You’ve come up short in a union election. It’s painful, but it happens. Where do you go from here? First, you mourn — then you organize!
Share Your Feelings
Start by sharing your pain and disappointment with your friends. It’s important for any organizer to demonstrate why you create a social network beyond the campaign, even if you are in a new location. Don’t suppress your disappointment and anger about losing. These are perfectly legitimate feelings, and your co-workers will benefit from sharing them with you.
Organizers often take it personally when workers flip, like they have been betrayed. Unfortunately, you as the organizer have to recognize the enormous power that companies have to frighten people, and you have to put your personal feelings aside. It’s time to start organizing.
Examine the Campaign
One important part of the process after a loss is to “watch the tape,” as coaches say. Get your committee together with any other active members and go over the campaign from the beginning.
Organizers can greatly benefit from this examination.It serves as excellent training for an organizer because they faced the attacks every day and made important campaign decisions. There is no substitute for this experience. You can learn about organizing in books or in workshops, but living through a campaign, win or lose, is so powerful. These real-life life experiences mean that the learning curve for an organizer is several years. Union officers often struggle on new organizing campaigns because they lack organizers with these experiences.
Consider a potential nationwide campaign against one of the three biggest bosses, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Nucor: A campaign of that size would require thousands of experienced organizers who have seen many different campaigns and can make good decisions based on their own experience.
Explore Why Workers Flipped
Part of this examination will include figuring out what initially convinced workers to support the union, then what flipped the votes against. In most cases, it’s fear or confusion about what the union is. Would a union mean pay raises or dues? Talk with these workers calmly and honestly to regain their support.
In some cases, workers flip for selfish motives, like the promise of a management job in exchange for voting or working against the campaign. If they get the job, they are likely out of the unit, so you don’t have to worry about them; if they were promised a favor and then forgotten, their anger can be channeled into support for the union.
Inoculate Against Attacks
The organizing term for these conversations is “inoculation”: telling workers about what the boss will say about us. A losing campaign will emphasize what works for the boss. As you evaluate your losing campaign, figure out what issues and attacks worked and which ones did not.
Anti-union consultants have become more sophisticated with experience. They make anti-union arguments with such force that an organizer cannot always fully prepare the workers for the emotional impact of an anti-union campaign. We can describe the issues that the boss will raise, what bribes and threats they will make, and what happened in similar campaigns. Until your co-workers directly experience it, though, they can only imagine what it’s like. Workers can become cynical toward management’s efforts after experiencing sophisticated anti-union attacks — “Oh yeah, another video” — and focus on our issues.
Plan Ahead
The most important part of recovery is to immediately start the next campaign, right after the votes are counted. A good campaign, which is proactive and aggressive, will plan activities that happen after the vote count. Iif the union wins, hold a campaign to consolidate power and start negotiations; if the union loses, do not walk away from the workplace and set it aside for another year.
Immediately start creating activities that will bring the anti-union votes back into the campaign and give the workers a sense of what it is like to control their workplace. As the boss inevitably makes decisions that anger workers, go to the swing votes and remind them, “This would not have happened if we had a union.”
Demonstrate Support
An engaging campaign offers workers activities to publicly demonstrate their union support. Create petitions for them to assign, even before you put out the cards, to both test your support and create union visibility. March on the boss to demand recognition and demonstrate to each other the power you have together. These visible activities should not be occasional, like a weekly T-shirt day. Workers should show their support for the union all day and every day. You may not have enough T-shirts to wear all the time, but union buttons or decals for hard hats serve the purpose.
These activities not only build the union for the next formal campaign but help focus organizers on being so proactive that the hurt of losing will fade.
