an equally diverse range of activities that were either ineffective or, in some cases, harmful to the campaign.
What I learned was that, while each situation had its own complex idiosyncrasies, the successful activities were remarkably similar. For the most part, a campaign works because it can disrupt the employer (or industry) in a significant way. And that disruption will always involve workers taking a big risk. The bigger the hurdle, the bigger the risk. Moving workers to a place where they understand their power comes from taking that risk together with their colleagues is the essence of organizing.
Labor history is replete with examples of people risking everything for their right to have a meaningful voice in their working life. It’s remarkable to stop and consider what it takes for a regular working person to be willing to face armed opposition. It certainly doesn’t happen when we are bound by fear into inaction or placated into complacency by success. Historically, it most often happens when people feel connected to their own sense of power. It’s a risk, yes, but it’s one they have the power to win.
But what does it take for a person to go from fear to powerful action? What makes a person willing to take a big risk for the hope of something better?
Well, as it turns out, that is a very well-studied topic. The people we listen to are the ones closest to us. We will not easily decide to risk something important based on a social media campaign or well-designed branding. But we will, and often do, take risks based on our closest relationships. If we want to take organizing seriously as a union activity, we need to understand that it isn’t the voices of our officers or organizers that are going to make the difference. It is always going to be the voices of those closest to the worker that are going to hold sway. To organize is to strategize a way for the message of a worker’s power to reach their trusted inner circle.
And history shows us that the elements of change required to make that happen are the same. In fact, this understanding has been codified into a conversational model meant to include all the necessary elements of change. We often refer to it as the “one-on-one.” Effective one-on-one conversations are not about convincing someone as much as they are about going through a person’s individual journey with them. Usually this means the organizer is putting aside their own thoughts and beliefs to participate fully in the worker’s.
This is, in large part, why I have become wary of campaigns that make most of the decisions before even speaking with most of the workers. A lot of issue based campaigns begin this way. From what I’ve seen, to later convert workers into livelihood-riskers is almost impossible given the psychological distance workers are asked to travel in what is often the last few days or weeks before a work action. And when you begin in a place of fear and protectiveness, it takes much longer to reach that point – sometimes years. We simply never reach that critical mass without a dedication to fostering the one-on-one conversation. In some ways I think it is like trying to write a novel at the third or fourth stop of a huge game of telephone.
It takes training to understand the salient points and practice to internalize it. But it also takes time for the workers themselves to reach a place of activity. That’s why organizing campaigns that are successful can take so long. That’s also why, over and over, campaigns that dedicate themselves to communications, messaging platforms, and public events but don’t spend enough time teaching their people how to teach other people to teach other people how to have an effective one-on-one almost always fail. In fact, I have yet to find a campaign that has ignored this step and been successful. By contrast, I also know of only a few campaigns that did a great job with one-on-one support that weren’t.
One could almost make the case that this single issue itself is the make or break element of a successful organizing campaign. And this is, I think, probably what separates my view on this topic from the current prevalent view in our union. Organizing means listening to musicians and helping them plan and execute their own path to power. It doesn’t mean being the power for them. On the contrary, it more often takes a conscious limiting of our voice as officers and organizers in order to create the space where musician-workers can take ownership of their own lives. We need to spend far less time coming up with solutions and far more time supporting workers’ solutions.
This is how our guidance and expertise can become a resource to a workers’ campaign. It’s only when the worker or body of workers is making a choice for themselves that they will really be able to hear our input about our experiences.
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