Recent wins from Starbucks Workers United, the United Auto Workers, and in independent shops like Barboncino have inspired workers not in unions to consider unionizing. But what should you consider when you take those first steps of talking with your co-workers?
The boss can already fire you whenever they want
Organizing at work is a risk in pretty much any workplace. If you choose to organize with your co-workers, you do open up the risk of being fired for organizing.
However, without a union or even a group of militant, organized workers, the boss can fire you or lay you off whenever they want anyway! The status quo is not any safer — it’s just what we’re used to.
With a legally recognized union, though, you can include “just cause” standards for discipline in the contract with your employer. These standards can prevent your employer from disciplining your co-workers without good reason, among other things.
Remember: collectively, you all make the workplace run
The key point is this: It’s usually easy to fire one or two people, but it’s incredibly difficult to fire everyone all at once. Don’t plan or act on your own, plan and act as a group. Nonetheless, think deeply and assess together how easy each of you actually are to fire.
Not all workers are as easy to fire for organizing. Workers in certain professions, like software engineering, may be harder to replace than, for example, retail workers. That’s something else to consider in your strategy: How often is your company hiring new people? How high is turnover? How easy are you to replace? Have you noticed your management tends to be reluctant to let people go, or do they have a proven track record of firing people or laying people off for whatever they feel like? Are there part-timers in your unit who would be easier to replace than the full-timers?
Answers to these questions don’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t organize or that you won’t get fired for trying, but they’re important to consider from a strategy standpoint as you and your co-workers decide what action to take.
People do get fired anyway
In the US, we have the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), section 8, which prohibits unfair labor practices (ULP), like firing people for union organizing. According to this, it’s illegal for a manager to fire you for organizing your co-workers for better conditions. However, even when the law protects you, sometimes the boss doesn’t know what a ULP is, or, sometimes worse, they don’t care!
You can be fired just for organizing, and management may make up whatever excuses they want to cover their asses. Management at Starbucks fired workers and closed stores as part of its intense anti-union campaign, and some were eventually reinstated. Bosses have shut down entire manufacturing plants in response to otherwise successful organizing campaigns.
Be real about the risks with your co-workers
It’s important to be prepared for that when you decide to start organizing. It’s not enough to answer this question for yourself, though. You and your co-workers will have to answer this question together. You will have to motivate each other to keep organizing, sign that petition, or conduct a public action in spite of the risks of retaliation from management or the threats that management throws at you. Among union organizers, we call this “inoculation.”
Don’t downplay the risks with your co-workers; be real with each other. Sit with the difficult emotions and the fear together. Listen to each others’ worries and work through them together. Help each other plan finances or offer to help each other file unemployment and find new jobs after if someone gets fired. Take it as an opportunity to build solidarity and trust with each other.
Organizing a winning campaign will take a lot of time
Organizing, especially leading a campaign, is difficult and anyone who says it is easy is lying to you. The hours you put in will balloon as much as you let them, and things may be slow for a while, but during critical points of a campaign, it will be a lot of work and take a lot of hours.
You may lose. You and some of your co-workers may get fired. There are things you can try to do to get your jobs back if that happens, such as taking public actions, filing ULPs, etc. People do get their jobs back, but it sucks. It could take months. It’s a lot of work, and it depends a lot on how well you are organized as a group.
The good news is you could also win. You could change people’s lives. Some of your co-workers could become lifelong friends. You all could accomplish what many of you could have never imagined.
And no matter the outcome, you take these lessons you’ve learned about how to fight back against unjust conditions at work into every job you’ll have in the future.
There are no guarantees, but it can still be worth trying, even if you lose
You’re not supposed to promise anything in organizing (seriously, don’t), but I will take a risk and promise you this.
If you
- Decide you’re OK with the risks because you believe in a fair workplace more than you feel afraid of losing your job
- Really believe that deep down in your soul
- Do the best you can to organize your co-workers around widely, deeply felt issues
- Create a rank-and-file, worker-led campaign
Then no matter if you win or lose, it will change your life. You will see people and the world around you very differently and you will realize that the power to make change is, as Shawn Fain put very well: not in me, not in you, but us, all of us together. And you will learn what that means in your heart.
Is the hope in your heart greater than the fear?
Every campaign that gets far enough is fundamentally the same, emotionally: It is the fight of the workers’ hope versus the fear the boss tries to instill in them. Anti-union strategies revolve around instilling fear into the workers by firing them, scaring them out of talking to each other, scaring them into huddling into the status quo. It is the workers’ hope for a better future that gives them the bravery to fight on even though the fear is still there.
If you feel moved to do so, I encourage you to reach out to us to get connected with an organizer. Helping folks learn how to start organizing their co-workers is exactly what we do best.
