The Organizer and the Disorganized Resistance
Last year, my workplace instituted a number of changes to our time off policies. While a couple of these changes were good, most ranged from annoying to very bad. We lost most of our ability to take paid sick time (down to the legally mandated 5 days) and were informed that any vacation time we had at the end of the year would be lost without being paid out (previously it would roll over). While the company tried to spin the changes, most people recognized what was happening: things were getting worse.
Anticipating this, our bosses had human resources put on two virtual presentations to explain the changes for any of us who might be confused. Neither had time for questions, suggesting that HR understood exactly what was happening. The first presentation, however, had dozens of workers expressing displeasure through the chat feature. One worker said, “now we know why there is no time for questions,” and another even said, “we should keep making a fuss.” In the second presentation (which had the same content), HR disabled the chat. The changes continued to be a topic of discussion throughout unit meetings and among co-workers, and slowly management began rolling back some changes. First, they announced that workers who lost a vacation day due to the new method for calculating days would get a bonus vacation day the following year (meaning there would be no net loss for anyone), then it was announced that up to one day of vacation could be paid out if not taken, then finally that any unused vacation time would be paid out at the end of the year.
Throughout this time, I had begun talking with my co-workers about the changes, as any good Wobbly would, and a few of us had started a small organizing committee. This makes it tempting to count the changes our bosses rolled out as wins. Are they, though? After all, most of the people complaining hadn’t spoken to a committee member before doing so.
Before we answer that question, I want to contrast this with another worker in a similar situation in a similar workplace. Their summary follows:
A few years ago, my employer changed the supplier for the prescription drug insurance benefit offered to salaried employees located in the United States. As a result of this change, employees were abruptly forced to transfer their prescriptions from their pharmacy of choice to either Walgreens or a mail order service, and they were restricted to filling long-term maintenance prescriptions in 90-day quantities. This was communicated poorly, with vague language emphasizing that the change was giving employees the power to choose (between picking prescriptions up from Walgreens in-person and having prescriptions delivered by mail) and suggesting that employees could save money by transferring their prescriptions to Walgreens (rather than clearly and explicitly stating outside of fine print that employees would not be able to get prescriptions covered at other pharmacies). In addition to these changes, the list of covered medications changed, resulting in a number of employees losing coverage for expensive prescriptions. Overall, the impression was very much that the prescription insurance benefit became substantially worse.
Employees who had been negatively impacted by the change in benefit provider began to discuss their experiences with each other through a variety of internal channels of communication. As one of those employees, I was involved in a number of these discussions, but they were only that—discussions among employees with no clear plan for action. At around the same time, I was also getting involved in a very small organizing campaign, and I wanted to do something about the change in benefits, but I knew that we did not have nearly the numbers that would be needed to publicly take direct action as a union. Instead, I worked with some contacts from a corporate employee group to collect emotionally impactful stories about the negative consequences of the change and feed them to a sympathetic employee in HR. Eventually, the company worked with the new prescription benefit provider to allow employees to once again utilize a pharmacy of their choice. This was a win, but it was a small one, and while I believe that we collectively influenced the company’s decision to make a change, it wasn’t something for which our campaign could take credit. I wasn’t able to talk openly with everyone involved about organizing, which was unfortunate. Still, given the size of our campaign, I think that avoiding public action was the correct choice.
While our win was small, I have been able to use some of the conversations sparked by this issue as springboards to bigger conversations around organizing. I have since had one-on-one conversations with a couple of fellow workers who were impacted by this issue, and one has joined our campaign. For me, the whole experience shows that there is value in taking even small actions, that even a small number of workers can make a difference through direct action, and that paying attention to the concerns of fellow workers pays off.
First of all, we should note that a union is multiple workers acting together to make changes in the workplace. However, a union that seeks to endure as an organization cannot be a group of workers that takes collective action once. From this perspective, while what we did was union activity, it reflected a response to existing discontent rather than stemming from our organizing. Looking at my fellow worker’s actions in their campaign, I want to draw a few contrasts and lessons.
First, by collecting stories and identifying a channel by which HR could be pressured, the organizer was able to increase the pressure on management to fix the problem. This shows how knowledge of how to formulate and conduct good direct action can be applied even if other workers aren’t familiar with what you’re trying to do. Second, by using the experience in further organizing conversations, organizers can easily demonstrate to our co-workers how even loosely coordinated action can have some effect. Identifying imperfect examples of collective action in our workplace can be more impactful to our co-workers than more perfect examples from elsewhere (although I think both types of stories have value).
Some organizers, in encouraging greater militancy, have said that “union is a verb.” This is true, but union is also a noun. The union is workers acting together, but it is also the organization that exists between actions. To the extent that workers engage in union action without a union organization, we should expect to see things we wouldn’t recommend, such as individuals singling themselves out or communicating their displeasure or even desire to organize in public. We should encourage organizing best practices when we can safely and covertly do so, and we should also use the action to try to build the union as an organization. For example, in identifying the right target for the action (such as a specific person in HR) and suggesting delivering the demand in a way that maximizes emotional pressure in a short period of time, we can make demands more likely to be met. By later reminding other workers of the action and emphasizing its collective nature, we can help workers see the power of collective action. After all, if one mostly unplanned, loosely collective action gets some changes, it’s no great leap to realize that planning more collective actions is a way to get more changes.
-Daniel Bovard-Katz and Margaret Ignatowski
Originally published on Industrial Worker.