Collective Help, not Self Help
Rest in Peace Jane McAlevey, work update, and new column How To (In) Action?!
Build Actual Power not Pretend Power
We just lost a titan of working class organizing far too early. I’m not here to talk about some personal connection I had to Jane McAlevey,1 just to speak of the profound influence her ideas of broad, deep, class based organizing had on today's seemingly resurgent workers’ movement. Her books, but especially No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, are really manuals for the current generation of organizers. I know every generation seems to get a new crop of starry eyed idealist radicals who get burned out. But at least to me it seems class politics are becoming more broadly popular as the rich squeeze out whatever's left at the bottom of our grandparents’ bygone retirement funds. While unions have been in decline for over three decades, at least in popular consciousness, Americans' general approval for worker organizing is at a new high with 71% approval (over 90% for those under 30).
Though polling results may point to some abstract new appeal for organized labor, consciousness raising was not the type of winning Jane talked about. Jane was for people who saw workers as the front of a class war, and took seriously that workers were sick of losing. All else flowed from that. For organizers, that means helping workers see their collective strength through action instead of acting as professionalized suits that can read whether the tea leaves of capital will give them a raise or take concessions this time around. The labor movement could not stand to relegate itself to back room deals negotiating a less severe surrender, it had to turn things around entirely. Right the ship. Win.
For Jane, winning required a plan. First analyzing the systems of power at play in working people’s lives. Seeing where workers' weaknesses and strengths are2 (we are many, the bosses are few), but also understanding that mapping how power is demonstrated is merely the first step. Organizers need to be in the muck, doing the long and grueling work that is uniting those that the boss has divided to not only agree—but do something about it! Well meaning advocates in the boardrooms of the world step aside, workers are the movers and shakers. Collective help, over self-help.
In 2017 when I was organizing at my fast food job, No Shortcuts was the first reading group for a book I felt was directly applicable to the type of organizing happening at my job, not just analyzing movements of the past. Reading groups for this book had a room full of teachers, retired letter carriers, fast food cooks, and warehouse workers together trying to understand that it’s going to take getting out of that room and into our coworker’s church/summer softball team/D&D group/other subculture to make the big changes we wanted.
Just a month ago, a new worker-organizer from a local grocery chain was lamenting the need for a “structure test” in their campaign to win a first contract. If they are going to build towards the all out strike, they need to start small and see how willing their co-workers are to take action.
I find myself thinking constantly about her ideas around “bounded constituencies” and how important they are for building a meaningful deep organizing campaign. That is a fixed group of workers that are clearly defined under a specific regime (everyone who works in a Smithfield Foods Factory, everyone who makes up a school system, etc.). These groups may have a wide variety of different communities, languages, races, ideologies, and religions outside the workplace, but share certain conditions and specific small to medium scale oppressive forces.3 To make everyone work together across what is often used to divide requires a supreme lack of bullshit/PR. Liberal organizing always has an impulse to rely on the same activists that always show up to pull the weight as “representatives” on an issue. But no matter how much these people’s hearts can be in the right place or how tightly they’ve gathered “facts,” they can’t beat the boss for you. It’s really as simple and as difficult as getting the mass of people within that bounded constituency bought into the idea of their own power.
Jane didn’t spin losses as wins4 and never gave into the liberal impulse to generalize an issue so much that there was no way to quantify if we’ve won or lost. In the class war there are winners and losers. There’s no use in sugar coating it. Jane didn’t live to see total victory. Yet till her last months she stayed writing, giving trainings, and building more labor militants to keep up the fight and turn the ship around. Pick up the arms she left behind, the struggle continues.
New Recurring Column: How To (In) Action?!
Just wanted to give a little update on stuff going on here at the blog. I have started doing some freelance reporting again for local labor newspaper Northwest Labor Press. The newspaper is a valuable source of committed, well-researched, and critical news coverage of the working world in the Pacific Northwest. They publish in print (and online) twice a month to 45,000 union members in Portland and beyond. I’m very excited to be reporting again, covering the worker’s movement, something that I’ve thought deeply about basically my entire adult life, or at least since I changed from my shitty job at Oaks Park to another shitty job at Little Big Burger and we started organizing. I’m actually continuing a legacy of people who have lived in my room in the Burgerville Workers Union Frat/Sorority House (shoutout Firefighter Noah) writing for this publication. Huge thanks to editor Don McIntosh for the opportunity to contribute.
My first two stories are on Grand Central workers ratifying their second contract at the local bakery and reporting on a recent vacancy in the Portland NLRB office with Officer-in-Charge Jessica Dietz out on extended leave. I’ll have more to come in upcoming issues, if you aren’t already subscribed through your union membership you can subscribe here.
So in addition to promoting my factually rigorous reporting and interviewing I’m doing in that newspaper, I wanted to also have some more fun, middle-brow gossip content that will go up exclusively here. All the fun of a “Workers’ Page 6,” but with some analysis on organizing tactics you might feel comfortable sharing with a coworker you’re trying to convince to take action with.
Organizing your workplace is messy. Trying to change the conditions we work in for the better is more like mud sculpting than paint by numbers. We need to talk to as many of our co-workers as possible, hear their stories, share them, which can sound a lot like gossip.5 Oftentimes this leads us to places we don’t anticipate, conversations we are not naturally comfortable having. Then after all that, our goal essentially becomes to create a mess big enough that our bosses cannot clean it up on their own unless they cave to our demands. This new column here will be aimed at newbie organizers, workers who've never taken action before, to even seasoned rank-and-file labor leaders who want shareable gossip stories of fellow workers in action.
Each month How To?! will tell a story of how a real life worker organizer came together with their co-workers to take a direct action on the job. Workers interviewed will go through the nuts-and-bolts of why they chose the action they did, how the planning went, and what results (good and bad) came of it, in hopes that we can demystify some of the process of taking action on the job. In a less eloquent way let’s cut through the legalist bullshit like Jane did. Dispel the idea that all problems need to be solved through the legal system, at the bargaining table, and through grievances processes, heck we don’t always even need union representation to get what we want as workers (though all these things I named CAN certainly help too). We’re in a new moment of labor militancy. From baristas to autoworkers, grad students to fast food workers workers’ around the world are sick of the slide into stagnant wages and corporate consolidation. Taking action can be so scary we don’t know where to even start. So hopefully this can help provide a few editable blueprints of different kinds of actions to take on the job: from walking out, marching on the boss, buttoning up, to singing picket lines. I’ll try and document how it’s been done before by workers just like you!
I unfortunately never met her, only read her books and heard her speak.
But also workers’ weakness, and the boss’ strengths & weaknesses as well, bosses aren’t the only people who can weaponize a SWOT analysis right??
Sure we can take on “capitalism” or “America” but right now we have to fight Stephanie from HR that wants to keep paying you minimum wage.
Though losses still can be lessons.
Gossip for the common good.