How To: March on the Boss
ft. Norah Rivera of New Season Labor Union!
When it comes to workplace actions, the march on the boss is a staple grain. Sure there are more flashy and more flavorful actions1 that you will see covered in the media as huge events. However, any big saucy strike you see drizzled on top of a hearty escalation campaign, is typically resting on a bed of march on the boss beneath it.
In simplest terms, a “march on the boss” is a very short work stoppage, where workers organizing around a specific issue (big or small), stop what they are doing and collectively confront a decision maker (manager, foreman, HR, lawyer, landlord, etc.) with a demand around that issue. Sometimes it will feature a letter, petition, or first person testimonials about how the issue affects their lives. Other times it's more spontaneous, i.e. workers stopping work with unsafe equipment and going in to yell at their boss to fix it. At its core, two parts need to happen: 1. Work stops temporarily so that a problem can be addressed in the time and place workers choose 2. Workers are confronting their boss in a group setting (more than one person).
Taking action can be scary, it seems even more daunting when we imagine the only thing we can do to tackle an issue is either go on strike, take on the big risk this implies (i.e. not getting paid), or do nothing. In a training that I helped2 lead in Portland called ‘Job Action Training’3 we shared this short video featuring SEIU members at Northwestern Hospital confronting their boss by delivering him a pie. In it workers say “we don’t just want a small slice, we want the whole pie.” We wrote some of what we go over in the training in this little pamphlet on the first steps to organizing an escalation campaign during times of crisis.
Depending on the issue, and power that workers are able to demonstrate, different actions can yield different results. It’s important to not to romanticize any one action or view them solely in a vacuum, but rather as steps in a plan to beat the boss. Even if one action doesn’t win the day, and sometimes even if it seemingly does, actions can build the confidence and resolve needed to take on the bigger, more daunting tasks ahead. Oftentimes the march on the boss is the first public step workers take.
New Seasons Seven Corners
Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of organizing a march on the boss with a real world example. I talked with Norah Rivera, a shop floor union leader and produce department worker at New Seasons Seven Corners, about a march on the boss she did with her co-workers earlier this year. New Season Labor Union (NSLU) has been bargaining with the multinational grocery conglomerate E-Mart, that owns the “neighborhood market,” for the past 20 months. This march on the boss later led to a short ULP strike over the unilateral changes to working conditions at Norah’s store, as well as the state of management not moving a lick in bargaining. Currently, workers in NSLU voted overwhelmingly for a one-day strike the day before Labor Day (Sunday September 1) at ten of the eleven union-represented stores. With management still not moving at the bargaining table, and workers getting progressively more fed up, a wider industrial action at New Seasons feels inevitable unless something dramatically changes.
In Fall of 2022, Seven Corners became the first New Seasons Market location to vote to certify their union and had long had a store culture centered on worker power. Over time though, union participation in the union had started to stagnate. Rivera talked about how a new (hated) boss breathed new life into a struggling organizing committee to fight back against wack changes.
“He seemed to be brought in to be tougher on a ‘difficult store,’” Rivera said. “Employees, including management, took advantage of some benefits like getting free coffee before shifts, access to deli (and prepared foods) after they’d been pulled, cards and flowers after big life events, and other things that really added up.”
New management arrived in January 2024, by March workers already had enough and started organizing. The Seven Corners store holds two monthly union meetings, one for morning shift workers and one for evening shift workers, after the new general manager came through workers immediately got together to commiserate over the shift in culture. After rounds of complaints amassed, a couple workers started working on group letter to address the spectrum of changes they’d brought in.
“Someone from the meeting started writing a letter then asked the group for feedback in our [Seven Corners] group chat,” Rivera said. “Everyone in the chat had a chance to mess with the wording before we decided on a final letter that we could present to the rest of our co-workers and finally read aloud to management.
Social mapping & One on one conversations
But workers can walk and chew gum at the same time. While working on fine tuning the letter, workers who attended the meetings were making the rounds and talking to those who didn’t about the issues one on one. A core group of workers put together a map4 of the other workers at the store, organized by department, shift, and how likely they are to participate in an action (from will participate, on the fence, to won’t participate at all).
“We needed to create a visual way to track who and how many of our co-workers are on board for an action. It has looked different for us at different times. This time it started with just a list of people in a Google Doc, then evolved into a [color coded] spreadsheet. When our contract action team was putting together an action of getting everyone to wear [union] buttons5 it looked different. We made physical charts with stickers next to the names of people who were wearing buttons on shift, and we even drew out a physical map of the store, separating the departments. Then we talked through which departments were close to others and could easily communicate with each other [on shift], which people float around multiple departments on a given day, etc.” Rivera said.
Rivera highlighted how mapping is both an activity that takes different shapes based on the organizing task at hand, and something that constantly needs to be done and redone. It makes sense. Workplaces have turnover, relationships change, job titles shift, people who once couldn’t stand each other become friends,6 someone supports one action but has hang ups about something else. Our social lives are dynamic, so our mapping practices should reflect that.
After mapping the workplace, the Seven Corners workers continued talking to everyone at the store about the letter and ‘march on the boss’ plan in order of who they thought would be most supportive, to least supportive. Rivera and her fellow worker-organizers ran into those on the fence, and tried to have a deeper conversation about addressing their fears.
“I think more often people were unsure, not flat our no’s,” Rivera said. “It’s really important to acknowledge that our co-workers have real fears of repercussions. But we can point to past actions that we’ve done where nobody was singled out [by the boss]. We can talk about other stores that have [taken actions] without repercussions, and we also mention that these are federally protected activities.7 Give real concrete examples of how this has been done before. But, also understand that not everyone is going to participate in every action.”
Go over roles & Just do the thing
Before the actual day of the action, workers went over a run-of-show in their signal group chat. They decided on a location within the store (start in the deli seating area, then march through the store to the manager’s office), a date and time (shift change, where the most supportive workers would already be on shift to maximize participation), and who would physically bring, read, and hand over the letter.
At noon, Rivera clocked off her shift and went around reminding co-workers still working about the action, while other workers taking lead on the action did the same. Pretty soon they rallied a sizable group to walk through the store, and as they marched others on shift that they’d talked to joined in as the crowd passed by.
“A lot of other co-workers saw this group of people and decided that this is a big enough thing that I can sort of be hidden in the crowd and be part of it,” Rivera said. “It was really a moment of camaraderie between us, we felt powerful, having 32 or 33 people crammed into this little manager's corral to read a letter to him.”
Workers made it upstairs and ran into a tiny logistical problem. The manager wasn’t in his office. But they didn’t let that deter them. When you’ve got yourself a mob, you make sure you’re addressed.
“We found an assistant manager who paged for the GM to come upstairs,” Rivera said. “She seemed terrified. He took a little while, but once he got upstairs there’s just this mob of people waiting for him. Someone told him we have something we need to discuss, and then another person read our letter. From there we returned to work. Nobody’s pay got docked for being there, it felt great.”
In the wake of the action, New Seasons Labor Relations agreed to a meeting to address the workers issues. Management then met with a store committee and union representatives, went through each issue one by one, and ended by agreeing to a follow up meeting which was subsequently canceled at the last minute by New Seasons Management. I wrote about the follow up Unfair Labor Practices, ULP-Strike, and bargaining escalations elsewhere, but it really highlights how this action really became an early step in a campaign of escalation.
It may seem obvious, but no one action is going to bring down capitalism8 and sometimes it won’t even win you exactly what you asked for, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful or necessary. It’s important to analyze what went well or could have gone better, but also contextualize an action in relation to our organization’s wider goals were working towards.
“One thing I wish we did better was having a plan immediately after on how we were going to continue the momentum and pressure,” Rivera said, as between the follow up meetings and strike there was a over three month gap in time. “Things fell off for a little bit, but once the company dropped the agreement to bargain it reinvigorated everything again. For people who participated [in the actions], most were feeling powerful and good. But, even for those that didn’t, I had a lot of them come up to me and say how they wished they would have. It made it so people were ready for the next thing.”
Donate to the New Seasons Labor Union Strike Fund here.
Some stuff I’ve written the past month
Last summer strippers unionized with Actors’ Equity at Magic Tavern in Portland, but owner Ben Donohue has ignored every NLRB order to bargain with workers. Now the US 9th Circuit Court might find him in contempt if he doesn't shape up (link)
“We are NOT asking you to work for free,” said Growing Seeds North manager that was asking ILWU Local 5 preschool teachers to continue working without paying them (link to article; link to gofundme for out of work teachers)
Union voted down at Oaks Amusement Park after openly union workers were not hired back for the summer (link)
Will New Season workers get a union contract? 19 months into bargaining, something's gotta give! (link)
What happens when your friend is having a midlife crisis on your relaxing summer vacation? Gossip, that’s what (link)
Strikes, picket lines, work to rule, etc.
To a much smaller extent than Luis and Fiona.
Reach out to burgervilleworkersunion@gmail.com if you’re interested in the full training.
Often called a “social map” by organizers, or a way of tracking how people interact at the workplace, what the social groups are, and what sort of dynamics are at play that will help or hurt us organizers when trying to get the word out about issues or an action.
Also known as a Button Up.
Or vice versa *side eyes emoji*
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, or “Section 7 Rights,” guarantee employees "the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining.” Let’s say, charitably, the NLRB that oversees this act, doesn’t exactly act fast to enforce things.
Sometimes the real escalation campaign is the friends you make along the way.