I love it when people tell me that Organizing is the tired old way of the 60s. Really. I love it. that protests and marches and general hell-raising don’t matter any more.
That’s not what people with clout think. Check out this post over at Working Life, it’s about the likelihood of a worker who is actively backing a Union losing their job. This is, of course, illegal, but very hard to prove. You can always make up some reason to fire someone. Employers can just have lots of stupid rules that they never enforce, until they need to fire an agitator.
One of the reasons why Saul Alinsky’s original round of Organizations quit growing was because they started taking government money to run programs that they had pushed for as an organization. Once you take money from someone, it gets hard to criticize them. People in power know that if you want to kill an organization, get rid of its Organizers.
Organizers are a very threatening force, but the way to beat them has always been the paycheck. In public life, the Man makes it hard to find money to pay Organizers’ salaries. In the life of Labor, they cut off pay to the people helping the Union move a cohort of workers into the better day of collective bargaining.
It’s a shame. And it’s a shame that any employer gets away with it.
The most frequently searched entry on this site is the one I headed “Anti-Union Propaganda.” So let’s help the people looking for that garbage find this post.
The Organizer worries about the general perception of Unions in the country right now. We believe that Unions are the best thing to happen to the common man since the Church. True, both institutions have been corrupted from time to time. That said, they have both been very good.
Let’s summarize their essential good: both Labor and Faith organize people into permanent institutions that provide for both material and ephemeral needs.
When I speak to my fellow young members of the middle class, I sense a real ambivalence about Labor. It’s past ties to Organized Crime and its various moments of gross expressions of self-interest sully it’s name to them. Among young, idealistic people, things that are good should be pure. They should have no blemishes. That’s the nice thing about untried ideas, concepts and nascent organizations: they haven’t had an opportunity to sully their own history yet with negative confrontations with reality.
What saddens the Organizer, though, is that I meet young people who think Unions are good for “people who need it.” They see Unions as purely oppositional to bosses. If you have a bad boss, then you need a Union. If you don’t have a bad boss, then you don’t “need” a Union.
Everyone needs a Union.
We are better off when we are organized. The business world understands this. They are organized money. Organized money is less visible than organized people (Labor, the Church), but it’s just as powerful. Why should we, normal people, go without Organization when the people we work for don’t?
Moreover, membership in a Union is good because it builds community, fosters political involvement, gives people a means by which they can participate not just in their workplace but in their city and state. Of course, everyone can just join some other organization but Unions are a more meaningful way to participate because: a) they are linked to your workplace, which means they have a real role in your life and b) because Unions have a great track record of getting people involved who never would have gotten involved on their own.
We all should be in Unions. We owe Unions for moving this country forward. We owe Unions for creating the American Middle Class.
What young yuppies really need to know about Unions: the Middle Class of our grandparents and even our parents was not like the Middle Class of today. They were workers in factories and mines and on farms and job sites. They were Union members who worked with their hands.
Today’s Middle Class is all knowlege workers and service workers. People who do manual work should be in the middle class, too, and the money is their to make sure they join it. Our country would be far better off if we had a larger Middle Class.
It’s no accident that the Middle Class has declined as Labor has declined.
We all need a Union.
Filed under: Friends and Allies, big issues, organizing, organizing networks
Okay, so picture this: your organization has decided the city has a big problem with homelessness. You’ve got some good homeless advocates that you know and you can work with locally. You’ve met with them, and they agree, it’s time to get hostile on decisionmakers who aren’t finding new beds for the homeless population and failing to invest diddly-squat in rehabilitation and reentry into the mainstream.
But your city is broke. You make the decision to go statewide, but to do that you need to reach staff and hopefully homeless people at other shelters around the state. You need to find more good eggs, like the ones you know in your city, people willing to push a little, get a little controversial, in the cities you don’t have a base in.
So what do you do?
Well, once you get out and start talking to people, they are inevitably going to point you to some statewide or nationwide association of the sort of institution you want to reach. Odds are, you’ve never heard of the association or any of its staff.
Ostensibly, you’ll be told that the association works on the exact same issues you care about, “and if anyone can help you reach the people you want to reach, they can.”
Sounds like a goldmine, right?
In my experience: not usually.
Typically, these associations of local institutions are shaky entities at best. Their first priority in life is staying afloat and keep everyone’s paycheck coming. To that end, they usually have a lot of prominent, middle-of-the-road people on their boards. When it comes to advocacy, they show up at hearings, submit testimony, reports. They use the word “critical” a lot.
I can’t really blame them, but I have three problems with working through associations to reach the people I need at the grassroots.
- They never help Organizers connect me with anyone. These groups always guard their contacts, so I’m never actually able to talk to anyone. If an Organizer, if I can’t talk to you, it’s pretty much a given that you’re not going to get on-board. The line you get is, “Send me the information and I’ll be sure to pass it along. If anyone is interested I will let you know.” You might as well throw your fliers in a trashcan now and save everyone a step.
- Associations always play it safe. The idea of getting involved in anything controversial and really pushing the buttons of a decisionmaker always rubs these folks the wrong way. These are the types who believe in working within the system. Why? I don’t know. It never seems to accomplish much, but they persist in believing it to be the right approach.
- They exert a pacifying influence on the institutions associated with them. Institutions associated in associations can always pass the buck to their association. “Oh, we don’t get involved in political issues here. We leave those things to our association.” And if the association doesn’t take the issue up, it must not really be important to the population the local institution is serving.
I almost have what amounts to a phobia of associations when I start going out to build coalitions. It’s the call I avoid making. I follow every possible lead to find the good eggs in other towns before I ever call a permanent, statewide or national association of the good local offices I need to get into.
Rage Against the Machine was a great band.
I’m not sure that they ever really did much to help organizers.
It’s interesting, but there is no question that once upon a time art was a powerful tool for helping organizing people. Especially folk music. I’m not really clear why we don’t have any Woody Guthrie’s today. “Charlie on the MTA” helped organize a major effort against a fare increase in Massachusetts.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. I think it has something to do with the technology of music these days and musician’s insistence on putting the music first. If you put the music first, then it’s going to take you twenty minutes to set up the stage so that the prima-donnas can play. That doesn’t really work with most actions that us Organizers put together. Hell, our stages are usually not exactly ideal for a band to play on.
When Woody played, I get the impression he just stood up with his gee-tar and did the best he could with whatever sort of sound system the situation presented him with. I also don’t get the impression that he worried much about getting paid for performing. He just followed the movement.
Meanwhile, it always seemed like R.A.T.M.’s priority mainly focused on ‘raising consciousness’ around issues that appealed to them. We here at The Organizer have no use for consciousness raising. All the consciousness in the world can be raised, but if it isn’t mobilized in some way then there is not reason for people-in-power to care.
Artists can be helpful in generating turnout, if they make posters and sing songs that not only discuss current issues but also direct people to actions that real organizations are taking. If they don’t do that, though, there work isn’t good for anything but Art. Not that Art isn’t, in itself, good enough. That’s not what I’m saying.
I just want to disabuse all artists of the notion that if their work is not specifically linked to a campaign (not just a cause), it isn’t helping anything politically.
For example, political cartoonists make me laugh all the time. I enjoy them endlessly. That said, I don’t consider them members of the political team. They are artists. Good for them. I know that they generally avoid getting involved with specific campaigns. Contemporary political artists feel like if they get involved with campaigns (rather than issues) they will be seen as aligned with organizations and special interests and will therefore lose their credibility.
That’s probably right.
So, if that’s their priority, then they should stay away from organization’s like the one I work for. I’m not going to criticize them for not getting involved in campaigns. If they want to preserve their credbibility above all things, then that is their choice and it is a smart one for their careers.
That said, if you ever read an interview with one of these folks or other political artists (like R.A.T.M.), you always here this refrain: “I’m never really sure if my work does any good for the larger causes that inspires my art.”
Let’s settle this question once and for all. As a person who is actually working on the real campaigns that make a difference on the issues you artists make art about, my answer is this: no, you aren’t helping. Until you help plug people into real campaigns, all you’re doing is serving your own muse and amusing/intriguing your audience. The latter is a fine and good goal. but you aren’t helping the cause.
There. That’s settled. I just saved a lot of interviewers an obligatory question. They can move on to other topics now.
Like, when is R.A.T.M. going to get over this “we should have been Soundgarden” shit and get back together with Zack de la Rocha?
Tomorrow is Election Day in our fair nation of the United States, and this brings up the perennial armchair quarterbacking of American politics. We here at The Organizer bemoan the fact that America has such bad voter turnout and it deeply disconcerts us. That said, we here at The Organizer also completely disagree with all the quick fixes people like to propose to increase voter turnout.
Our least favorite proposal for increasing turnout is moving the Election Day to the weekend or making it a national holiday. We adamantly oppose either “solution.” The (perhaps) well-meaning folks at Why Tuesday have proposed moving Election Day to one that has fewer people working, like Saturday.
It’s a very slick website, so The Organizer is suspicious. Could this actually be created by conservatives who want voter turnout to go down? Who think they could control the government more easily that way? People who’ve actually watched the research and know that every time we make voting easier, paradoxically, fewer people vote?
The Organizer knows this. The voting experts at the Center for the Study of the American Electorate know this. So why is it that every Election Day, good people, even smart people, start talking about moving it to a non-work day?
The Organizer knows.
The first thing you realize as an Organizer, once you start to get it, is that most of our instincts about what moves and motivates people is wrong.
You think people take part in issues because they care about the issue. You learn this isn’t usually true. It’s because of who and how they were invited to take part.
You think that people follow others because they are well-spoken and articulate. You learn that’s not true, that those folks just do well on TV, but that people honestly listen to people that, for some ineffable reason, they trust – and they don’t usually trust the slick ones.
You think that politicians will pay attention to you if you have your facts straight and make a strong case. You learn this isn’t true. That they pay attention when you build power and shove it in their face, and at that point it doesn’t really matter if you’re right or wrong.
You also learn that coddling people and babying people into participation drives them away. That, in fact, challenging them, pushing them and giving them a chance to fail is what really generates buy-in, growth and participation.
So The Organizer isn’t surprised that all of our efforts to massage people into the polls isn’t working. The Organizer understands that the easier you make voting, the less important it seems.
The Organizer also understands people’s lives. The Organizer understands that it is middle class people who want the vote on Saturday, because they all have Saturday off. The Organizer knows low-income people, and he knows that the ones who have jobs work on Saturday all the time. Their day off is Tuesday or Thursday. Maybe they only have one day off a week. It could as easily be Wednesday.
The Organizer also understands that people are more likely to figure out a way to finnagle out of work a bit if they want to vote than they are to finnagle out of their kids’ soccer games or a chance to spend a weekend at a friends lodge. The Organizer knows people leave town on the Weekend or get caught up on all the other stuff they have to do.
The Organizer knows how little free time we have here in the states, and he doesn’t want to put voting up against free time when it can be put up against work time.
The Organizer understands the facts, and gets a little arrogant when writing about the facts. If only the people who support groups like Why Tuesday would pay attention to the facts rather than their own ill-formed opinions. The facts show it: making voting easier does not increase the vote. The Motor Voter failed. Let’s not throw good energy after bad.
Keep Election Day on Tuesday. It’s going to take good, old-fashioned work – Organizer work – to increase voter turnout. People have to care to vote, and if they care they will.
If you are lucky enough to talk to old school Organizers at The Industrial Areas Foundation, eventually they will get around to one of their favorite rules-of-thumb: if you get your campaign going right, the opposition will probably do your organizing for you.
What they mean is, if you make a demand of a target, they will often reply to your demand in such an offensive and derogatory or insensitive way, that it will tick your base off badly enough that they will fly to your next action. There’s some real truth in this. If you use the offensive reply as an organizing tool.
So I wish some IAF leaders would sit down with John Sweeney and teach him how to use the opposition to his advantage. On The Hill Blog, Sweeney bemoans all of Labor’s recent legal losses. The losses are pretty offensive when you break them down. Insulting to worker rights. But is organized Labor using it?
Change to Win argues that they aren’t. Someone needs to use it and use it right. Labor is still the largest organized base out there, except for maybe churches. They have the power to right this wrong, if they know how to work their people (people who have every reason to be worked and worked up!).
Well, this is depressing. It sounds like more and more people are working to get out the vote this year, but the AP is not very optimistic that it will accomplish much. Apparently we’ve got lots of volunteers pounding the pavement to get out the vote on both sides, but, overall, lots of voter registration lists are declinining in numbers, not gaining.
I don’t want to add to the steadily growing list of speculation as to why so many people don’t vote, but I will say that I think much of the GOTV effort is rushed and impersonal. According to Robert Caro, LBJ had a very personalized campaign style. He had teams of Organizers who went out and met people, talked to them and sent back contact information with notes about personal information.
Then teams of typists and writers would take that personal information and type up thousands and thousands of individualized letters to each of the people the advance team met, and follow up with more letters!
In today’s computerized world, this would be even easier, but somehow I doubt anyone is personalizing their voter identification to this level.
Black Democrats convened in Detroit this weekend to talk about Black voter turnout and Black candidates. It’s great that so many Black people are running, but my favorite line was the part about advancing the Democratic vision for America.
What vision?
Voters aren’t irrational. They often don’t vote because they say it doesn’t do any good. Politicians and activists decry this stance, saying that if you don’t vote you can’t complain. They should listen, though. Voters realize that there is no real, credible alternative to the GOP, which has a very clear vision for itself. Why invest the time and energy into voting when you’ve got nothing to vote for?
The article never articulates any sort of vision, but it does end breathlessly excited about the prospect of some very powerful Black legislators gaining a lot of power for the Black Caucus if the Democrats retake the House.
Bully for them, but what are they going to do with that power? Do they know?
Today’s Chicago Tribune is saying that economics is an election issue, once again. I haven’t heard a candidate willing to address the real problem, though. It’s diminishing buying power among working people. Our economic indicators have failed to keep up with the times, because once upon a time expanding economies realized expanding wages and expanding buying power.
Now wages are flat and buying power is dropping.
It’s going to take a willingness to go after the very rich. It’s their fault. They’ve managed to roll back laws from the first President Roosevelt such that the Trusts are back and the richer are getting better and better at accumulating wealth.
Wealth is finite. Anywhere it accumulates means someone else is getting less. The poor obviously are not doing better, but now the midde class is suffering too.
The problem is, how do you organize them? With people working more and more in order to keep up or hold onto their job, how do they find time to organize and vote meaningfully?
The Unions are trying a few different approaches, all of which are laudable (America Votes, Working America, Communities United), but I don’t think anyone has hit quite the right proverbial lick on the guitar of civic action just yet.
I was thinking today about when I was organizing on a nationwide basis. I worked with this organization that had local groups around the country.
At one point, the President came out with this really awful plan that would have changed the way services were delivered to poor people nationwide. We thought it was awful. It ran against everything we stood for. Probably the single greatest threat to our mission ever.
But we were a pretty small organization without a ton of groups. What did we do? We rallied the troops hard and convinced about ten different local volunteer groups to do forums about the issue.
Now, we were just one little piece of the fight. Lots and lots of people hated the idea. Lots of other people loved it, though.
It’s always hard to know what works when very powerful people push something and it passes or it doesn’t. What was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back, right? All I know, though, is that every little bit helps and sometimes a few events really can add to the negative buzz (or positive, if you like what a high-powered politician is doing) in an important way.
I like to think that events, even silly little forums, when they coincide with large media buzz, somehow make the print and talking heads words more real and magnify their impact.
Anyway, the President’s evil scheme pretty much failed. My organization can’t take the credit for it, but we sure as hell didn’t do it any good.
