How Do Unions Work? An Interview With A Union Organizer
How can you actually organize? We sit down with Omar, a member of the International Worker’s of the World, who intimately knows the process behind unionizing and organizing.
You can check out the IWW here: https://www.iww.org/
S: All right, so today we’re joined by Omar who's very much involved in unions and organizing and I feel like it would be better if you kind of introduce yourself and tell us your background and experience in this specific field.
Omar: For sure. Hi guys my name's Omar I'm from California and I'm an external organizer for the IWW. I'm not sanctioned by them to come here or anything like that, I just came here as someone who has some experience and some campaigns that are happening locally. I've also attended some trainings where they basically teach you how to organize at your workplace. So yeah.
S: Could you explain the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) a little bit?
Omar: Yeah, of course so we are an industrial union that's based around having direct action and we practice something called solidarity unionism where all the workers kind of band together against the employing class. We believe that employers and employees have nothing in common at all and that their relationship remain very antagonistic so you basically try to develop, as a certain academic said, “class consciousness” with the workers.
S: That’s cool and then I guess to kind of end on the topic of your background and stuff how did you specifically get involved in this? Did you have kind of grievances at work yourself or were you like unhappy about certain conditions?
Omar: Yeah I was kind of looping in and out of kind of customer service fast food type jobs and it was super hard, especially as a full time student. Really juggled that around. The burnout was pretty crazy so it was really intimidating and overwhelming for me to kind of figure out the whole unionization process and you know… what it looked like and which Union was right for me, and over time I kind of bumped into the IWW and saw, you know, what they stood for and they got back to me super fast with an email and worked through the whole process with me. So after that I kind of just stuck around with them and wanted to kind of return the favour for other people.
S: Oh that's great. Yeah I guess on that point, what sort of concrete outcomes have came about from your work with them?
Omar: I developed a lot of amazing relationships with other organizers and it also really opened up the channel to kind of get in contact with people from tons of other industries. I have friends who are in Amazon. I have friends who are in the education part of the industrial union and, you know, it's kind of building that worker-to-worker relationship and, you know… backing each other up. Especially now where things can seem pretty isolating. So definitely building that relationship and backing each other up is definitely a huge thing I experienced being part of the IWW.
S: Oh that's great to hear. So I guess the main reason why I brought you on is you have some kind of practical background regarding opening up you know, unionization and and organizing workforces.
I'm kind of wondering like how how would you describe a sort of step by-step process of you know, just an employee who maybe has not a lot of power in their position. They have specific needs that aren't being met by their employer. How would they go about from the start to the end in trying to advocate and potentially cause some sort of change that does lead to those needs being met?
Omar: Especially at the IWW we have tons of different people who come to us for help. A lot of these people either don't have any experience unionizing and they really need help. And that's when my role kind of comes in as an external organizer where we kind of lead them through the process of their specific campaign and there are some people who do have experience with the unions and they're kind of like disillusioned by the idea of it. They're kind of sick of how overly bureaucratic it is. You know one of the common things I've heard about was you know they don't know where their dues are going at all so there's that huge disconnect between the union and the worker where the union kind of ends up becoming a third party basically instead of being an extension of the workers themselves. So, we have tons of different people who come in. First things first is we try to get them in training and it's basically, the thing I attended where it just breaks down the whole unionization process.
We have this process called an AEIOU, and it's basically an abbreviation for agitate educate inoculate organize and unite and it's this process we basically try to agitate our coworkers about their conditions there. You know like most coworkers already have pent up frustrations about their work but they never really have like a channel or the ability to kind of like focus in on why it's happening and how they can fix it basically.
After the agitation stage where you know the problem is being posed, education basically tries to direct that agitation to collective action. To band together as workers against the employer and, you know the important thing about like this whole process is basically I'm just there to kind of guide them. Most of the fire of the union comes from the shop floor workers themselves, the rank and file. And how successful a campaign in the union is, is dependent on how involved the workers are in the union.
Then during inoculation, we basically try to assess tools we can basically use to better the workplace. Yeah at this at this phase, this is when you kind of talk about the risks of what could possibly happen. So during the inoculation phase you basically prepare them for union busting and the type of tools the employer is going to kind of use against you. We've seen it with the Amazon Union forming a while back and we're starting to see it now with the WGA strikes and the Starbucks Union strikes where there has been tons of retaliation firings and such and it's very very difficult to deal with when the workers are not like banded together.
The agitation and the education phase is super super important. A lot of workers tend to like kind of jump the gun and try to get a contract immediately and try to get the authorization cards to like form a formal quote unquote Union . But at the end of the day the goal is to better the workplace and we always tell the people who are interested in unionizing that the contract and the authorization cards, they’re only a tool. They're not the end end goal.
After the inoculation phase the next phase is the O which is to organize, which is where you build the confidence of the organizing committee and you basically assess all of the contacts that you made in the beginning during the agitation phase. The thing to do before which I kind of missed was to build a contact list in a workplace flow map a contact list. Just basically the name and number of everyone in the workplace and you basically try to write if they are sympathetic to building a union. Are they indifferent? Are they close to the boss themselves? And you basically try to work that out and map social leaders which is basically anyone who has like a lot of social power in the workplace or they're you know, very sociable.
They're always the one initiating workplace hangouts… that kind of stuff. After noting that, then you write down the workplace map which is basically how the workplace is structured physically. Where are the break rooms where you can talk to some of your workers? Where is the manager room?
Ah one of the things I've been seeing is with the manager. The room of the manager is super close to the break room. So definitely something to kind of keep in mind. You know? After you do the workflow map then you move on to agitate. So basically after you have those 2 contact lists in the workplace map. You basically go to the origin organize phase. That’s when you really solidify the workplace committee and you know you basically plan on getting as many people on board as you can and you plan the last step which is something that we call the push step.
Sometimes at this phase you can do something we called March on the Boss where you go public to the boss and all the workers come together as a group. They go to the manager's office and they're like hey these are our grievances we are the blank Blank Union and we are letting you know that we want this fixed as soon as possible. Also at this step you can do a workplace slowdown if the manager doesn't cooperate.
But yeah, help guide them through this process….There’s a lot of backtracking and steps taking forward. It's a very long process. But this is how all the workers kind of build that connection and that solidarity to do it together.
S: I like the AEIOU, very easy to remember. I guess there's 2 things. Do you sometimes run into the issue of like you mentioned in the beginning? There's something inherently antagonistic between the employer employee dynamic which is true. Do you think that that is something that could sometimes lead to kind of over aggravation? Because you were talking about with Starbucks and Amazon, that they can just very easily dismiss these movements because they're just so antagonistic towards the people that basically own the means of production. Do you think that in terms of communicating with them, there’s some sort of attempts to see eye to eye or a lowering of hostility or do you think that it is necessary, that sort of kind of aggression?
Omar: I think that antagonistic relationship always remain even before the workers themselves think about unionizing. If unionizing wasn't so powerful they wouldn't be so scared of it. Amazon has spent like a million plus dollars trying to union bust and you know they do those anti-union seminars and even when the unionization process formalizes and you know they got a contract they still break the contracts, so that antagonistic relationship always remains and especially when it comes to forming the union themselves. Their main goal is to basically you know, drive up profits and keep wages low at the end of the day and a union can seriously hurt their profits even if it's record high profits.
They do not want workers to unionize and, oh boy, they do not want workers to strike. So definitely that antagonistic relationship will kind of always remain there. The only problem is that you know workers do not have kind of that consciousness of how powerful they really are. Like to say we have the ability to pick our own vote and our own people into positions of political power. But we do not have the power to kind of vote who's going to be our our manager, our employer, and we just kind of end up there by sheer luck or you know we have to fight other workers to get to that position. And it's not fair to the workers themselves especially when that antagonistic relationship brings a lot of grievances on the workers end for the most part.
S: That's definitely important to highlight. And then I guess my second question regarding the layout of the workplace: has this process needed some sort of amendments just because a lot of people work from home now? The workplace appears to becoming less and less of a physical space and more of a digital workspace.
Omar: Oh that's a great question. It's almost still uncharted territory for a lot of unions. It kind of makes things tricky but never impossible. Especially since it's in a digital space. There's a lot of advantages that also come with that, one of them being this is a huge huge rule: you do not want to talk union talk at the workplace period. Not even in the parking lot. It’s very much something to do during one on ones which is during the agitation phase which I forgot to mention which basically, it could look anything like you're talking to a coworker during a car ride or you just even directly come up to the worker and be like hey can we talk about work? And you know, you try to keep it strictly professional and you basically talk about the problems that are going on in the workplace. That's also during the agitate phase. It makes it a lot easier when you're working online to kind of try to talk union.
For example at one of my older jobs which I cannot name. We had a Discord chat. And we all just were on Discord and played video games and kind of built that connection. But that was a great way to kind of segue into the agitation phase. For example, we had a channel that kind of was dedicated to mental health. And surprise surprise a lot of it had to do with the grievances at work. So there's definitely a lot of pros and cons when it comes to working online. It's still kind of uncharted territory. But at the end of the day at least from what I've been seeing (with companies is an attempt to stop) workers from having to work online in the first place. They want people there, they want to be able to keep an eye on them.
And if anything you know they want the smallest amount of workers to be able to work online in my opinion. But yeah, it's definitely a lot of pros and cons. But it's not impossible at all to get to that unionization phase with it.
S: As the workplace kind of evolves, I suppose the unionization process does to. I guess 1 last question and you already kind of touched on it…but could you kind of speak more on this idea of employees not really knowing the power they have to organize, to kind of you know, request certain things from their employers? Because I do think that that's super super important nowadays. I think there's a lot of apathy and people kind of not realizing the power they have especially when it's a collective.
Omar: Oh definitely that was something I definitely struggled with when I first joined, especially since the power the employers have seem immense. At first they get to dictate your wages. They get to dictate when you work and they can even dictate if you'll have a job at all. Many workers also rely on them for insurance benefits and stuff and healthcare which is essential. But the employer class would be nothing without the workers themselves. I'd like to take a look at the bread and butter of the IWW which is the strike. The strike is just basically all you're doing which is just withholding your labor. And we've seen with the writers in the actor strike where you know they withheld their labor and the bosses scrambled and it's such an effective way of disrupting their main goal which is trying to drive profits up. So it's essential for workers to kind of realize that at the end of the day they're all working under the same conditions.
They're all working a wage to you know, just get by. You know they have a family to feed. They have school. All of our conditions are very similar as a working class and especially you know like that antagonism that they have where they want to drive profits up and try to keep wages low. They quickly realized that there would be no profits without the workers and there would be no product without the workers. So, definitely realizing that and building that connection with your workers is essential to realizing that these are people with lives.
These are people who, you know also have goals in the future they're trying to achieve, or some people are at the workplace they want to settle in forever which is also completely fine. At the end of the day it's all about improving your your life at the workplace and after building those connections with your workers and that solidarity you quickly realize how powerful you really are against the employers and how powerless they are in comparison to you.