I work for a small-ish company of laborers. We have ~100 full-time employees who work in labour, a small team of administrative employees, and very few managers all things considered. The reasons for this are part of the reason I need to be vague in public talking about this, because the details make the company very identifiable to anyone who knows anything about the industry.
Some previous employees tried and failed to unionize over a decade ago, but the vote was very close. Since then, wages have stagnated to a degree that make me laugh and cry, we are being pushed to work more and more overtime, and in general morale is very low. I am in contact with a small group of very well-connected employees who are 100% on board with unionizing, and I believe that we can successfully get the required signatures this time if we play our cards right.
- How does one go about choosing a union to work with? I have done some Googling but the results are useless. I need some kind of leftist search engine, please! I know of the major Canadian unions like Unifor and Teamsters, as well as the IWW, and then the very specific ones like the postal union or the teachers’ union.
- Does the IWW even do workplace organizing? I was under the impression that it was more of a thing you joined solo.
- Are any of the bigger unions in Canada actually useful? We need a hard wage correction upfront and then guaranteed cost of living increases after that, and I don’t want to do all this work to have some centrist ‘union’ let us down in negotiations.
- Do you know of any trade-specific unions for things in the realm of carpentry and space finishing? (Again sorry for being vague in public about industry) I know that my industry is largely unionized in the US, but here it rarely is. I have not found any info from my Google searches as to which unions those other companies work with.
- If we can’t find anything that’s a good fit, is it advisable to start an industry-specific union for us and others? Is that doomed to fail?
- I’ve found a few different groups that say “contact us if you want to organize your workplace” but basically
- Most of them seem US-centric and we are in Canada
- I worry that they’re ops lol
- Not sure if this is the IWW’s wheelhouse or not. I don’t want to take help from them and then form a union under Teamsters or something, kind of feels like wasting their resources idk maybe this is fine??
- So uhhhh please recommend a good group to talk to about this in Canada! Or I mean a US group is fine so long as they have the knowledge about local rules and can help us.
- There is some complex stuff to explain about the company structure that make it hard to know how many people we’d have to get to sign cards and I would really appreciate someone knowledgeable messaging me privately so I can explain a bit, or point me to a good group where I can ask this question
Gosh sorry I am rather at a loss of where to start here so I’m someone could just give me a stick and point me in the right direction I would be exceptionally pleased, thank you!!
Edit: as a bonus I may have slam-dunk proof of wage theft by the company not paying certain employees overtime, would be great if we could also get some resources on how to retaliate for that in as big of a blow as possible. ✌️
Yes! Your local IWW’s website or the GHQ website (iww.org) should have workplace organizing intake forms. I will say that GHQ is swamped right now, so it might take some time (weeks, even) to get a response.
I’m in
, so I’m unfamiliar with Canadian laws. However, IWW organizing generally works to involve the legal system as little as possible, as the bureaucracy takes years to do anything and, when they do, it’s too little too late (at least the US NLRB). I wouldn’t put much hope in getting anything accomplished through the legal system. However, I’ll try to give a quick primer on IWW style organizing:
First, IWW has External Organizers (EO’s), but they’re there to coach you through organizing your own campaign rather than to do the legwork for you. This is partially because they’re all unpaid dues-paying volunteers, but also because you’re much more invested in the outcome than any EO could ever be.
So, how do you get started? First, you are going to want to get/make a list of all of the people at your company and their personal contact info. This is useful if the boss fires everyone, but also you don’t want to use company resources to organize because the boss will find out. This can be a daunting task, especially at a big company, so you will want to make an organizing buddy ASAP.
The overall strategy is to build your committee and spread the load out to everyone. You have to share the burden equally to prevent burnout, make your union more resilient, and to create buy-in among the members so they’re more committed.
So, how do you do it? You have to talk with your coworkers, one-on-one, about work, outside of the workplace. You should concentrate on two types of coworkers: social leaders and easy wins, in that order. Social leaders are the informal leaders among your coworkers. Like, if you fuck up and break something, who do you go to to fix it before management finds out? They’re the most important coworkers to get on your side, because they will have an easier time converting people to the cause and they will be the hardest opposition if you don’t get them on your side.
Throughout this whole process, you should avoid saying the ‘U’ word (“Union”) as much as possible. If, during a one-on one, your coworker perks up and says something like “Hell yeah, lets unionize!” then that’s fine, but if someone reacts negatively, like “wait are you talking about unionizing?” you can reply with something like “Hey, I don’t know about unions, I’m just talking about us getting what we deserve.”
Also, don’t count on voting your way into a union. You should focus on direct action, starting at the lowest level, because you can escalate up from what business unions call “an IWW style march on the boss,” but you can’t escalate up from a strike.
I don’t want to type out a whole organizing manual, as those already exist and you’ll get better results with a dedicated EO, as I’m in a different country and working on campaigns here already, but I’d be happy to answer any questions and clarify anything for you while you decide on a path to take or wait on an EO (from whichever union you decide on) to help.
Luckily, thanks to a new law, any union vote over 55% in favour doesn’t require certification anymore! 45-55% does. So obviously we’d be aiming for 55%+ if we could.
Getting an employee list is easy, I have full access to that. Phone numbers I can get for all the lead hands very easily. Beyond that some networking may be required. But my co-conspirators will have several and we can work from there. This part I was already aware of.
I don’t think this will work in my kind of workplace, as none of the workers are ever anywhere near the bosses. Ever. They rarely even go to the location where the bosses are. Getting people to that place is hard enough even when the company incentivizes it with free food. :/
Basically we are all dispatched to different locations every day. You might work a week on the same jobsite, but then you’re off somewhere else. Getting people to commit to going to the office to talk to the boss is hard because 1) your jobsite might be super far away, and 2) the bosses are only at the office during the hours you’re supposed to be working. And when you’re working paycheque to paycheque, it’s hard to agree to skipping a few hours of paid work (even if it would get you a raise or something.) Additionally we do have an elected employee council (consolation prize after the failed union attempt) that we use to pressure management, but nothing ever comes from it. It’s a joke. I don’t think we have any leverage without having some kind of legal way to represent all of us without people having to come down and do the work themselves.
I think it will be easy to get most of the workers to sign onto the idea that some of their trusted coworkers (who they already elected to the council, in some cases) are going to try to negotiate a raise for everyone on their behalf, you know?
60% maybe 70%
And who are the remainders? Hard line anti union or just don’t care? It makes a difference. You will need to know. Will the run a decert campaign? They will end up being in the Bargaining Unit. Will they obstruct the democratic process of the union?
Do you actually have the list? Or do you just think you could get it any moment? Get it now. The very first thing your employer will do when they hear about this could be pull the contact list.
Create and populate a spreadsheet. Verify for changes on a regular basis.
As the saying goes:
I 100% have the employee list on my own computer, with phone numbers for all the key people who run teams. Through my own contacts list and those of the people working with me, we can fill in a lot of the rest. I need to verify if 3 employees still work for us or not. The recent arrivals are added already. We have a lot of employee churn on the entry level but they send out an email every month welcoming the newbies, so adding them is no problem. Removing them as they go is.
We have a couple old reactionary dudes who are definitely anti-union, but basically just because conservatives have told them “union bad! 😠” We know to avoid them. We also know to avoid a couple key people who are buddies with the owner, although some of them are technically managers so I don’t even know if they qualify for being part of the union? It gets complicated because of how horizontal our company structure is overall. Barely anyone actually manages people. (Part of the reason why we never get reviews or raises!)
Luckily the worst reactionaries that I knew of who would’ve fought tooth and nail against a union are gone. One of the old guys might complain about it, but he’s far too lazy to do anything but mouth off, and his influence is limited to a small satellite facility with like 3 coworkers.
Good stuff!
I would discourage you from making assumptions one way or another about how people will act based on their political orientation or even stated beliefs about unions. People who area “anti union” and “pro capitalist” are general also “pro job security”, appreciate regular raises, want health benefits. They can be turned around by participating in and benefiting from solidarity. And like, they can be fundamentally changed as people.
Of the other hand, the most rad communist, ML, anarchist, syndicalist, maoist… any of these can be useless or even turncoats in a union drive. Don’t trust based on memes or music or readings or tattoos or having the correct line.
this is the right way to assess. What do people do? Will they take a risk one way or another? Will they call someone up and try to influence their behaviour? Will they snitch?
Sounds like you are already doing mapping? Make sure that every person who joins your committee does mapping, even if you think you have no new information to gain. It’s a really good way to start thinking like an organizer.
Sorry for the late reply, my inbox keeps marking things as read without me seeing them. It looks like glans has made some good points, and I agree with it on all points. I’m going to try to reply to all of the comments on mine since I posted in this comment instead of just this one I’m replying to.
I would like to reiterate not counting on the perceived politics of coworkers. All of us here have had experiences with leftists flaking out at critical points, so you can’t trust that just because someone, say, listens to punk music and talks about XYZ political theory shit that they’ll actually put in the work and be there when you need them. Just the same, a lot of these old conservative guys that are against unions are against those other, bad unions, but not their good union (similar to the only good abortion is my abortion type crowd). You just have to figure out what actually motivates other people.
I won’t cover mapping too much, as it seems you’ve done a lot of the work already. The only thing I’ll say here is: good points on watching out for the boss’s buddies, and I include managers with bosses. Basically, real “managers” are those with hire/fire authority. Everyone else is fair game for unionizing, but you gotta keep your wits about you to detect snitches before looping them in. You’ll want to keep the unionization efforts as secret as possible for as long as possible, as the bosses will try to smother it in the crib as soon as they catch wind.
As far as marching on the boss being a hard sell: it always is. There is no part of a unionization effort that’s easy. When the Peet’s Coffee union in the East Bay was unionizing, they got everyone they could to make the drive out to the regional corporate headquarters across town, pack the lobby, and then wait outside of the office for hours until they basically forced themselves into the boss’s office to make demands. Like, I get that it’s a big ask, and you’ll have to be creative about it, and planning something like this is something that a dedicated External Organizer can help with.
The thing about concentrating on card checks and elections is: It’s gonna take a good 6-12 months to actually have the election, then you’ll spend the next 6-12 months negotiating a contract, then you’ll spend the next 6-12 months fighting them to actually honor the contract, and they’ll drag it out until they can force another election and, oh it looks like you didn’t actually improve conditions and now everyone’s mad and they’re not motivated to keep the union certified. However, if you engage in direct action you can get shit like payraises and benefits without ever filing for an election, which will motivate your coworkers to work harder to unionize. A Fellow Worker of mine who is organizing his own workplace, which is a surprisingly similar situation to yours (as far as working on customer sites, everything being handled through leads, rarely interacting with the office which is inconvenient), got ratted out by a snitch and everyone got a $2 payraise, which has just motivated the committee to work harder (and more secretively).