So you have a supervisor who only communicates by screaming at you?
Your work schedule is unpredictable—some days are cancelled, some days are scheduled at the last minute.
Friends whom you work with are fired with no notice and really no good reason.
You are forced to work under unsafe or unhealthy conditions—no protection against heat, for example, or no physical protections for a physical job.
You need to organize a union!
Organizing is about power
Most of the discussions about organizing are about money—higher pay, better benefits, more paid time off—but a union is really about power in the workplace so that a boss can’t treat you like a disposable diaper.
A major part of a union contract is called “contract language,” which challenges the power of your boss in every area of work—and some even off the job. Organizing campaigns usually focus on money but the dangerous and humiliating working conditions can be powerful and emotional, and a real push to organize.
Know your contract
An organizer needs to get copies of union contracts, ideally from the same industry you are trying to organize, and carefully go through each clause so that you know the language.
It is important to understand the Recognition Clause of the union contract—every contract has one, and it specifies that the union is “the bargaining agent for all wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment.” This language means that even if some dispute is not specifically listed in the union contract, it can still be challenged as a “term and condition” of employment.
“This wouldn’t happen if you had the union.”
You can meet with union stewards to collect stories of grievances that challenge the boss’s power in ways that non-union workers can’t even dream about. For your campaign, create videos of workers who have been returned to work—maybe holding a big back pay check—or otherwise pushed the boss around, so you can spread these out among the workers you are trying to organize.
Then, as you talk with workers in the facility you’re trying to organize, listen for situations and then see how they could be challenged by language in the union contract. Show the worker the language and explain how a grievance—that magic word—could be filed over the situation that the boss creates with no recourse in a non-union workplace.
“This wouldn’t happen if you had the union.”
Just keep repeating this phrase. Yeah, money is important in a campaign, but power over every minute of every workday is almost more compelling. And a powerful organizing issue.
